BOTW: PWC leaks; Comeuppance for a radio predator?; Listnr takes the lead; Why Binge is better placed than Netflix to make ads work
BOTW: PWC leaks; Comeuppance for a radio predator?; Listnr takes the lead; Why Binge is better placed than Netflix to make ads work
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on Friday in a pleasant hotel room overlooking Sydney’s Railway Square.
The room must have been refurbished recently; it has a high tech lighting system, triggered via movement sensor. Or indeed, inadvertently triggered if one rolls over in bed during the night, launching the strobing disco lighting setting. I’m not sure they’ve fully thought this one through.
Today: The myth that consultancies are better at keeping client secrets; Unmade’s first play review; Binge launches ads
Happy National Battery Day.
Why should you become a paying member of Unmade? 1. You get full access to our content, which goes behind a paywall after two months; 2. You’re supporting independent, analytical journalism; 3. You’re entitled to an hour’s consulting on your trade marketing strategy with Unmade’s founder Tim Burrowes; 4. You receive Tuesdata, only available to paying members 5. See the next paragraph.
RE:Made - Retail Media Unmade is now less than a fortnight away. It’s Australia’s first retail media event. The final program is now live - check it out on the RE:Made website. Unmade’s paying members get a 30% discount on tickets.
How the consultancy sector lost its chance to lecture adland on ethics
To the outsider, one of the first (of many) crazy things about the communications industry is the large number of agencies owned by every holding company.
The reason, the veterans would explain, is “conflict”.
Unlike other professional services, the orthodoxy is that CMOs cannot possibly give work to an agency which also works for a rival in the sector.
At the defensive end of the playing field comes the fear that agency staff might inadvertently (or otherwise) give something away about strategy or market intelligence. Or at the offensive end comes the theory that only one client in a sector can get access to the best innovation opportunities, so why risk missing out?
That made a couple of generations of agency founders rich, as there was always a competitive pool of potential buyers of any independent shop that got big enough.
It’s a theory that has become increasingly ludicrous though in the age of campuses, with every agency in the group contained in the same building - sorry, “campus” - and often on the same technological back end.
Nonetheless, the idea has persisted, with one exception.
The consultancies, apparently, were different.
Even as the big four accountants - PWC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG - looked to take a bigger slice of the consulting pie and launched communications practices, they successfully argued that although they might audit the accounts of one client company, that should not preclude them from bidding for strategic communications work from another.
The reassurance, back before the phrase was seen as problematic, was of the existence of Chinese walls, with ethical barriers keeping information isolated.
Consultancies are more grown up than those gossipy ad agencies, you see.
Mind you, there’s been so much staff travel back and forth over the last five years or so that adland culture has leaked into the communications practices, and vice versa.
In practice, the argument has succeeded though. We’ve seen hot agencies like The Monkeys, owned by Accenture, or Thinkerbell, minority owned by PWC, end up on pitch lists even if the potential client’s rivals use the services of the parent consultancy.
This weeks revelations made in Parliament have blown up the myth that consultancies are any better at keeping secrets than their adland rivals.
A senior PWC partner, who has since left, had been consulted by the Treasury about changes to tax-avoidance laws, and had signed a confidentiality agreement. Nonetheless, Parliament was told this week, 20 to 30 PWC partners and staff got involved in sharing this confidential policy information among colleagues and clients in order to get a business advantage.
The embarrassing revelations for PWC were well away from the organisation’s communications consultancy, but speak to the culture of the sector.
No doubt every other consultancy, or indeed every other department of PWC, will argue that this was a one off lapse and that marketers should go on thinking of consultancies as that little bit better at managing conflict.
That won’t be convincing. The pitch list playing field has become a little more level.
Could #MeToo come to the morning show?
On Wednesday night, I headed to The Ensemble Theatre in Kirribilli to see Melanie Tait’s play, A Broadcast Coup. It was terrific. It tells the story of the power imbalances between a successful male radio talk host and his relationships with his younger female subordinates.
Without any of the characters uttering the words “Me too”, it was a play about #MeToo.
In the final paragraph of this section, by the way, there’s a spoiler, so if you’re thinking of seeing the play, please take my recommendation to do so, and skip on.
Tait was once a junior producer on the John Laws show on 2UE and worked extensively on ABC radio, so she understands the radio environment well. The radio host is an amalgam of talkback characters. He’s called Michael King (mic king, gerrit?) He’s just come back from a mandatory anger management course, which he disparages. He writes best selling history books. But he talks about Ray Hadley and Peter FitzSimons in their third person, so, for legal reasons, he’s clearly not based on one of them. Or on Mike Carlton.
What’s also interesting is how quickly things in the media have changed since the play, being premiered on this run, was written. One of the characters talks about Lisa Wilkinson having a TV show. A key plotline has the junior producer helping her boss join Twitter and build a following as if TikTok isn’t the hot new thing.
My only disappointment with the play, by the way, was the audience. Looking around, it appeared to be older Kirribilli locals rather than the people from within the media industry who should really see it. I can think of certain male executives who would have been very uncomfortable indeed to be in the room.
And there is one flaw (final spoiler warning). The bad guy gets his comeuppance. In the Australian media industry, that’s completely unrealistic.
Change at the top of the Podcast Ranker
We passed a new milestone in the Australian Podcast Ranker this week.
For the first time, Listnr, owned by Southern Cross Austereo was top of the sales representation rankings based on monthly downloads.
Listnr - which also reps the local podcast output of Schwartz Media, SiriusXM, Audiochuck, NBCUniversal and Wondery - had already been in the lead on the monthly listeners demographic, while until now ARN’s iHeart network had led on monthly downloads.
I wonder whether the real secret of Listnr’s success is not the technology, but the fact that it’s a good old fashioned sales representation model.
Don’t believe the hype
If you’re interested in the business models of the apparently gravity-defying digital publications of the noughties, there was a great piece during the week in Simon Owen’s Media Newsletter (he writes better content than he devises newsletter titles). He reflects on the rise and fall of Vice.
As Owen puts it, “It seems clear that it was built on a mountain of bullshit.” Indeed.
Binge gets ads
Foxtel Group’s Binge revealed details of its advertising tier this week after announcing the move at the company’s Upfronts event back in October.
Ads will begin on the $10 Binge Basic tier from the end of next month.
Foxtel is better placed than Netflix to make the advertising offering work from the beginning.
Nine’s news mastheads reported on Monday that some of the early advertisers on Netflix have been refunded because the platform wasn’t generating enough advertising inventory to deliver what had been booked.
Foxtel, which unlike Netflix has been in the ad game all along, has played it slightly smarter, introducing the ads on its existing, basic tier.
While subscribers to the tier will now see ads - capped (initially only, I’m sure) at one per hour - they also get an upgrade to the service, which will move up to HD quality.
ABC backs away from Twitter
The ABC has made the right call in starting to back away from Twitter. This week it confirmed that Insiders, News Breakfast and its ABC Politics handle will exit the platform.
For Insiders in particular, whenever the show is on air, the Twitter conversation is swamped by abusive, partisan commentary. When it comes to understanding the role of journalists interviewing politicians, the media literacy battle has been lost. Any challenging question to a Labor politician is taken as bias against their side, not a journalist doing their job.
The Twitter commentary around several female ABC presenters often verges on the unhinged. In that circumstance, why stick around?
Campaign of the week: Be Your Own Champion
As regular readers will know, in each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight the most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB Australia reporter Delmar Terblanche writes:
"This week we're choosing Paper Moose's new campaign for the Duke of Edinburgh Award. The campaign is deceptively straightforward - a montage of the different activities teenagers can choose to do while partaking in the award scheme. But the vision behind it, together with its visual flair, help to elevate it.
Creative director Jeremy Wilcott explains that the main driver was Gen Z's preoccupation with 'making a difference'. The goal, he told us, was to show how every one of the big challenges and dreams young people set for themselves can find a first step in the Duke of Ed. To show that this was a programme for every kid, striving for anything."
Hear more from Wilcott at LBB Online.
Unmade Index slides
Almost all of the ASX listed media and marketing stocks on the Unmade Index slid on Friday, with the index falling 1.57% to 679.1.
The biggest fall came from real estate platform Domain which dropped by 3.46%, taking it below a $2bn market capitalisation.
Seven West Media has had a bad week since its results update on Tuesday, with yesterday’s 5.81% fall meaning the stock has fallen by 14% in the last five days.
Time to let you get on with your Saturday. I’ve a quick trip up the NSW coast before heading back to Tasmania on Sunday.
If you haven’t done so yet, don’t forget to check out our program for RE-Made - Retail Media Unmade. March 2 sounds like a long time away, but it’s actually only 12 days time.
Abe Udy and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade