BotW: AI takes the mic; Netflix gets serious about ads; SCA spikes; and a Google breakup gets a little closer
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on a beautiful morning at Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today: A Rubicon-crossing moment for Australian radio as ARN Media turns to an AI presenter; as anti-competition laws threaten to catch up with the platforms, will it actually change things if the White House can be bought anyhow?; and Netflix plans to amp up ads in APAC.
Happy Garlic Day.
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Radio - no longer (a)live and local?
Back on Monday, ARN Media’s former director of podcast content Stephanie Coombes broke a big piece of news: for months, one of the on-air hosts at her former employer was actually an AI-generated voice.
Thy, presenter of Workdays with Thy on western Sydney hip hop station CADA, does not exist. Thy has been on air for months, and until Coombes shared the tip-off she had received, nobody had noticed.
Officially broadcasting from the Blue Mountains, CADA is not included in the Sydney ratings (otherwise ARN would have to own up to having more than the two Sydney FM licences it’s entitled to, in Kiis and Gold). But CADA is also Sydney’s third biggest streaming and DAB+ station, behind fellow ARN brands iHeartAustralia and Kiis 90s.
According to the first GfK ratings of the year, Workdays with Thy has been averaging a cumulative Sydney audience of 75,000. That’s to say that at some point over the working week, 75,000 people tuned in to CADA’s early afternoon timeslot.
Incidentally, that’s down on the same ratings period last year when the number was 93,000.
I’m struggling to explain why this feels like such a significant moment. Cheap and realistic voice cloning has been around for a couple of years now. We cloned my voice for Timbot two years ago.
Audio production house Abe’s Audio - who help produce and edit our podcasts - have been offering a service they call Ethical AI Voiceovers. In the Abe’s Audio model, the person who’s voice is cloned still gets paid something.
As Abe Udy explained in a post this week: “Ethical AI voiceovers are not suitable for every project, but they can be helpful for agency pitch reads, creating eLearning content, long-form narrations, and some lower-budget commercials.”
And there’s already plenty of artifice in radio. Links, and indeed entire shows are pre-recorded.
You’d be a naive Smooth FM listener to believe that David Campbell is somehow presenting his breakfast show while also simultaneously being live on air for Nine’s Today Extra. Is there that much difference between a presenter popping into a studio for a couple of hours and recording a month’s worth of links than going to the next stage and having a cloned voice do it anyway?
Yet there’s also a reluctance to own up. When Southern Cross Austereo’s Triple M put Melburnian and lie-in lover Mick Molloy into Sydney breakfast, it went though contortions to avoid admitting he would be neither live nor local.
But still… Thy does feel like a landmark moment. It is, as far as we know, the first time it’s occurred in Australian radio.
There’s an argument that radio’s crucial point of difference over music streaming services like Spotify is to be live and local.
And there’s an irony that Coombes’ revelation only hit the mainstream on Thursday afternoon when it was picked up by the Australian Financial Review, at almost exactly the same moment that news broke of the cancellation of the commercial radio industry’s annual awards to recognise its human talent.
When the Australian Commercial Radio Awards (presumably) return in 2026, will there be a new category for best AI presenter?
HumAIn, Unmade’s conference focused on the impact of AI on the media and marketing world, takes place in just over a fortnight. Abe Udy will be presenting Ethical AI Voiceovers as part of the AI Upfronts.
Will Google turn to the new ultimate authority?
It’s remarkable how quickly the end of the rule of law in the United States changes how you think about the world.
This week, Google lost a key antitrust trial in the US which effectively ruled that it illegally built and holds a monopoly in the programatic advertising chain. Previously another US trial ruled that the company has used anticompetitive behaviour to hold onto its monopoly in search.
Google says it will appeal both cases. But if it loses, that eventual consequences could - and should - be a breakup. That would be good for advertisers, good for media owners and might even be good for Google shareholders too.
And yet, in the new world order, my first thought on seeing the results of the case was not a question of how it would change things, but rather one of how big a bribe Google would be willing to pay the Trump White House to continue to do business.
Here comes Netflix
Quarterly reporting season has already kicked off in the US. On Friday morning Australian time, that included a Netflix update.
Although I knew it was coming, the first absence of a quarterly update on the number of paying Netflix subscribers still caused a moment of sadness. December’s moment of passing 300m paying subscribers was the last update.
Instead came new milestones. Most significantly, the first quarter of more than US$10bn in revenues.
For Australia’s advertising market, we’re yet to see Netflix make a big impact, but that’s coming.
When Netflix hastily launched its ad tier it did so based on the Microsoft tech stack, with Microsoft handling ad sales in most markets outside the US. That’s changing. Three weeks ago it launched its own fully programmatic Netflix Ads Suite in the US. That includes “a full APAC launch coming in Q2”. As in, the quarter we’re currently in.
Just watch.
SCA shares jump as the ASX closes for Easter
Southern Cross Austereo shares leapt on Thursday, spiking by 12.2% for the day. The audio company’s $165m market capitalisation is near its highest point in 11 months.
It was also a good end to the short trading week for agency holdco Enero which rose by 6.5%.
Meanwhile Domain fell back below a $4 share price to $3.96. The drop is a signal of continued market scepticism that CoStar’s deal with Nine to buy the platform at a price of $4.43 per share will actually get done.
The Unmade Index finished the week almost flat on 490.9 points, up by just 0.06%, or 0.3 points, for the day.
Declaration of interest: Through my self managed super fund, I have shares in all the companies listed on the Unmade Index except for Gumtree. I bought approximately $1,000 more shares in SCA when the market opened on Thursday morning, before the price jumped. The cash was a reinvestment of half year dividends from my wider portfolio. My criteria was to buy a single stock which had both good management and was most undervalued. When I made that assessment on Wednesday night, my choice was SCA.
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like a little more, you’ll find last night’s episode of MediaLand from ABC Radio National in your favourite podcatcher. Vivienne Kelly and I discussed CADA’s AI presenter; pollies paying influencers after Monique Ryan’s car crash moment on Insiders, and the sad cobblers of Facebook. And we were joined by Screen Producers Australia boss Matthew Deaner to talk streaming quotas.
I’m mostly taking next week off. My colleagues at Mumbrella Media will keep the Unmade wheels turning.
Have a great long weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade & Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Deeply appreciate the generous credit and link to my article, Tim.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zuckerberg recently offered the FTC four hundred and fifty million dollars to settle the lawsuit.