BotW: Jonesy & Amanda's (begrudging) move; the AI hit list; influencers gone wild
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Saturday morning in bright, chilly, Evandale, Tasmania after a week of being rained on in Sydney.
This week marked a return to routine. The week before I was wiped out by the respiratory thing that seems to have swept every Sydney office. Apologies for missing last Saturday’s Best of the Week (and indeed the Mumbrella Awards), by the way. It got me good.
Today: Jonesy & Amanda reluctantly move to drive time; media and marketing jobs on the AI destruction list and a brush with an influencer prankster.
Happy National Clown Day.
We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:
3rd November – Compass Sydney
5th November – Compass Brisbane
10th November – Compass Adelaide
11th November – Compass Perth
17th November – Compass Melbourne
18th November – Compass Hobart
Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.
And you also get access to our paywalled archive.
Upgrade today.
Lame pranks in Maccas
Speaking of clown day, I witnessed an influencer in action this week. It confirmed many of my biases, even as I try to convince myself that the creator economy has gone legit.
I mention it here in case someone happens to come across the final footage. I’d be curious to know whether it looks less lame in the final edit.
First though, let’s cover an embarrassing disclosure. I was in McDonald’s. Since the rise of delivery apps changed the business model, the city McDonald’s eat-in experience has evolved from fine-for-what-it-is, to a depressing one where the customer feels more like a loser surrounded by fellow losers, abandoned food packaging and pigeons. I was in the George Street branch with a few minutes between commitments and needing to pull out my laptop to send a couple of emails. (Review: I tried the McWings. I ordered three and only managed to eat one; they were slimy. One star.)
It was relatively quiet, with hardly anyone at the ordering screens or waiting for food at the counter, but quite a few people eating at tables.
Then there was a shout from near the door although it wasn’t clear what was said the first time. In swept a group of three or four young men, filming with phones. One of them shouted again: “Free food!” Then he added: “Not from me, from the restaurant.” That was it. That was the joke.
None of the customers really reacted. Not least because they’d already paid for and collected their food.
The group swaggered further in but didn’t quite dare approach the counter. He tried shouting the same thing a third time, and again there was almost no reaction. I didn’t even see a member of staff tell him to leave.
Within a minute or two, they slunk away. Look out, TikTok.
AI consequences
It was yet another big week in AI.
I spent yesterday’s flight home reading a couple of hair raising new pieces on generative AI.
First, came a buzzy study published by Microsoft researchers listing which professions are being most disrupted (clue: most of the media and marketing industry). And then was a thoughtful piece of analysis in The Economist on the economics of superintelligence (clue: it might change everything, or not a lot).
Starting with the study from the Microsoft team, with the title “Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI”. It created a few headlines this week, mainly thanks to its ranking of the top 40 occupations that are being disrupted. See it for yourself.
From our world:
4: Sales reps
5: Writers and authors
6: Customer service reps
10 Broadcast announcers and radio DJs
13: Telemarketers
16: News analysts, reporters, journalists
21: Editors
23: Public relations specialists
25: Advertising sales agents
37: Market research analysts
There’s also a separate table of the occupations less likely to have AI applied to them. Least likely to be disrupted? Phlebotomists; the people who take blood. Also high on the list: embalmers and dishwashers.
Perhaps happily, the more I got into the paper, the more I began to realise how flawed the methodology was. Those working in media and marketing may well be correct to be alarmed about what generative AI will do to the size of their industry, but this report offers less evidence of that than you might think.
It was based on 200,000 conversations on Microsoft Copilot a year ago. It examined what they had used AI for, and whether they had been successful. The (weak) criteria for success was whether the users had clicked on a thumbs up or not.
It was only after more digging around that another key fact emerged: the study was released as a pre-print, meaning it has not yet been peer reviewed and passed for publication in a research journal. I suspect it may not clear that bar
In reality, all the report tells us which professions are getting high use out of generative AI. But almost no evidence that it is replacing those using its assistance.
Meanwhile the Economist piece set out the radical possibilities far more authoritatively. Wild stock market swings; high unemployment; humans battling AI for land and energy are possibilities, but not certainties. My favourite quote about the consequences: “Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”
Keller and Jones get a lie in
ARN Media began to unveil the next stage of its networking strategy on Friday. It was bounced into the timing.
Earlier in the week, a tip circulated the industry that ARN has budgeted $1.5m for an upfronts event later this year to announce Christian O’Connell being networked into Gold in Sydney (and probably the Kyle & Jackie O Show into other Kiis markets). On Wednesday, the Daily Mail republished it as fact, opening up a wave of coverage.
In itself that was no surprise. It’s been widely known that O’Connell was promised the opportunity to reach a wider live audience than his current Melbourne show. It’s part of ARN’s wider strategy, which saw the Sydney based The Kyle & Jackie O Show networked into Kiis Melbourne.
The missing part of the puzzle though has been Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones - the current hosts of Sydney breakfast for Gold. A miscalculation when ARN made the Melbourne move was firing hosts Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips rather than finding them another slot. They took their audience over to Nova, one of the factors in The Kyle & Jackie O Show so far failing to find a Melbourne audience.
ARN has learned from this for Christian O’Connell into Sydney. The Jonesy & Amanda show will stay on the network, moving to drive time, presumably nationally or at least into Sydney and Melbourne. The risk of them taking their audience over to Triple M would have been too big. They will presumably stay on breakfast-sized salaries.
The duo made the announcement on Friday’s show. There was an odd tone to it. They told listeners they had been bounced into the timing because it was going to be talked about on a podcast this weekend (presumably Game Changers Radio). And before they (half heartedly) told listeners how pleased they were about the move, they made it clear they’d have been content to stay in breakfast. Casual listeners would have got the impression that they’d rather have done so.
Still, a slightly reluctant move is better than them popping up as competition. It will be fascinating to see how hard the duo work to help COC inherit their Sydney breakfast audience.
Unmade Index in end of week dip
Most Unmade Index stocks swooned into the weekend with eight of the locally listed media and marketing companies losing ground and just two improving.
While most of the falls were moderate, the two stocks that improved saw bigger jumps. Seven West Media improved by 7.1% and Vinyl Group by 6%.
The Unmade Index lost 0.28% landing on 584.2%.
More from Mumbrella…
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like a little more from me, on this week’s episode of Medialand, from ABC Radio National, we tackled the decision to add YouTube to Australia’s social media age gating rules.
And I was a last minute stand-in on this morning’s edition of Fear & Greed after Adam Lang lost his voice. That bug’s everywhere.
We’ll be back with more next week. Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Tim, a very interesting comment of AI. "It was based on 200,000 conversations on Microsoft Copilot a year ago".
I was just thinking that the OzTAM TV ratings (as one Aussie example) use a national panel which provides about 20,000 people's viewing. In a fortnight they will have about 280,000 people's viewing behaviour recorded.