BOTW: Seven's new era; Meta turns on its AI; Radio leads change hands; and here come Amazon and Uber
Welcome to Best of the Week, written at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania, after an early morning start for a spot of aurora hunting.
Today: No coke or coffee for Seven’s new boss; A big hire as Amazon’s media play spins up locally; an abrupt exit in radio; SCA takeover bid hits its six month anniversary; and Meta switches on AI.
Happy Mariachi Day.
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Back on tour
I’m heading for Queensland the week after next, and I’d love to catch up with anyone in the industry who’s around.
I’ll be in Brisbane all day on Tuesday April 30. And I’ll be up in Port Douglas to speak at the Local & Independent News Association Summit on Wednesday and Thursday May 1 and 2.
If you’d like to grab a coffee (or a weak chai, Jeff), please email me at tim@unmade.media
Advertising’s next wave is here
The tectonic plates of media are beginning to move so fast that they’re entirely the wrong analogy. But I’ve started the paragraph now, so there’s no going back.
Yesterday, Colin Lewis wrote for us about how quickly Uber Advertising is growing. Already Uber is on the way to becoming a billion dollar advertising business, and that includes swift growth in Australia.
One of the new buzz phrases of retail media is endemic versus non-endemic advertising - ads that make sense in the placement, but also those that are there because of who the customer is, not the context.
It came up twice in yesterday’s retail media focused edition of Unmade. As well as Colin’s piece on Uber, Adam Freeedman, who is building out Booktopia’s own, impressive retail media offering, touched upon the same topic. What both retail media networks have in common is incredibly specific data on what’s relevant about the customers viewing ads on their platforms.
And then comes the biggest beast in retail media - Amazon.
Amazon has taken the significant step of appointing Essence Mediacom’s chief investment officer Nick Thomas as national head of sales. Although it had already emerged that he was moving to Amazon, Thomas announced his role on Wednesday.
It won’t take long before Amazon is a bigger media player in Australia than any of the local media companies. Along with its retail media dominance, the advertising tier of Amazon’s Prime Video will be huge because it will be the default tier for the company’s streaming service.
The landscape will look quite different in 12 months time.
Audio exits and new leads
Six months in, is any momentum left in the SCA takeover?
It was all kicking off in audioland this week, except for the thing we’re actually waiting for.
On Thursday, we hit the six month mark since a consortium led by ARN Media proposed the takeover of Southern Cross Austereo.
And it’s now been a month since ARN upped its bid and the SCA board said it was ready to work with the consortium to move towards a binding offer. Since then, SCA chair Rob Murray stepped down early to be replaced by Heith Mackay-Cruise, and Antony Catalano’s vehicle 19 Cashews upped its stake in the company to 6%, suggesting The Cat hasn’t given up on getting a slice of the action. But there’s been no substantial announcement.
There are ten weeks left of the Australian financial year. It will give the accountants far fewer headaches to complete a deal by then, but that deadline is starting to look tight.
Deals with momentum get done. This deal seems to be losing momentum.
CRA’s unhappy departure
Meanwhile, there was a strange turn of events at industry body Commercial Radio + Audio. You always know trouble is afoot when an email arrives with the anodyne subject line “Statement”.
The news was that CEO Ford Ennals has left, just two years after relocating from the UK for the role. The fact that he departed immediately is a further sign that this was not an amicable parting.
ABC pumping out the pods
Meanwhile, the biorhythms of the audio industry aligned, with the March Australian Podcast Ranker and second metro radio ratings survey of the year both landing this week.
The Podcast Ranker was more stable in March, with everybody npw mrunning broadly the same race. The January and February numbers are always messier because the radio-based podcasts (and Hamish & Andy) mostly vanish for the summer.
This time round, Hamish & Andy returned to top slot after a full month of new content, with 874,000 monthly listeners.
And something which has been true since the ABC joined the ranker late last year, but hasn’t really been commented upon: While both ARN’s iHeart and SCA’s Listnr deliver more monthly listeners, the ABC has a far larger number of monthly downloads, more than 24m. That’s impressive.
Melbourne on hold
In the radio ratings, Melbourne was again the most interesting market as anticipation around The Kyle & Jackie O Show grows. The Melbourne launch for the show is nine days from now.
The Kiis strategy of running a personality-free breakfast show until Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson arrive, again delivered a low share of 6.4% (annoyingly for owner ARN Media, that was actually a bounce of 0.5 ratings points on the previous book).
Meanwhile Nova’s move to give Kiis refugees Jason Hawkins and Lauren Phillips a home appears to be working out. Their share grew from 6.7% to 8.3%. However, that picture is not yet fully clear; they only came on air on March 8 and the survey period covered February 4 to March 30.
The battle for Melbourne’s top FM show is still in flux (3AW is still far ahead, overall). Fox FM’s Fifi, Fev & Nick show (up from 10.8% to 11.2%) took back the lead from Gold’s Christian O’Connell (down from 11.9% to 9.9%).
There was far less movement in Sydney, although a lead changed hands there too.
The Kyle & Jackie O Show on Kiis once again overtook 2GB’s Ben Fordham. K+J took a share of 16.1% to Fordham’s 14.9%. The Kyle & Jackie O Show’s 6am to 9am average audience was 124,000 to 2GB’s 115,000.
It’s the tenth time the lead has changed between the two shows since Fordham took over from Alan Jones in 2020.
Meanwhile, Nine’s 2GB is still struggling to nail down its drivetime audience since the promotion of Ben Fordham to breakfast in 2020.
Chris O’Keefe just delivered his worst number, an average audience of 32,000 in the 4-7pm slot. That’s worse than all but one of the results driven by Jim Wilson who was ditched at the end of last year.
The average share of 6.6% is 2GB’s worst performer across the day for a station doing a Monday to Friday share of 12%. The Olympics uplift can’t come soon enough.
Born to be mild
Seven’s new boss Jeff Howard stepped up yesterday.
His first memo to staff, as reported by News Corp, was memorable. And he really likes full stops.
“First, some disclosures. As a family man first and foremost. I’ve never smoked. I don’t use drugs. Never have, never will. Call me boring but I don’t even drink coffee. Personally. I like to stay fit and try to run every day.
“Occasional glass of red or a beer hits the spot. Importantly, that’s just me. People can do what they want in their own time.
“I wont judge. But when it impacts others - or the workplace - that’s a different story.”
The tone Howard needs to strike is a tricky one.
With only four years inside the company, he’s better placed to create culture change than a long time insider would be. But it doesn’t look classy to be too critical of the previous management which is why he’s chosen his words carefully.
The fairest way to judge him is by what happens next.
Meta’s monster AI move
This week Meta took a big step in catching up on the AI race. Powered by the company’s large language model Llama 3, Meta AI will pretty much be available wherever Meta is - so, embedded within Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp et al.
That may feel like a gimmick, at first - last year, I played with Snapchat’s inbuilt AI for a couple of weeks then forgot it was there. But I suspect the ubiquity (and the fact that it’s free) will see Meta AI become as well used as ChatGPT.
I’m yet to spend much time with it, but at first glance Meta AI isn’t quite as smart at understanding what a user wants.
I tried the prompt: “Draw a realistic picture of the Loch Ness Monster, as if it was taken with a camera from the 1970s”. ChatGPT’s image generator DALL-E understood the assignment…
Meta AI… not so much
Unmade Index still can’t find a floor
The Unmade Index had another really bad day on Friday, losing a further 1.81% to land at 524.1 points. The fall was nearly twice that of the wider ASX All Ords.
Our tracker of locally listed media and marketing companies has declined every day since Tuesday of last week - nine straight sessions. It means that in the space of less than a fortnight, Australia’s media companies have lost 9.5% of their value.
Yesterday’s biggest loser was Seven West Media, down by 7.14% on Jeff Howard’s first day in charge. Meanwhile, Nine lost 2.6%.
CotW: Only a2 will do
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
Milk brand a2 has launched a new platform, 'Only a2 Will Do', reminding Aussies that the beloved brand is still looking after the 'tough tummies' and always will be. The spot, from BMF, is unlike any other milk spot on the market, setting it apart from the rest
In case you missed it:
On Monday we assessed media’s performance after the Bondi Junction attack:
On Tuesday it was time to offer a verdict on Seven’s poor pattern of behaviour:
On Wednesday we tried to work out why Innocean boss Jasmin Bedir is urging Mediaweek readers to skip our HumAIn conference:
On Thursday, we talked to the architect of Australia’s newest news masthead The Nightly:
And on Friday, we focused on retail media networks, telling the stories behind the rise of Uber Advertising and Booktopia
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
Abe Udy and I will be back with an audio-led edition of Start the Week on Monday.
And if you haven’t heard enough enough from me already this week I joined the TV Blackbox podcast to discuss Seven’s woes, and Craig Bruce’s Melbourne Radio Wars podcast to discuss this week’s ratings and the SCA takeover.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media