BotW: Here come the juniors; Early exit of boss is good for the ABC - if they can find the right successor; Audio stocks take a hit
BotW: Here come the juniors; Early exit of boss is good for the ABC - if they can find the right successor; Audio stocks take a hit
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday and Saturday in beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania. Admittedly that beauty has to be admired while sheltering from the rain.
Happy Vesuvius Day.
Today: The IAB’s numbers show an alarming outlook for senior staff; What the ABC needs after David Anderson; and yet another new low on the Unmade Index.
This week we announced an upgrade for Unmade’s paying members. Annual members now get a free ticket to all of our events. That includes REmade - Retail Media Unmade on October 1; Unlock on October 31; our Compass series in November; and HumAIn next year.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership also includes members-only content, access to our paywalled archives and your own copy of Media Unmade. Upgrade today.
Grey hair not welcome
On Thursday, the IAB released its annual survey of the state of employment within the Australian digital advertising industry. The data suggests that there’s never been a worse time to be experienced and looking for a job in digital advertising.
While the survey covers digital advertising, with 42 media owners and ad tech companies contributing, the IAB suggests “it is deemed representative of the wider industry”. My instinct is that that’s correct.
The survey began in 2021 which only provides four years of trends. But that’s enough to offer some signals.
The most significant one is how hard it is to get a job for the many senior people who have been laid off in recent months. From 44% of vacancies in the space being for people with more than six years’ experience just one year ago, that’s halved to 20%.
Meanwhile the proportion of ads seeking (no doubt, cheaper) people with one to three years of experience has jumped from 13% to 34% in the space of a year.
As The IAB puts it: “The increase in available talent and reduction in headcount has continue since the last report.”
According to IAB CEO Gai Le Roy: “As workforces become leaner in the executive ranks, there’s been a significant shift to the hiring of more junior members of staff.”
I have a suspicion that the trend is even more prevalent in the agency sector where revenues have been even more squeezed as production shifts towards generative AI.
We’re in a shrinking, less experienced industry. Le Roy points out: “Only five per cent of the digital advertising and ad tech employees are now aged over 50 years of age.”
The long term problem of this is the knowledge that is leaving the industry. When all the experienced (and expensive) staff have gone, who will train the next generation?
The best (and worst) thing David Anderson brought to the ABC was stability
Six years on, it’s easy to forget the intensity of the crisis that engulfed the ABC after the board fired managing director Michelle Guthrie who set fire to the place on the way out.
It was the ABC’s lowest ebb. Guthrie - previously a midlevel sales boss at Google, hired by an ABC board bedazzled by the aura of a tech co - proved to be unable to inspire or lead Australia’s most important cultural institution.
After being fired by the board, she ensured that the failings of chairman Justin Milne - including overeagerness to appease the government - made it into the public domain. The ensuing staff mutiny forced Milne out of the door too.
This week the man who stepped in to fix the mess, David Anderson, announced that he is now going to leave just a year after signing a five-year contract renewal that he should not have been given.
Anderson, an ABC lifer, was what the organisation needed to calm the crisis. But not to reverse its longer term decline, if that’s even possible. If his appointment was the roll of a dice, he come up as a four.
Anderson’s renewal was slipped through by chair Ita Buttrose a few months before she departed. It was a classless move as it robbed the new chair Kim Williams and his board of the opportunity to make their own appointment.
The one thing predictable about Williams’ tenure is that it will be high energy and low status quo. This week’s announcement suggests Anderson was not up for that. Both men said exceptionally nice things about each other. I doubt it would have stayed that way if Anderson stuck around. He was not the man to deliver the change the ABC needs.
So now begins the hunt for an MD. As it happens, the best qualified person may be Williams himself. But it would surely be impossible to engineer a seemly transition for non-exec to exec. Wouldn’t it?
It’s a tricky job description - leading any sort of large public organisation is complicated and requires specific management and leadership skills. Having the vision to navigate media’s disruption - across audio, online and TV - is another factor. Part of the role is as editor-in-chief - to do that part well really requires someone from a journalism background. But the ABC has a remit to entertain too. Few resumes have both elements.
The appointment is always a compromise because nobody has everything. (I keep coming back to the fact that Williams, with high culture hinterland and media business skills may be closest.)
The other issue is that some of the other best qualified candidates will be deterred by Williams’ presence as chair. There may be room for only one vision at the top.
Greg Hywood - who turned around Fairfax Media and led its merger with Nine - is an interesting thought. He’s a journo by background too. But I get the impression that he’s been dialling things back rather than ready to dive into one more big job. If Wikipedia is accurate, Hywood celebrates his 70th birthday next month.
From the other side of that merger, Hugh Marks is an even more intriguing thought. He left Nine a stronger company than he found it. That role gave him exposure to TV, radio and online, along with the business of news. His production company Dreamchaser, launched with Carl Fennessy two years ago, hasn’t set the world on fire, which might make it easier for him to be willing to make a jump.
Moving down a generation, Chris Janz ticks several boxes including a background in journalism, having led the Project Blue team the reengineered Fairfax’s newspaper publishing business model, and some exposure to TV streaming during his time at Nine. He missed out to Mike Sneesby for the top job there. A barrier for him to be interested will be his co-ownership of Scire, the company behind Capital Brief which launched a year ago yesterday.
If Williams is looking for somebody who can tuck in to his slipstream, there’s another intriguing character who’s already inside the building. Deputy chair Peter Tonagh was effectively Williams’ number two at Foxtel when he was chief operating officer. He was briefly CEO of News Corp after Williams, and then led the rescue of newswire service Australian Associated Press. However, moving Tonagh from non-exec back to exec would be tricky. He’s board chair of several other organisations including Quantium. That’s a nice life to give up.
It’s a key moment. The ABC needs to not only make the case for more funding, but to spend it effectively. It needs to tackle its audience crisis in radio, and its ageing demographics across the board. If he or she wins a second term, the next MD will be the person to lead the ABC into its centennial year. The ABC turns 100 in July 2032, the same month Brisbane hosts the Olympics. What a time it could be.
I have a hunch that the ABC board will lead a global search before concluding that the best person to take the helm is indeed Mr Kimberley Lynton Williams. They might be right to do so.
Our analysis of Williams’ appointment as chair:
Hear Tim Burrowes narrate the disastrous saga of Michelle Guthrie’s brief leadership of the ABC:
Radio companies and the Unmade Index hit new lows
Australia’s two major audio companies both hit all time low market capitalisations yesterday. Southern Cross Austereo lost 1.75% to land on a market cap of $134m, while ARN Media lost 1.63% to land on $189m.
Meanwhile Ooh Media lost 3.7% taking it down to its lowest point since last October.
The Unmade Index - which tracks all of the local ASX-listed media and marketing stocks - hit its own new low point yesterday too, dropping by 0.9% to 460.3 points.
CotW: Make Death Less Scary
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
Creative agency Cocogun and production house Rowdy have crafted a strangely uplifting stop motion film titled, 'The Cassette’ on behalf of Palliative Care Queensland.
A man is visited by Death, instead of facing him with fear, he spends his final moments playing his favourite song, “Here Comes Your Man” by The Pixies.
We've seen a rise in craft over the past few months and this spot is no exception; the stop motion adds an emotional, handcrafted feel that strikes a balance between breaking hearts and healing them with a sense of hope.
In case you missed it:
On Monday we kicked off the week by reflecting on results season, discussing a brilliant Media Watch appointment that didn’t happen and checking in on the government’s overdue media reforms:
On Tuesday we talked to Ooh Media boss Cathy O’Connor as the outdoor business owned up to a disappointing half:
On Wednesday we talked to the founders of lifestyle site Man of Many:
On Thursday we shared an update (and an upgrade) for Unmade readers after our first three years:
On Friday we analysed the cost of ARN Media’s so far thwarted pursuit of Southern Cross Austereo:
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you haven’t had enough of me for one week, I talked to Simon Owens for the excellent Business of Content podcast about the journey of building Mumbrella, and now Unmade. By happy coincidence, he published the video on the day we celebrated Unmade’s third birthday.
If you only want to hear me, then you’ll find me on today’s new episode of Game Changers Radio: Melbourne Radio Wars, talking about the week’s ARN Media results.
And yesterday, I took part in Crikey’s Friday Fight on the question of whether taxpayers should bail out journalism. I argued in favour of a tax intervention. Based on the comments underneath, I see I’m badly mistaken.
And this Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be popping into Sydney to moderate a discussion about where technology is taking us in publishing for both media companies and brands. I hope to see you there.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
