BotD: TAC luurves Omnicom; Sorrell disses WPP; How Nine failed to act
Welcome to Best of the Day on a freaky Friday the 13th when it emerged that the Victorian government has chosen three Omnicom agencies to do battle for its road safety messaging, and the former bosses of WPP and Fairfax Media both dumped buckets on their successors
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The Day Today:
How Nine failed to rethink
Former Fairfax Media boss Greg Hywood shared pointed criticisms of the failure of Nine’s management to build for the future after the 2018 takeover. Hywood told Mumbrella: “It’s not enough just to take out the costs that you don’t replicate because you’ve got one organisation instead of two. That’s not enough. You’ve got to rethink the whole business.”
Waleed nails it one last time
TV networks’ failure to keep up with the platforms in advertising technology is one reason for the television industry’s woes, The Project host Waleed Aly wrote today. He told readers:
“What matters is the quality of the advertising product. And social media companies like Meta or Google, having harvested frankly unconscionable amounts of their users’ personal data, offer a far more sophisticated, better targeted advertising product than free-to-air television can.”
What about Merriwa?
Journalists union the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance claimed cuts at the ABC are being exacerbated by a Sydney-first approach from the management.
Was Mars the final straw?
Former WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell shared pointed criticisms of the failure of his successor to build for the future. After WPP’s Mark Read said he would be leaving, Sorrell linked the exit to client losses and a failure to get to grips with AI. Sorrell told the BBC’s The Media Show: “The timing of his resignation is interesting over the weekend when the Mars loss was announced last night. You have to put those two things together and it follows a string of losses.”
How marketing ‘easy option’ hurt publishers
Marketers’ complacency about budgets leaking out of the programmatic supply chain are partly to blame for the trouble the industry finds itself in, a publishing panel was told. Phil Sim, CEO of Mediaconnect Group, told the Sydney event: “marketers took very easy options to just give their money to Google and let Google place ads while Google took half of the money.”
Lotta love for Omnicom
The Victorian government placed three Omnicom agencies on the pitch list for its Transport Accident Commission account. In a move which may be unprecedented, Omnicom’s Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, DDB Melbourne and TBWA Melbourne will do battle for the account currently held by Clems. The love for the US-headquartered Omnicom extends further, with TAC choosing not to review the media agency brief held by OMD, according to AdNews.
Will brand safety be sacrificed to get Omnicom-IPG deal across the line?
The impending Omnicom-Interpublic merger took on a political dimension, with the New York Times reporting that Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission may make the merger conditional on the companies promising not to encourage their clients to boycott advertising on far right websites.
Strange new commissioning strategies
The latest series in the Star Trek franchise was both renewed and cancelled. Paramount said it has commissioned a fifth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but that it would be the last. So far only the first two seasons have been broadcast.
Unmade Index ends the week with a tumble
Most media and marketing stocks took a tumble today, with the Unmade Index following the wider ASX All Ordinaries into negative territory.
The two main audio companies once again swapped the lead in terms of size, with Southern Cross Austereo tonight worth just $1.4m more than ARN Media. SCA gained 1.5% to land on a market cap of $159.5m, and ARN Media lost 1% to land on $158.1m.
In late trading, Vinyl improved, gaining 8.3% to land on $163m, overtaking both SCA and ARN. And radio minnow Sports Entertainment Group, owner of SEN, rose 2.1% to $65m.
Ooh Media lost 1.7% to once again fall below a $900m market cap.
The Unmade Index closed on 567.9 points, down 0.37% for the day.
More from Mumbrella…
Marketers under pressure ‘like never before’: Wingmaven study
LinkedIn is becoming an AI wasteland. Let’s reclaim it for humans
‘Nine and Fairfax hasn’t worked’: Hywood’s view from the river bank
Time to leave you to your evening.
I’ll be back with Best of the Week in the morning.
And if you’d like a little more of me tonight, I’ll be on air on ABC Radio National shortly (in about 20 minutes from now in the eastern states). MediaLand kicks off at 5.30 - we’ll be discussing the axing of Q&A, The Project and the Back Page, along with SBS at 50, and why the hell Nine allows its journalists to report on riots without safety gear.
And if you don’t catch Vivienne Kelly and me when we go to air, you’ll find the show in the usual podcast places soon too.
Have a great night
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
