BotW: Cancelling Campaign Brief; Nine's underwhelming upfronts; Compass Perth
Welcome to Best of the Week, started on Friday on board the much delayed QF101 to Fiji, and wrapped up this morning, wishing I was already by the pool.
Today: Did Nine undersell its media mix modelling initiative at its Upfronts?; acting CEO Matt Stanton’s first misstep; and Campaign Brief cancelled.
Happy Hug a Sheep Day.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:
A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including Unlock (October 31), Compass (across November), HumAIn (Q2 2025) and REmade (Q3 2025);
Members-only content; and all of our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade.
Meet the Compass Perthonalities
Cat McGinn writes:
We can today announce our panel of WA media and marketing luminaries for Unmade’s first Perth event.
The speakers for Compass Perth are Taryn Payne, executive manager for brand and customer strategy at Bankwest; Clive Bingwa, MD of Nine Entertainment, Steve Harris, MD of The Brand Agency; Amber Martin, MD of Hypnosis Creative; and Meg Coffey, founder of State of Social.
The panel will be moderated by Unmade’s Tim Burrowes with the pub conversation later featured as an Unmade podcast.
The Perth edition of Compass, in which the panellists reflect on the year just gone and offer their projections for 2025, takes place on the evening of Monday, November 18.
Unmade’s paying members are entitled to a complimentary place at Compass, and tickets are also on sale here.
Unmade’s Compass takes place in a hectic fortnight across six states:
Wednesday November 6 - Hobart, The Hope and Anchor;
Tuesday November 12 - Brisbane, The Prince Consort;
Wednesday November 13 - Sydney, The Sporting Globe;
Monday November 18 - Perth, The Globe;
Tuesday November 19 - Adelaide, Elephant British Pub;
Wednesday November 20 - Melbourne, The Garden State Hotel.
Nine Upfront: Less show, more biz
Tim Burrowes writes:
For the first time in well over a decade, I missed Nine Upfront on Thursday, because of a personal commitment.
I wonder whether not being in the room contributed to having found the crop of announcements underwhelming.
The sum of the parts didn’t add up to Australia’s biggest media company flexing its muscles. Not that it was the moment for muscle flexing, just a week after the publication of the critical report into Nine’s culture.
It was by all accounts a less splashy affair than usual - a sit down lunch rather than the usual performance followed by party.
There were boxes to be ticked.
Show confidence to the market by doing some kind of event. Tick
Make an announcement of more technical capabilities. In Nine’s case that was more capabilities for AdManager, the AI-driven do-it-yourself advertising platform for smaller brands. Tick
Announce new partnerships with data providers. This time with Adgile and DataCo. Tick
Announce some new content. Tick.
Maybe because the status quo isn’t that exciting, that’s where things really start to seem underwhelming. Nine’s had a strong slate for the last few years. NRL and tennis are the major content investments, and they still rate. Other genres fill the gaps around the sport, and never more noticeably than this year. Mostly it was the return of what works for Nine - Married At First Sight; The Block. No surprises there.
One eyebrow-raiser was new gameshow The Floor, hosted by Rodger Corser, last seen on Australian television as host of The Traitors on Ten.
Unlike the US and UK versions of The Traitors, Corser’s version bombed. He played a weird, stiff version of himself that made the show hard to watch, for me at least. I’d be fascinated to know whether that was by direction, or his own artistic interpretation. Hopefully for Nine, it was the former, and they get a different Rodger for The Floor.
I suspect the casting is more pragmatic. Corser was a Nine star thanks to Underbelly and Doctor Doctor, and this gets him back in the fold for future projects even if the show gameshow doesn’t work out.
And if that later gives Paramount a face saving way of trying again with The Traitors (just give it to Jonathan LaPaglia, already) in 2026, then so be it.
There were, in fairness, some interesting content announcements. The licensing of the BBC’s channels may help Nine catch up on its free ad-supported television (FAST) offering, which has lagged behind Paramount’s Pluto TV-powered offering and Seven, which invested before FAST was even an acronym.
Putting some ads on Stan Sport is an incremental step which will round out larger Nine network sponsorships. But it has happened two years too late to have really moved the dial (or share price). Netflix jumped in 2022. Former boss Mike Sneesby had started to look stubborn by refusing to follow.
Like many tech announcements it was hard to tell from the outside whether Nine’s media mix modelling announcement was meaningful. For brands already using an MMM service, it won’t matter. But will it be helpful for brands that do not, to get better insights on how their TV spend has performed? It certainly wouldn’t do any harm.
There may be a bigger story at play - and one that the TV networks need to get better at telling. The global platforms’ proprietary measurement systems are most likely attributing sales credit for heavy lifting actually done by television or other mediums.
It’s possible that Nine’s MMM initiative is a much more important strategic move than it looks. If so, it did not tell that story particularly well this week.
Stanton’s Seven stuff-up
Speaking of Nine, acting CEO Matt Stanton has had his first misstep. It emerged on Wednesday that Seven News doorstepped Stanton over the culture report.
Admittedly, Stanton didn’t go the full Costello and put a journo on their arse, or even the full Sneesby and blurt out something stupid. But he did reportedly pick up the phone to management at Seven after the perfectly legitimate encounter.
It’s not been revealed what Stanton said on the call, but there’s no conceivable form of words that justified the conversation. When you’re the boss of a TV company in the business of doorstepping people, the only thing you can say about it happening to you is nothing.
It’s certainly not a fatal blow to Stanton’s hopes of making the top job permanent, but it is a reminder for the board of what doesn’t come naturally. If you choose not to appoint somebody with ink in the veins or cathode rays in the eyes, that’s what you get.
The cancellation of Campaign Brief
Maybe this time really will be different for Campaign Brief.
While I understand that publisher Michael Lynch has been telling creatives he’ll be able to resume publishing anonymous comments on Campaign Brief when the sexism furore dies down, there was a further major development this week.
Publicis Group’s individual creative agencies - including Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett - have ended their dealings with Campaign Brief. That includes no longer submitting campaigns and credits for publication and allowing their paying memberships of sister site Best Ads on TV to lapse. Mumbrella reports that Special Group has done the same thing.
That follows Innocean and the Clemenger Group agencies which were among the first to jump.
The dam seems to have finally broken. As I wrote last week, agency creative departments were scared of finding themselves on the wrong side of Campaign Brief’s influence.
But each agency or group that decides not to be part of the Hot and Cold chart, or to not send in their work for judgment, or to not pay membership fees in order to have their work published, weakens that power further. I’ve heard a number of anecdotes in recent days that suggest many were reluctant supporters.
Even when I wrote last week’s piece, I had not appreciated just how influential Michael Lynch was upon the choice of Australian representatives on creative awards juries over the years. I believe that has acted a glass ceiling for many who were not in his club.
There is another significance to this week’s developments. Although Publicis says the decision was made by its individual agencies, it’s impossible to miss the fact that the group CEO is Michael Rebelo, who also happens to be deputy chair of the peak body for Australia’s creative agencies, the Advertising Council of Australia.
Campaign Brief has historically been close to the ACA and its predecessor the Communications Council. The ACA runs the AWARD Awards and the Effies.
During my 13 years with Mumbrella and three at Unmade, I sometimes had the sense that our corner of the trade press were a little on the outer with the staff of Communications Council and now ACA; not entirely welcome into Michael Lynch’s territory.
That may be starting to change as well. Even ACA CEO Tony Hale, a long time professional friend to Campaign Brief, put out a statement which, if it didn’t actually criticise Campaign Brief did say it was “disappointing that we still need to have this discussion”.
And looking at the current directors of the ACA, many of them are from agencies that have already moved on from Campaign Brief.
If this moment truly is the cancellation of Campaign Brief, don’t be sorry. This isn’t the equivalent of advertisers exerting undue pressure on a brave news masthead. There is no journalistic enterprise in what Campaign Brief produces.
Campaign Brief doesn’t publish news. Although it does not label them as such, it republishes press releases, verbatim, from its commercial partners, as part of a wider club of influence which has quietly helped hold back the industry from becoming as diverse as the audience it serves.
As Michael Lynch has demonstrated over the years, Campaign Brief lacks the good faith to be part of the solution. But at least it may no longer be part of the problem.
Vinyl Group soars up the Unmade Index with 33% jump
Publishing and music platforms company Vinyl Group surged late on Friday, with the share price jumping by a third.
Vinyl Group owns Brag Media including Variety Australia, along with Mediaweek.
It disclosed a couple of new deals to the market this week.
On Tuesday Vinyl Group said it had signed a deal to represent the advertising inventory of music licencing platform Songtradr.
As of June 30, Songtradr owned a 17.4% stake in Vinyl Group, while Songtradr’s boss Paul Wiltshire holds a further 4.3%. According to Vinyl’s 2024 Annual Report, published earlier this month, Songtradr also holds a further 92m options in Vinyl Group stock which would amount to another 9% or so if fully exercised.
And on Wednesday, Vinyl Group said it was launching its record store vinyl.com into the UK.
On Thursday, after a ticking off from the ASX, Vinyl Group added extra information to the announcements saying that the Songtradr arrangement was a two year deal and that it might have to hire extra staff. It also said that the vinyl.com launch might "materially affect results” as it tries to “secure and exploit exclusives”.
Meanwhile Vinyl Group’s largest shareholder, WiseTech founder Richard White, had a tumultuous week after a sex scandal saw him step down as CEO from the company he founded following revelations about him in the Nine mastheads.
Through Realwise Group Holdings, White owns just under 31% of Vinyl Group.
Yesterday’s 33.3% jump in the Vinyl Group share price, to a market capitalisation of $155m, came in the final minutes of trading.
Elsewhere on the Unmade Index, Seven West Media took a hit, losing 5.7%.
The Unmade Index closed at 447.5 points, up by 0.8%.
CotW: Possessed
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Tom Loudon writes:
Treasury Wine Estates' in-house agency, Splash, has launched the "Possessed Wine Bar," transforming Fitzroy’s The Shady Lady into a pop-up featuring haunted objects worldwide, all to promote 19 Crimes' latest glow-in-the-dark wines. Tarot card readers, ominous decor, and ouija boards on every table. A museum-style display of artefacts. A saging ritual. This is more than just a product promotion—it's an immersive, chilling journey that rewards only the brave.
Time to leave you to your Saturday. My slightly flaky Fijian wifi permitting, Abe Udy and I will be back with Start the Week on Monday,
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media