BotD: How AI remains in the balance for Aussie marketers; ARN Media's restructure; SWM surges on the Unmade Index
Welcome to day two of a new experiment from Unmade, Best of the Day.
Yesterday marked deal completion day for Unmade and Mumbrella becoming part of the same group, under the banner of Mumbrella Media. If you missed it, you can read last week’s announcement here.
In case you were missing yesterday and today’s daily Mumbrella email, we’ve now conquered the switchover gremlins. It will return tomorrow.
As I mentioned yesterday, to provide as much of a point of difference as possible while we bring the two mastheads closer, Unmade’s publishing cycle will, for now, shift towards the close of business.
Today, as we prepare for the next edition of HumAIn, our curator Cat McGinn argues that while you should have already started on your AI journey, the second best time is now.
Meanwhile, Seven West Media’s share price pops on a good day for the Unmade Index. And ARN Media reveals a shakeup of its senior ranks.
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The state of play for AI in Australian marketing: An enabler or a short-cut?
HumAIn curator Cat McGinn writes:
For Australian marketers, 2025 is the year AI moves from hype to business-critical reality. It’s reshaping customer interactions, content creation, and campaign execution - but it’s also raising complex, and at times existential, questions about value, ethics, and differentiation. While AI tools promise efficiency, marketers must ensure they’re not just producing more content, faster, but creating work that truly resonates; reframing the true potential of genAI as a what-if engine, rather than a machine to deliver plagiarism at speed.
Getting this balance right will mean the difference between thriving in an AI-driven world or being left behind.
AI’s impact is already evident across the industry. Brands are leveraging generative AI to create hyper-personalised content at scale, streamlining workflows, and optimising media spend with speed and precision. Agentic AI has the potential to automate a range of tasks and sequence a complex chain of decisions autonomously, presenting both relief at outsourcing the monotonous, and alarm at the likely impact on jobs.
The belief that human capital can easily be replaced is attractive in terms of the bottom line, but could have devastating consequences for the creative industries, and critically our relationships with our audiences and customers. The overlapping macro trends of ‘juniorisation,’ challenging economic times and the overhyping of AI as a magic bullet solution creates a crucible with the potential to derail the industry.
The much-touted promise of AI is the holy grail of doing more with less, but without careful consideration, marketers risk making a Faustian bargain. Along with these benefits are serious risks: diminishing creative distinctiveness, shifting consumer expectations, and the looming threat of AI-generated brand erosion. The key challenge is ensuring AI serves as an enabler rather than a shortcut—enhancing creative effectiveness instead of diluting brand identity. Marketers must ask themselves whether AI efficiencies will lead to deeper consumer connections or simply generating more noise.
They must also consider how to integrate AI without sacrificing the human insight and carefully crafted differentiation that makes brands compelling - as well as how their agency relationships will evolve as AI takes on more of the executional workload.
AI hype can create a sense of paralysis - I’d argue this is no accident. In my conversations with marketing and media folk across the industry, there’s often a tone of defeatedness; that it’s impossible to keep up, that they’re starting too late to regain a competitive edge.
Despite the frenzy of speculation about the impact of new players like Chinese AI company DeepSeek, OpenAI et al’s aggressive propagandisation, and the bamboozling effect of industry analysis peppered so densely with highly technical terms that you could almost miss the lack of substance, the reality is that the way forward starts with the same core principles of brand marketing, not with technology in search of a purpose.
As Arthur Ashe once said, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”
One of the biggest risks in AI adoption isn’t the technology itself—it’s the gap between perceived and actual understanding. Last year’s research which informed the humAIn principles identified a clear disparity: senior leaders often overestimate their AI knowledge, while those working with AI daily recognise its complexities, fabrications and shortcomings.
We’ll be putting this year’s research into field soon, but I suspect that this divide has in all likelihood widened in 2025, creating a dangerous misalignment between strategy and execution. Bridging this gap requires more than just high-level awareness; it demands hands-on training that maps AI capabilities with real-world marketing challenges. Without this foundation, brands risk misusing AI in ways that damage consumer trust and creative integrity.
At the same time, many marketing teams are already integrating AI into their workflows informally, often without leadership oversight or knowledge. Whether it’s the homogeneity of AI-generated copy, uploading confidential data and plans into AI models, scraping competitor data, and unwittingly breaching data and copyright regulations, this ‘shadow AI’ landscape presents new risks. Left unchecked, it can dilute brand voice by over-relying on generic AI-generated content, introduce compliance challenges in regulated industries, and reduce transparency in marketing decision-making.
Addressing this isn’t just about enforcing control—it’s about ensuring AI enhances, rather than compromises, marketing effectiveness. Marketers need to establish clear governance and policies, ensuring the right AI tools are used strategically and align with broader brand and organisational goals.
The rise of AI is also reshaping the client-agency relationship. With direct access to AI-powered tools, marketers are re-evaluating what they need from external partners. Automated creative production, media buying, and audience insights are likely to be increasingly managed in-house, forcing agencies to shift from executional service providers - potentially giving them space to regain their role as strategic advisors. Agencies must rethink their value proposition, focusing on helping brands navigate AI complexity in all its multi-faceted ways. For marketers, this shift presents an opportunity to restructure agency partnerships to focus on value; partners who deliver outcomes rather than output.
As AI becomes more embedded in marketing, consumer expectations are evolving in parallel. Younger audiences in particular, are rejecting what they perceive as “AI slop”—ultra bland machine-generated content that lacks the nuance of human creativity or cultural context. We know that Aussie customers are highly sensitive to issues of privacy and data protection, and it remains to be seen what appetite the public has for increased use of genAI in consumer communications, and what levels of disclosure will be demanded.
My sense is that getting ahead of that future potential backlash and reputation damage with self-regulation and an industry-wide code of conduct would be wise, but we tend to resist learning from history.
Since appropriate government regulation is still missing in action, there is a real opportunity for those brands that take the lead in transparent AI adoption—disclosing when content is AI-generated, prioritising human creativity, and ensuring responsible data practices. This approach will not only protect their reputation but strengthen consumer loyalty in an AI-skeptical world.
Despite these challenges, AI presents enormous opportunities for marketers who use it wisely. Hyper-personalisation, predictive analytics, and automated optimisation can all drive stronger engagement and ROI. But AI alone is not a strategy.
The key to success in 2025 is ensuring that AI serves as an accelerator and an augmenting agent for creativity, not as a substitute for it.
HumAIn returns on May 6. Discounted earlybird tickets are on sale now
Unmade Index
It was a strong day on the Unmade Index with Seven West Media’s market capitalisation rising by 7.74% and Pureprofile continuing yesterday’s upwards charge.
Other broadcasters enjoying a good day included Nine, up by 2.6% and Southern Cross Austereo up by 1.6%. ARN Media bucked the trend, dipping by 0.5%.
Out of home company Ooh Media was up by 1.7%
The Unmade Index, which tracks all the ASX-listed media and marketing stocks, rose by 1.76% to land on 460 points.
The day in focus: ARN Media cuts from the top; BMF stays Taswegian; making the four day working week work
ARN Media makes its moves
A month after announcing the arrival of Nine’s former sales chief Michael Stephenson as its chief operating officer, ARN Media said it was parting ways with chief commercial officer Pete Whitehead.
And in the same announcement, ARN said chief content officer Duncan Campbell - one of the architects of the brilliant launch of The Kyle & Jackie O Show into Sydney, and the squibbed launch of The Kyle & Jackie O Show into Melbourne - would step down into a consulting role.
Lauren Joyce, currently chief strategy and connections officer, will take on the newly created role of chief audience and content officer. The appointment of somebody whose career was not previously in radio as a key decision maker for on air output will raise eyebrows among radio stalwarts.
More air for BMF
BMF, the creators of the cut through “Come Down for Air” creative work for Tourism Tasmania, have hung onto the account after a full pitch. BMF will now retain the account for another three to seven years.
Four days a week
Marketing agency Claxon said that a three month experiment inviting staff to jam five days of work into four has worked out. The move will now be made permanent.
The media gap
Publishing has the largest gender pay gap in the media sector, new research from Women In Media revealed. Women in publishing earn 16.4% less than men and those in broadcasting 11.8% less, the study suggested.
Time to leave you to your evening.
Hopefully we’re through the bumps of our fresh start as Mumbrella Media.
Like I said yesterday, most glitches are now ironed out and the Mumbrella newsletter should be back to normal tomorrow.
Meanwhile, please do give us your feedback over the timing and format of Unmade. There will still be longer form content too of course, but we do like to experiment.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Yet another excellent piece, Tim. Here’s hoping that your bigger Publisher gig won’t stop you producing these kinds of insights.