BOTW: The end of audits; Foxtel's shifting sands; and a wild day on the Unmade Index
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on a crisp morning in Evandale, Tasmania, after a frustrating evening of aurora hunting stymied by a bright moon.
Today: The end of the audit bureau; succession manoeuvres at Foxtel; and big movements on the Unmade Index for Pureprofile and Vinyl.
Happy National Day of Puppetry.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:
Member-only pricing for our HumAIn (May 28) and REmade (October 1) conferences;
A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);
Member-only content and our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade
After a long illness, print audits finally die
We reached another one of those signs-of-the-times moments yesterday.
The Audited Media Association of Australia announced that it will no longer audit any of Australia’s media. A little like that time KACL pivoted overnight from talk radio to all-Latino music on Frasier, the AMAA will instead set standards for the influencer industry through its new arm AiMCO, the Australian Influencer Marketing Council.
Good on them if it saves the jobs of the team at the audit bureau.
The death of print audits has been a long time coming.
The AMAA has been bleeding out since the end of 2016 when News Corp, Bauer Media and Pacific Magazines absolutely did not collude to resign from the audit bureau within a few days of each other.
It brought to an end the best part of a decade of negative headlines about declining magazine and newspaper circulations.
Instead the industry leaned into the good news metric of readership as its preferred way of talking about audience. If anybody so much as glances in the direction of a newspaper on a supermarket shelf, or walks past their computer, they’ll be counted as a reader. Well, almost.
This announcement was buried during the unofficial Anzac Day long weekend, much like this year’s Australia Day kneecapping of the OzTam ratings, when the free to air TV networks decided they’d no longer be releasing average metro numbers.
This one though was much more predictable. Most of what was left of the audited titles were small and specialist.
There seems to be an unending trend towards less transparency and accountability in media. Marketers have become willing to tolerate it.
The rise of Facebook as the first major walled garden was where the landscape changed for media transparency. The company insisted on marking its own homework, and yet marketers continued to advertise even when stories emerged about dubious metrics.
In that environment, it seems almost unfair to hold traditional media to a higher standard. These days, nobody is.
Netflix goes grey
And the line keeps moving. This month, Netflix announced that it will no longer be sharing its most interesting quarterly metric - the number of paying subscribers.
Burned by its share price crash when it had a single quarter of stall at the start of 2022, Netflix is going to make sure that never happens again by stopping sharing its numbers while it’s on the up.
As soon as it disadvantages the others to remain transparent, I’m sure they’ll follow Netflix and go dark too.
Shifting sands at Foxtel
Locally, if Foxtel is still sharing its detailed subscriber numbers in 12 months time, I’ll eat my hat. Why would it, when nobody else is?
We’ll get a better sense when News Corp releases its quarterly numbers in a fortnight’s time, but the signs are that Foxtel’s streaming growth is peaking.
A launch date of March 2024 seems to be firming up for Max, owned by Warner Bros Discovery, to enter the Australian market. When that moment comes, Binge will lose its excellent HBO content.
On Tuesday, Binge MD Amanda Laing, perhaps the most widely respected of the TV industry’s low profile execs, announced she will leave Foxtel. It wasn’t a shock. She missed out in the succession race to Julian Ogrin who seems poised to take over from CEO Patrick Delany when his seat becomes vacant.
Meanwhile, the AFR talked to Delany this week in a comprehensive analysis of Foxtel’s prospects during what it headlined the “streaming apocalypse”.
On another page in the same edition, the newspaper also revealed that Delany has been speaking to the recruiters looking for a new CEO for Tabcorp. Last month The Australian reported he was also rumoured to be a candidate for CEO of the AFL.
Changes are afoot both side of the Pacific. As the AFR observed: “Sources close to these platforms say News Corp has periodically discussed partnerships between Binge with Stan’s owner, Nine Entertainment. Nine chief executive Mike Sneesby has met with Paramount+ executives.”
And in the US, the battle for Paramount is heating up, while Warner Bros Discovery might yet be in deal mode too.
A lot is about to happen everywhere, all at once.
Ups and downs on the Unmade Index
The Unmade Index saw a wild day at the shallow end of the pool with big swings for Pureprofile, Vinyl Group and Motio.
Vinyl Group, chaired by Linda Jenkinson, jumped 35%.
Pureprofile, also chaired by Linda Jenkinson, lost 24%.
And Motio lost 35%.
The big jump for Vinyl - which yesterday overtook both Sports Entertainment Group and Hot Copper’s owner The Market Ltd for market capitalisation - came thanks to the support of billionaire Richard White. White had loaned Vinyl Group $7m when it bought Brag Media, and yesterday announced that he had chosen to take his repayment in shares, meaning he now owns 34% of the company.
Vinyl’s share price is now up 86% since the start of the calendar year.
Meanwhile research house Pureprofile’s share price slumped as the market reacted to its announcement that its US-based executive chair Jenkinson is stepping down after just a year on the board - an unusually short time for a company director.
Jenkinson had replaced executive chair Andrew Edwards, with the hope that her local connections would drive the business in the US. However, in its last set of numbers, revenue growth for Pureprofile was stronger in India, South East Asia and the EU.
Fellow Pureprofile director Albert Hitchcock, based in the UK, will be stepping down after three years.
Despite the announcements spooking the market, Pureprofile did not change its previous guidance given in its end-of-half update in February, that it expects to deliver a 7-9% profit margin on annual revenue of $46-51m.
Meanwhile, Nine and its real estate platform Domain had the worst of it at the big end of town, losing 2.3% and 2.65% respectively.
Seven West Media rose another 4.65%.
Overall, the index was down 1.08% to 529.6 points. In the last three weeks, the index has spent two days in positive territory.
How Unmade covered the purchase of The Brag in February:
COTW: Peanut jams with butter
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:
SICKDOGWOLFMAN decided to have some unadulterated fun with Maxibon's new flavour. The costuming and skatepark premise is exactly the type of branding that fans of Maxibon know and love. It is out of the park enough to grab people's attention.
In case you missed it:
It was a shorter working week because of Anzac Day public holiday.
On Monday, we began the week by looking at the sudden arrival of new legislation around TikTok’s ownership in the US
On Tuesday, we investigated the financial accounts of industry foundation UnLtd:
On Wednesday, we examined the 48 hour phenomenon of comedian Arj Barker’s problem with a crying baby, and what turned it into an irresistible next story:
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.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media