Welcome to Best of the Week, partly written on JQ749 home from Sydney and completed in lovely Evandale, Tasmania this morning.
Today: Optus is facing yet another PR crisis, but this time its comms strategy appears to have risen to the challenge; and the falling dominoes at Nova kick off radio’s killing season.
Happy Escapology Day for tomorrow.
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Optus seems to have learned the crisis comms lesson
When last night’s breaking news alert dropped about Optus, I must confess, I initially thought it was the publication of some long delayed investigation into the telco’s 2023 network disaster.
But lightning has struck twice. There’s been another Optus network failure and once again triple-zero calls could not be made. Some 600 emergency calls could not be connected and at least three people died.
That’s a massive PR disaster. But the difference is that last time, poor communications made the problem worse. This time, Optus seems to have communicated better with the media.
Back in 2023, most of Optus’s broadband and wireless services went down and stayed down for the best part of a day. While communications minister Michelle Rowland held press conferences, the then Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was late to front the media, and robotic when she did so.
Given that it came only a year after Optus messed up its comms over its giant data hack, it signalled the end for Bayer Rosmarin in the role.
This time, Optus was ahead of the story. When new CEO Stephen Rue fronted last night’s press conference he was first to share the details, give the bad news about the three deaths and to issue an apology.
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Optus still faces a reputation-shaking PR crisis. One network disaster is bad, but a second time and consumers will start to think of it as simply less reliable than Telstra.
There will also be difficult questions to answer about why Optus did not disclose what it knew earlier, given that the problem occurred on Thursday. Sceptics would point out the Friday night is a great time in the cycle to bury bad news.
But the difference compared to last time is that this time round, the crisis response has not made things worse.
Radio killing season’s first victims arrive early
Nova manoeuvres
Radio’s killing season has arrived earlier than usual. My colleague Vivienne Kelly sounded the bugle, revealing in Mumbrella that Nova’s late drive show Ben, Liam & Belle has been given the chop.
That’s not entirely surprising given that they were probably expensive for their time slot. Yet they had been seen as developing stars that the network had helped build.
Nova moved Ben Harvey, Liam Stapleton and Belle Jackson out of their Melbourne breakfast slot at the start of last year to make way for Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips. Jase & Lauren had in turn just been ousted from their Kiis Melbourne breakfast show to make way for ARN’s networking of The Kyle & Jackie O Show.
That move was opportunistic by Nova, seeing an opportunity to tempt the Jase & Lauren Show audience to come across while KIIS ran dead in the breakfast slot for the first half of 2024 while they waited for Sandilands and Henderson to start the networking. It worked - having inherited a 5% share from the last survey in 2023, Jase & Lauren currently has a 10% share.
The chances are that when Nova moved Ben, Liam & Belle into the new national slot of 6-8pm, it was a pragmatic move, with them likely still having another two years to run on their contracts.
The reason we get a killing season is that most radio contracts start and finish at the end of a calendar year so decision time is upon us.
Helpfully moving them to the drive slot avoided detracting from the underdog tale of Jase & Lauren getting a second chance. It avoided the new arrivals being seen by the audience as bad guys who had cost others their jobs.
However, with the trio remaining on big breakfast contracts, they were expensive for the new 6-8pm time slot. They had appeared to be on option to return to breakfast in Nova Adelaide next year, where they’d been before the Nova Melbourne gig. Since the shift to drive, they had already moved back to Adelaide anyway.
But this week Nova decided to renew the (presumably much cheaper) contracts of Jodie Oddy and Andrew Hayes. The Jodie & Haysey show has a 10.9% share which puts it just behind FM rivals Triple M, Mix along with sister talk station 5AA.
The current breakfast underperformer in the Adelaide ratings is SAFM’s Bernie Vince and Emma Georgiadis with a share of 7.2%. Bernie & Emma G’s Best Mates For Breakfast only started in November. Their predecessors Rebecca Morse and Mark Soderstrom had a 9.9% share this time last year.
I wonder whether SAFM’s owner Southern Cross Austereo is be considering the option of Ben, Liam and Belle for breakfast.
And this is far from the end of the Nova changes. Smallsy’s Surgery, which aired nationally from 8-10pm, ended a month ago.
There’s plenty of speculation about what will happen with the 4-6pm early drive trio of Tim Blackwell, Ricki-Lee Coulter and Joel Creasy. Nova’s entire late afternoon and evening timeslot is an option for reworking. Could four shows become three, or even two?
Nova’s Sydney breakfast slot may also finally see a change. Last week, Ryan Fitzgerald and Michael Wipfli hit 14 years in the time slot.
Despite only currently being fourth in the Sydney FM market, Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie has been a solid, advertiser-friendly commercial option. But Fitzy now presents the show from his home town of Adelaide (what is it with everybody moving back to Adelaide?) The drumbeats (by which I mean this morning’s episode of the Gamechangers Radio podcast) are getting louder for changes.
What’s ahead for killing season at ARN, Nine Radio, SCA and the ABC?
While there’s more to come at Nova Entertainment, chances are there will now be more than a month of waiting to find out the detail of the plans for ARN Media, owner of the Gold and KIIS networks. ARN is running its first Upfronts on October 29.
Thanks to Gold Sydney’s outgoing breakfast hosts Brendan Jones and Amanda Keller letting the cat out of the bag about their move to drive, we already know that Gold Melbourne breakfast host Christian O’Connell will also be networked into Sydney, and in some form into other metro markets.
But ARN will sensibly hold back as much as it can on the detail. The same goes for a further rollout of The Kyle & Jackie O Show. Brisbane (displacing Robin Bailey, Kip Wightman and Corey Oates) looks likely. Adelaide and Perth we’ll have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, without advertising deals to lock in, the ABC will probably be last to announce its 2026 plans.
Nine Radio is also likely to make changes. As I wrote earlier this month, former top Sydney station 2GB is losing its way in most time slots. Clinton Maynard in drive looks particularly vulnerable. Less so 3AW in Melbourne, which is still firing in most time slots. And Nine Radio’s less successful markets of 4BH in Brisbane and 6PR Perth, look to be in need of change too.
Eyes turn next to Southern Cross Austereo and its Triple M and Hit networks. In Sydney, both 2Day FM and Triple M are struggling, with less than a 10% share between them. That demands change.
‘Tis the season.
Unmade Index in end-of-week dip
The Unmade Index finished the week on a down note. Nine lost 2.1% ARN Media lost 3.1% and Ooh Media lost 1.6%
Meanwhile, Southern Cross Austereo improved by 1.9%, outdoor player Motio grew by 1.8% and Vinyl Group was up 1.1%.
The Unmade Index closed on 472.5 points, down 1.69% for the day.
In case you missed it…
On Monday we marked 1,000 days since generative AI hit the mainstream, and assessed its impact on the media and marketing industry so far:
On Tuesday we dug into the rules the platforms will have to work to when the under-16 social media ban kicks in. The vagueness looks more like a feature rather than a bug:
Our midweek update explored the poorly explained decision to remove from the Australian Podcast Ranker information about the relative performances of competing publishers:
On Thursday came one of the media stories of the year - the shocking suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live in a move with serious implications for freedom of speech in the United States:
And on Friday, editorial director Hal Crawford talked to one of the industry’s most interesting strategic brains, Mat Baxter about his moves to create his own brand:
And more from Mumbrella…
Mutinex leadership shake-up: Danny Bass departs, John Sintras returns to Australia
Amazon’s new agentic AI will plan and create an entire ad campaign
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you’d like to hear a little more from me, please do listen to last night’s episode of ABC Radio National’s MediaLand which was a ripper. As well as discussing the Kimmel situation, our guest was production house CJZ’s Michael Cordell to talk about The People vs Robodebt which goes to air on SBS next week. It’s an important show focused on one of the worst public administration scandals Australia has seen. Cordell was moved to tears discussing one of the Robodebt victims, and he also had tough words to say about the digital platforms.
It’s a big week coming up for us. Our retail media conference REmade is on Tuesday (it’s not too late to get a ticket). I’ll be interviewing Amazon Ads GM Willie Pang on stage and then a second time for our podcast which will go out after the first local Amazon Upfronts on Wednesday. And on Thursday night it’s the Publish Awards.
And Unmade will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
I am in Ho Chi Minh City using Optus $5 a day roaming and suddenly lost connectivity while out and about - had no way to book a car to back to my hotel and had to rely on the kindness of strangers. A small global ripple from much bigger problems in Oz ... PS Was no mention of the outage as I spent hours interacting with call centres / chat bots updating credit cards etc later that night!!