And now the calamitous news
Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade, hot off the press from today’s Mumbrella Retail Marketing Summit.
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‘It hasn’t bottomed out; it hasn’t turned’
Sometimes a speaker talks with enough clarity that you don’t need to read between the lines.
You could say that about today’s presentation from Roy Morgan Research CEO Michele Levine. Speaking at the Mumbrella Retail Marketing Summit, Levine was blunt about the economic picture: “It hasn’t bottomed out; it hasn’t turned.”
If anyone should know, it’s her. Roy Morgan has been operating the longest running consumer and business confidence surveys in the world.
And unfortunately it contradicts previous sightings of green shoots. A year and a month ago, Nine’s then sales boss, the perpetually optimistic Michael Stephenson, wrongly called bottom. Last month’s ASX market updates also suggested that the big local media players were through the worst.
Levine didn’t use the words “double dip recession” today, but she might as well have, certainly as far as the media sector is concerned.
Even more alarming was a single slide, showing the percentage of people who are either out of work, or don’t have enough work.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics puts that number at 10.1%. Roy Morgan, which gets the number by actually asking people, says it’s raced up to 21.7%.
And Roy Morgan says the number of people unemployed or underemployed has hit 21.7% - the highest number since the start of Covid. It was, she said, “calamitous”.
Calamitous for the individuals involved. But also calamitous for the wider economy when these people focus on paying their mortgage, not on buying stuff. And that, in turn, has a knock-on effect on advertising spend.
I suspect I was not the only person in the room to gulp.
If you’d like to hear more detail, Levine was the guest on today’s edition of the Mumbrellacast, recorded at the conference, which has just gone live
Nine fades as market puzzles over Domain silence
Nine gave back most of yesterday’s gains, losing 1.5% on its share price today after yesterday’s increase of 2.8%. It came as Capital Brief reported increasing puzzlement in the market that the company is yet to formally respond to last month’s unsolicited bid from CoStar to purchase Domain. The price of Domain, 60% owned by Nine, dipped by 0.7% today.
Meanwhile ARN Media lost 2.4% and Ooh Media lost 1%.
Among the stocks moving in a positive direction, Vinyl Group gained 10%, IVE Group gained 0.4%, and Enero was up 1.8%
The Unmade Index lost 0.8% to land on 546.9 points.
Time to leave you to your evening.
We’ll be back with more soon.
Have a great night.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
