BotD: 'Not all jobs are worth saving'; Women urged not to speak for free
Welcome to Best of the Day. Today: David Droga welcomes our AI overlords, Vinyl Group takes another hit, and the platforms complain they’re not on a fair playing field.
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Vinyl Group price sags again
Despite a rally in early trading, Vinyl Group finished down by 4.6% today. The company has seen its market capitalisation fall steadily over the last fortnight. It lost 12% on Tuesday and 3.9% on Monday.
Last month the company’s share price topped $170m for the first time. It has isnce lost more than $40m of that to land on $128m at the end of trading today.
Nine was one of the few stocks to have a positive day, with its price rising by 0.6%. It emerged that Pendal, which owns 7.6% of Nine, has told acting CEO Matt Stanton that he should lock in a deal with CoStar to purchase Domain.
On a generally rough day of business the Unmade Index followed the wider ASX All Ordinaries into negative territory. The All Ords lost 0.7% as global stocks got increasingly nervous about Donald Trump. The Unmade Index fell 0.16% to 552.4 points in a sixth successive day of drops.
The day today:
YouTube competitors rail against government free kick
The decision of the Australian government to give Youtube a pass on age verification infuriated its rivals Meta and Tiktok. It emerged that the government has issued a confidential discussion paper to the platforms setting out its position.
Beware the retail media black boxes
The walled gardens and black boxes of the digital platforms may be replicatdd by retail media players unless markters take a stand, media agency executive Dan Hojnik warned. He wrote in Mumbrella:
“If retail media is to avoid becoming just another walled garden, it must be held to the same standards as other media channels. Advertisers cannot accept another wave of black-box measurement, where data is selectively shared, performance is difficult, if not impossible, to validate and ultimately marketers become reluctant to trust what they are buying and whether it is value for money.:
Not all creative jobs are worth saving says Droga
AI will destroy the jobs of people doing mediocre advertising work, Droga5 and Accenture Song boss David Droga told the Australian Financial Review’s AI Summit.
Droga argued there is a “formulaic middle that exists in advertising, design, journalism, and even architecture. [AI won’t] eviscerate and erase the need for humans and thinkers and creators … it's going to replace the [bits in] the middle across a swathe of things.
“Not all creativity is profit, not all creativity and jobs are worth saving”
Clems urges women not to speak for free on IWD
Creative agency Clemenger launched a new campaign on behalf of industry campaign group Less Than 10% F*ck That urging women not to speak at International Women’s Day events unless they are paid a fee.
New hire at LBB
Little Black Book is becoming a reunion for former Mediaweek staff. Tess Connery-Britten has joined LBB as news and features editor. She spent five years with Mediaweek, eventually becoming deputy editor. She will report to LBB’s managing editor Brittney Rigby, who also joined after quitting Mediaweek.
Time to leave you to your evening.
This week’s Mumbrellacast is just about to go live in your usual podcast places. Hal Crawford and I discussed Natarsha Belling’s unconvincing reasons for quitting Triple M’s Sydney breakfast show after just six weeks, the treasure trove of salary data released by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and why somebody (poor old Omnicom Media Group) had to come bottom of the table.
We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
Have a great night.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
