BotW: Our verdict on the Unmade Index's CEO of 2024, in a dud year
Welcome to the opening edition of Unmade of 2025.
We return to a normal publishing cycle after Australia Day. We’ll be publishing sporadically until then. Today, we kick off with our first Best of the Week looking back at the (many) losers and (not very many) winners on the Unmade Index in 2024.
On the basis of delivering positive shareholder returns, there are only a couple of contenders for Unmade’s CEO of the year: Vinyl Group’s Josh Simons and Pureprofile’s Martin Filz. We reveal our selection below the paywall.
And we also examine the contenders for dunce’s cap, with the biggest destruction in shareholder value in 2024. It’s a four-way fight between the managements of Nine, Seven, Southern Cross Austereo and The Market Ltd. Again, you’ll find our choice below the paywall.
This is the perfect time to upgrade to an Unmade membership, and enjoy a full year of event benefits. Your annual membership includes:
A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including HumAIn, REmade, Unlock, and Compass, all returning in 2025.
Member-only content and our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade.
2024 was another rotten year to own (almost any) Australian media stocks
We’ve now hit the three year mark in the Unmade Index, our tracker of the performance of all the locally listed media and marketing stocks.
And while 2024 may not have sucked for investors quite as badly as the 2022 mid-year plunge, it still marked a trip further into negative territory as the advertising market remained stubbornly in recession.
We started the Unmade Index on a nominal 1000 points. After finally falling below half that value in May this year, the index continued to fall. It hit its all-time low of 423.6 points in November this year, and closed 2024 near that number, on 431.9 points.
That amounted to a loss across the year of 31.3% of the total market capitalisation of the Unmade Index. It means that, ignoring dividends, an investor in local media and marketing stocks lost nearly a third of their money. The index as a whole lost $2.4bn of its value in 2024.
The decline was steady throughout 2024.
In previous years there was a greater mix of bright spots. This time, almost every stock on the Unmade Index fell.
In absolute dollar terms, the dunce’s cap goes to