BotW: Making sense of TV cancellations; Why Amaysim must be in on the AI joke; Hard truth about Nine's missed moment
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on a chilly morning in Evandale, Tasmania.
Today: A tale of two cancellations - Ten’s strategic shift and the ABC’s tactical cut; Is Amaysim trolling adland? (Yes); and what Nine’s board didn’t do.
Happy National Kiss A Wookie Day for tomorrow
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TV cuts: Network Ten shifts strategy while ABC only looks tactical
It wasn’t entirely a coincidence of timing that we saw three long-running TV shows cut this week.
The end of the financial year, or more to the point, the start of the next one, is just a fortnight away. Network Ten’s The Project and Fox Sports’ The Back Page will get to do a couple of laps of honour before then. The ABC’s Q&A won’t come back from its season break.
I suspect we’ll hear of more job losses across the industry in the coming days as bosses lock in next year’s budgets in an uncertain economy and a changing marketing landscape.
I’ve already written obits for The Project and Q&A, so I won’t retread those here.
What the decisions had in common was that it wasn’t so much a function of weak shows, as changed audience patterns and economics.
Most of the coverage this week centred around Q&A and The Project, which is understandable as they had bigger audiences than The Back Page, which was only on subscription.
However, there is a difference in what the axing of the two big shows signals about their respective organisations.
For Ten, it marks a strategic shift: a recognition that the younger audience The Project chased has simply gone away from free to air television. The format of replacement Ten News+ seems to be targeting an older audience. It signals that Ten, always the youngest of the three networks, is going to be competing more directly with Nine and Seven.
The ABC announcement was a little more disappointing in that it appears tactical rather than strategic. This coming Tuesday will represent Hugh Marks’ 100th day in charge of the ABC. That’s seen as a magic number in leadership, but we’re not left any the wiser about what Marks’ strategic plans for the ABC actually are, or indeed, if he yet has any.
Instead, Q&A’s axing, alongside some minor changes to the org chart, represents fiddling at the edges. The show was already at death’s door.
Marks left it to director of news Justin Stevens to actually front the staff announcement. An email to staff from Marks only came several hours after the one from Stevens.
That’s one area where Hugh Marks has previous. When he ran Nine and there was bad news, he’d often be nowhere to be seen. For the disastrous 60 Minutes Beirut bungle and his decision to host an on-set fund raiser for the Coalition, he vanished from sight.
It was an approach that worked for the Marks at Nine, but if he wants to take staff with him at the ABC, he’ll need to break the habit.
*Declaration of interest: I co-present the weekly show MediaLand on ABC Radio National.
Hywood and Sorrell on lost opportunities at Nine and WPP
Speaking of Hugh Marks, it was a week of former CEOs offering assessments of their successors. The 80-year-old Sir Martin Sorrell had (another) full frontal verdict on Mark Read, while 70-year-old Greg Hywood had a more nuanced verdict on the lost opportunities at Nine.
After Hywood announced he would be stepping down as chair of Free TV Australia, in what looks like a retirement from a 50 year career in media, he gave a number of interviews, including with MediaLand. In that conversation we briefly explored the thankless work Hywood had done as boss of Fairfax Media to rebuild the publishing business model. That’s what made Fairfax a viable partner in Nine’s merger-takeover in 2018.
Hywood also gave a longer interview to my colleague Hal Crawford, which Mumbrella published yesterday. If you’re interested in media business strategy and only read one piece this weekend, then make it this one.
Hywood does not name names, but he makes clear that he sees the management of Nine as having missed their moment after the merger. He makes his case convincingly. In the subsequent years, they failed to reshape the TV business or to use the other outlets to build Domain.
In part that can be laid at Marks’ door - he stayed at Nine until early in 2021 - but mostly that criticism should sit with the (then) Peter Costello-run board, and with Marks’ successor Mike Sneesby.
Meanwhile, Hywood was not the only former CEO pointing fingers at his successor. The irascible Sir Martin Sorrell took another swing at his successor at WPP, Mark Read.
He did it as a guest on the BBC’s The Media Show. And it was a marvellous insight into Sorrell’s personality. Already in the studio for the live broadcast, he found himself unable to resist the temptation to join in the previous segment on history podcasts, leaving the hosts struggling to politely hold space for their other guests to speak.
Sorrell took the opportunity to suggest that Read’s resignation announcement was linked to WPP’s loss of clients, and to argue that his new business, S4 Capital, owner of the Monks agency, is more future focused.
And while it’s true that WPP’s share price is now only a quarter of its 2017 peak when Sorrell was in charge, the value of Sorrel’s S4C has collapsed from more than £800 a share four years ago, to £24. WPP is worth £6bn; S4C is worth $150m. Glass houses, Sir Martin.
While WPP has not been inspiring as an organisation in recent years - certainly it’s not feared by its competitors in the way it once was - Read nonetheless deserves to be well thought of for his time. He did the painful work of untangling a business built around Sorrell’s personality, and of drastically reducing the number of agency brands.
Amaysim plays the AI game
One of the oddities of the week came in this new ad from Amaysim. Please give it a watch, sceptically.
The telco brand press released it, boasting about the fact that it had been created in-house, using generative AI.
In production terms, the ad is shithouse. It opens with a close-up of a three fingered hand, and the voiceover has that off-kilter aspect that would be familiar to anybody who’s viewed the crappily stolen movie content currently infecting Meta’s reels.
I think they’re trolling.
The unfortunate truth is that generative AI has moved past this point. It would be perfectly possible to do a neater ad that you’d never even notice was AI.
And that’s the point. You’d never notice that. Amaysim’s intent, I think, is to create room for speculation without it being completely obvious. That’s what potentially drives the conversation.
Amaysim is positioning itself as the cheap brand. And this ad looks cheap.
If they later confess that it was actually a human-created ad designed to look like AI, then I’m willing to believe it.
More from Mumbrella…
Jacob Greber to replace Laura Tingle as 7.30 political editor
Women ‘still underestimated by brands’ despite spending power
‘Nine and Fairfax hasn’t worked’: Hywood’s view from the river bank
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like a little more, last night’s MediaLand is now available in the usual podcast places. We talked about the TV cuts, SBS at 50, and why the hell Nine sends reporters to cover riots without wearing protective gear.
We’ll be back with more on Monday.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
