BotW: Nine admits it got it wrong on radio; Google's big AI week; a curious magazine launch
Welcome to Best of the Week, written back home in Tasmania after a week of getting drenched in Sydney. It was poor timing to reject the tyranny of carrying umbrellas. Now it’s raining here too. I’m delighted - our tanks ran dry while I was on the mainland.
Today: Why Brian Gallagher’s arrival at Nine Radio signals a major strategy shift; Google closes the gap on AI; Can outdoor become a 20% medium?; and an odd magazine launch.
Happy Asparagus Day.
To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.
Your annual membership gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.
You also get access to our paywalled archive.
Upgrade today.
A Gallagher-shaped gap at Nine Radio
One of the big beasts of ad sales returned to the front line this week, not that he ever fully went away.
Brian Gallagher, whose last full time gig was an eight year stint as chief sales officer of Southern Cross Austereo, is Nine’s new commercial director of audio.
Since leaving SCA two years ago, Gallagher continued to chair the Boomtown regional advertising initiative, a relatively rare example of successful industry consensus which he launched back in 2019.
This week’s appointment was not out of the blue. In recent months, Gallagher has been consulting with Nine about the state of its radio business. Anyone who spent enough time in North Sydney would have spotted Gallagher doing meetings with Nine execs in the coffee shops nearby.
And just as Henry Tajer consulted with Seven West Media only to discover there was a Tajer-shaped hole at the top of its sales operation, Nine discovered a Gallagher-shaped gap.
The move is more significant than simply that of a sales appointment. It’s an acknowledgement that Nine has not been a good steward of its radio brands.
Since Macquarie Media fell into Nine’s full ownership in 2019 after the takeover of Fairfax Media, its commercial position went backwards.
Nine does big TV brands well, but has been less hospitable to the rats-and-mice small clients which are the lifeblood of city-based radio, and particularly talk radio. One of Gallagher’s first tasks will be to make Nine Radio easier for small advertisers to buy ads with.
There have been few benefits for the Nine Radio brands of being part of a bigger business. Their cultural heft - remember that in Melbourne and Sydney, 3AW and 2GB are the top ratings stations - has not been matched by their ad dollars.
We learned this week that Lachlan Murdoch’s Nova Entertainment wrote $188m in advertising last year. ARN Media’s audio operation including Kiis and Gold wrote $308m. In the 2024 financial year SCA’s audio arm did $401m. By contrast, Nine Radio’s sales were just $103m. Coincidentally that adds up to exactly $1bn.
Annual audio revenue:
SCA: $401m
ARN Media: $308m
Nova Entertainment: $188m
Nine Radio: $103m
In fairness, like Nova, Nine Radio is metro only, while ARN and SCA have regional stations too. And a talk radio audience is older and less attractive to advertisers. Nonetheless, owning the top rating stations in our two biggest cities and holding a revenue share of just 10% of the $1bn market outlined above cannot be justified.
Another failing of Nine in recent years was that it never got right the marketing of its multiple assets across TV, streaming, audio and publishing.
The hire of Gallagher also represents an unwinding of one of the weaknesses of Nine under former CEO Mike Sneesby - a lack of respect for domain expertise in executive choices.
Gallagher’s expanded role replaces that of Ashley Earnshaw who departed earlier this month after three years as director of sales for Total Audio. Earnshaw came up through media agencies and had not worked in radio before then.
It’s been the same story of a lack of domain expertise for Nine’s marketing leadership.
Chief marketing officer Liana Dubois left Nine earlier this year after three years as a marketer, having previously worked in ad sales before being promoted by Sneesby.
And last week Jamie Gilbert-Smith, appointed by Dubois, departed as Nine’s head of trade marketing after just under three years. It wasn’t just his first stint as a trade marketer; it was his first stint as a marketer full stop, having come up through agencies.
There has been no noticeable bigger-than-the-sum-of-the parts multiplier effect for Nine’s media brands since the Fairfax deal, and that has hurt the radio operation the most. Readers of The Age or Sydney Morning Herald could be forgiven for being unaware that 3AW and 2GB are part of the same family. Ditto Nine’s TV viewers.
Similarly, I can’t recall even seeing a trade marketing campaign about the company’s radio brands since Nine Radio existed.
This week’s changes will see Nine Radio run its own race in marketing itself too. Again, having run Boomtown, Gallagher has some domain expertise. Unlike Earnshaw, who reported into the sales team, Gallagher will report directly to Nine radio boss Tom Malone.
The appointment increases the already loud drum beat about Nine’s appetite to sell its radio operation. With the sale of Domain to Costar under way along with an uninspiring plan to hand the proceeds directly to the shareholders, Nine appears to be a not-particularly-ambitious seller of its assets.
Last year, Nine Radio only made a $8m profit. The first half of this financial year showed an improvement, but the latest market update suggested that this progress has since stalled. It may even go backwards in the full year, although we won’t know for sure until the results come out in August.
In theory, on a multiple of four or five times profit, Nine Radio could be sold for less than $50m. Embarrassing, considering the business was worth $275m when Nine bought out John Singleton and co five years ago.
Still in the balance is whether Gallagher’s mission will end up being to fatten that turkey for sale by improving Nine Radio’s profits, or to turn it around sufficiently that the board won’t want to let it go. The argument against holding it is that the new strategy suggests the operation will only thrive at arms length from the rest of the business. And the changes to the structure will certainly make it simpler to sell.
A side question is whether Gallagher will hang on to his other hat. Boomtown has been a big success, growing advertising revenue for regional media while metro media shrank.
It will be for Gallagher’s stakeholders to decide whether he can continue to chair Boomtown, which waves the flag for regional media, while also scrapping for metro radio dollars in the day job. If they decide he can’t, that leaves a giant Gallagher-shaped gap at the top of Boomtown.
Google gobbles up a little more
This week was one where Google somewhat caught up on its AI rivals (at least for the first half of the week until OpenAI acqui-hired Jony Ive).
Google’s developer conference I/O saw a series of AI-related announcements, along with its usual bombardment of projects and incomprehensible sub-brands, many of which will no doubt change again in a few weeks time. AI Mode, the agentic AI-focused Project Mariner, Gemini personal context, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini Flash, Gemini Live, Project Astra, Imagen 4, Flows, Project Moohan, Android XR Glasses and more.
For the rest of the week my LinkedIn feed was dominated with depressingly good videos built by Google AI via text only prompts.
Admittedly, when I tried it for the first time on my paid Workspace account, Google informed me I had already used my full allowance. Each subsequent attempt at any prompt was met with a message saying “We’re still learning and can’t help with that. Try something else.” So I can’t report back at first hand.
Where I did find utility today was in Google’s AI-driven Overviews.
I noticed that when I wrote the above article on Nine Radio, and I was checking details, I didn’t even need to click on the relevant Mumbrella article to get the valuation price I was looking for. All the details were there on the Google AI Overview search page.
Which does raise a question that as a publisher, I wouldn’t mind gently asking Google: If you take all the information from my website’s page and I don’t get the traffic, who will pay the journalists to go on providing that kind of information in the future, you IP-stealing fucking leeches?
Outdoor as a 20% medium?
There was plenty going on in outdoor this week.
This week, Mumbrella talked to another media sales boss who has returned to the scene - Ooh Media’s Mark Fairhurst. His key concession, and one that Ooh Media has been making regularly: it needs to become easier for agencies to deal with, and as a business built through acquisitions has not moved fast enough to standardise its systems.
Meanwhile, QMS staged a show-of-confidence event, hosting a lunch for the trade press in a swanky room within Sydney Opera House.
The focus of the QMS event was to showcase big format, brand building activations, particularly those in 3D.
But the number that ended up stuck in my head came from CEO John O’Neill: a prediction that outdoor could get up to a 20% revenue share of the ad market. He told the room: “This is a wonderful medium that has moved from three percent when I started. We are mid-fifteens - can we get to 20 percent of the industry? We like to think so.”
A lot will need to go right for MOVE 2.0 for that to happen.
Magland media models
While it’s always good to see new media ventures, a potential print media launch covered by Mumbrella yesterday raised an eyebrow.
There’s a lot about the business model of Australian Life Magazine that looks unusual.
Apparently owned by a consortium of Australian sporting stars, celebrity chefs, comedians, and influencers, Australian Life Magazine says it will donate $1 from each cover sale to the “Australian Life Fund”.
The Kickstarter appeal is at $5k. It will be interesting to watch how they go.
More from Mumbrella…
Linkedin ‘vibe shift’ behind key trend in reputation management
Nine appoints Brian Gallagher to lead revamped radio sales division
Australian brands face a new era as Tiktok Shop prepares to launch
QMS extends Olympic deal, predicts OOH is heading to 20% share
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you’d like to hear a little more from me, in this week’s Mumbrellacast we discussed Google’s new AI announcements; Omnicom Media Group’s reshaping of its local Resolution Digital and Ooh Media’s system challenges.
And in last night’s episode of MediaLand on ABC Radio National, now available as a podcast, we discussed the changes at Nine Radio, coverage of the Coalition bust-up, media literacy and the gender pay gap at the ABC.
A big week awaits, with Mumbrella360 taking place in Sydney. If you haven’t yet bought a ticket, you can get a 20% discount as an Unmade reader. Use the coupon code 20UNMADE360. See you at Carriageworks from Tuesday.
We’ll be back with more next week..
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
Nothing leaves a better 'closing comment' that what you wrote Tim.
I reckon you should also write about how AI will/is so accurate, effective, rapid and inexpensive, while also expanding and opening the industry to all. Oh, and also how 'inexpensive' also means that an unknown number of people will lose their job and income and the impact on the economy.
Cheers.
JG
Tim, A 20% target seems an appropriate ambition considering the [very] significant investment in MOVE, and investment in DOOH formats in a world where legacy media will remain under pressure, as long as the 20% is also of a growing pie. Such ambition however cannot rely on more inventory but convincing brands the value/price of OOH has been undervalued to date ..... that's the paradigm change challenge for the sector to wrestle with. Selling differently. GT