BOTW: The results week where it all went wrong (and that doesn't mean the Matildas)
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BOTW: The results week where it all went wrong (and that doesn't mean the Matildas)
Welcome to Unmade, edited on Friday on a rainy day at Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today: Results season spooks the media market; a big week in audioland; and we start revealing the first speakers for our next REmade retail media conference.
Unmade’s paying members support our analytical journalism. In return you get access to our full archive which goes behind the paywall after two months.
You also get discounts on tickets to our events, including our forthcoming retail media conference, REmade.
David Jones turns up the volume at REmade
REmade curator Cat McGinn writes:
Australia’s most vaunted department store David Jones will share the story of the creation of its retail media division Amplify at Unmade’s retail media conference REmade in October.
The 185-year-old brand announced its move into retail media earlier this month. The valuation and creation of the retail media offering has been supported by owned media consultancy Sonder.
The REmade session, Amplifying the retail media opportunity, will feature David Jones’ Head of Category Marketing & Retail Media Melissa Polglase and buying manager Liz Ormando, along with Angus Frazer, founding partner at Sonder. They will discuss the journey they took to value, build and operationalise a retail media business from scratch. They will address the opportunities they uncovered, the challenges they faced and the solutions they found that worked best.
We can also announce a return to REmade for global retail media expert and evangelist Colin Lewis. Lewis will present a forensic examination of marketplaces in the retail media sector.
The session, How marketplaces are changing the retail media game through flywheel and network effects, will draw on Lewis’ work with global retail media networks and a forthcoming best practice guide on Amazon Advertising.
The session will offer insights and practical use cases about how Australian brands and retailers can tap into this phenomenon and how retail media has become the flywheel that powers the success of marketplaces.
There’s an earlybird discount available for REmade tickets which expires in 11 days’ time. Discounted rates for teams are also available. REmade takes place in Sydney on October 11. Go to REmade to find out more.
Choosing sides in results season
Tim Burrowes writes:
It’s been a really odd week.
For starters, my split loyalties of being British-born and now an Australian citizen resolved themselves at the worst possible moment.
I returned to Tasmania after a hectic fortnight in Sydney which had culminated in screaming at the big screen as the Matildas put out France, before going into Stadium Australia to watch England defeat Colombia.
It took a few days to realise that while I felt chills at watching Australia on the screen, I felt hardly anything when I watched the Lionesses in person immediately afterwards. Rather than the joy experienced at the end of the shootout a couple of hours earlier, the only emotion I felt was satisfaction at shutting up the incredibly annoying space-invading Colombian guy sitting next to me.
But it took until full time on Wednesday night to realise: The Matildas are my team, not the Lionesses. When we lost, England being in the final didn’t even feel like a consolation prize.
National identity is confusing. I still cheer England in the Ashes. And I’d have no such confused loyalties about the English men’s football team; I’ve already invested decades of disappointment in that dysfunctional relationship. My theory is that because I didn’t grow up with any exposure to women’s football, the Matildas were the first to imprint on me when it finally went mainstream.
And that, I think is the key achievement of the Matildas. We had our shared cultural moment, and for most of the 11m+ Australians who watched the game or others in the tournament, they imprinted for the first time. That will stick.
I say an odd week. I brought back some sort of NSW bug with me. My voice went completely. You don’t realise just how much work involves talking to people, until you can’t. That automated “I can’t talk right now” reply on my phone got a major workout.
Speaking of bad results…
Luckily, being results season, there wasn’t much talking needed. It was a week of watching studio-based video streams (Seven West Media); webinars (Enero) and substandard 90’s-style results dial-ins (Southern Cross Austereo).
I covered SWM’s market-spooking results earlier in the week.
Seven sets course for an unremarkable decade
Seven’s stock has lost nearly 15%, or the best part of $100m, in market capitalisation since then, not because there were any surprises, but because the market found nothing new to believe in. That’s now becoming a theme across the sector.
SCA disappoints the market too
On Thursday came an update from Southern Cross Austereo, the first for new CEO John Kelly. The market reacted similarly, with SCA shares down 13% for the week.
Again, there were no major surprises, although the long term chart still makes for a depressing read.
Revenue (the green bar) fell to $506m and EBITDA profits (the red line) to $77m. A decade ago, profits were triple that, at $211m
There were a number of minor disappointments.
SCA’s streaming service Listnr is still loss making, and won’t break even until the final quarter of this financial year, investors were told. There had previously been hints it would get there sooner.
The company slashed the size of the annual dividend to shareholders which likely means a further selldown after the dividend is distributed in October.
SCA’s regional TV arm, mainly aligned to Paramount’s Network Ten, saw profits fall from $30m to $19m.
There was a hint that SCA is planning to take another step to extricate itself from the TV business. It flagged the “duplicated national sales process” of buying metro and regional ads on Ten, versus the unified operations of Seven, which acquired Prime, and Nine which now employs WIN’s sales staff directly.
You don’t flag a problem like that in an investor preso unless you plan to offer a solution. My prediction is that most SCA TV sales staff will soon find themselves working for Paramount directly. That’s not, however, as simple as it sounds. SCA also reps Seven in Tasmania, Darwin, the Spencer Gulf, Broken Hill and few other remote parts of Australia.
One thing for Kelly to sort out before his next market update is changing the providers of his investor call.
You had to dial in; you couldn’t even come in via the web. Even with my phone held to my ear at maximum volume it wasn’t all audible. I assumed it was just my line, until analysts on the call had to ask Kelly to repeat himself.
For a company trying to position itself as a tech-led audio company, that’s badly off brand.
Enero uncovers another Photon legacy to tidy up
Enero updated the market yesterday.
Although it’s a vastly different organisation from the house of cards that was its previous incarnation Photon Group, every now and then Enero still gets stung by the legacy.
That was the case this time.
An otherwise decent set of numbers (revenue was up 25% to $242m; profits up 19% to $79m; debt down to $8.7m) initially bucked the week’s trend and took the share price up slightly in the first few minutes of trading.
There was even a nice piece of good news for Enero’s BMF, revealed by CEO Brent Scrimshaw on the investor call. BMF has won energy company Alinta as a client. I think the creative account was held by Bastion before.
Bu then analysts began to tug at a thread. There have been dramas at Enero’s digital company OBMedia.
Photon bought a 51% stake in OBMedia back in 2006, when it was racing to become a global holding company player; about a year before that fell apart. It was the company’s first US acquisition.
Not that the ugly word was used in yesterday’s investor preso, but OBMedia operates in the arbitrage space.
Arbitrage is often grubby. Effectively publishers are paying people like OBMedia to send them audience so they can then serve ads at a higher rate than they paid for the traffic; and advertisers probably don’t know what they’re getting.
It feels like the investor update tells only a sanitised version of the story of OBMedia abruptly shutting down half its traffic earlier in the year.
There’s a lot to be read between the lines. But the words arbitrage and ad fraud often go together. And the update did not offer any better explanation for why revenue suddenly fall from an annualised US$60m to $36m.
Later in the update, Scrimshaw told the call that Enero is “commencing a strategic review of Enero’s 51% investment in OBMedia”.
Just about every analyst on the call had questions about that. They (probably correctly) took it to mean that Enero is trying to sell its stake in OBMedia although Scrimshaw wouldn’t confirm that.
It all sounds a bit ugly. I reckon that’s why Enero’s shares sank as the day went on.
Elsewhere in audioland…
Triple M rocks Newcastle
A couple of new scores appeared on the board in the audio world this week.
The second radio survey of the year dropped for Newcastle.
The dominance of SCA’s Triple M is extraordinary. The station’s Monday to Sunday share rose to 22.4%.
Almost as extraordinary is the invisibility of ABC Radio National, which has a share of 0.9%.
Why Chatfield chose podcasts
Bachelor contestant-turned-presenter Abbie Chatfield called a halt to her radio career this week, walking away from her daily Hot Nights show which went out across the Hit Network.
The timing, outside the usual contract cycle, suggests it was indeed her decision. Her audience share, which underperform other timeslots on the network, suggests the network may not have worked too hard to change her mind.
Thus far, Chatfield has managed her career smartly, using The Bachelor as a springboard to bigger broadcasting and podcasting opportunities. That includes her It’s A Lot podcast. With a reach of 220,000 listeners in the July Podcast Ranker which came out this week, it’s far greater than her radio reach.
Incidentally, there was no movement at the top of the ranker. The Hamish & Andy podcast, repped by Listnr, held off the Casefile True Crime, aligned to ARN, for top slot. And Listnr held off ARN for top sales representation.
I say this a lot, but maybe we’ll finally see the ABC enter the Podcast Ranker next month.
Oh yes, they can
I salute the IAB and Un Ltd for some of the worst Photoshop work I’ve ever seen, in service of inserting their CEOs Gai Le Roy and Chris Freel into an Aladdin pic.
The project deserves more attention though - an advertising industry pantomime. “Addy Lala and the MOOD Tea Thieves” will be held at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on December 5.
MOOD Tea is the product launched by Un Ltd as a means of funding youth mental health programs.
I’ve a hunch that the panto will become a big deal in the annual industry calendar. And in the meantime, those who want to get involved are being asked to make themselves known.
And speaking of MOOD Tea…
Campaign of the Week: The good guys of MOOD Tea
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s AUNZ reporter Casey Martin writes:
In a new spot by Dentsu Creative for MOOD's 'Jolly Good' English Breakfast range, the audience is reminded that all profits go towards youth mental health programs with wonderfully crafted humour that gets the point across in a succinct manner, with the 'hero' reminding the audiences of his intentions: "I don't drink it because I'm a good guy, I drink it because it's a good tea."
A disastrous week on the Unmade Index draws to a close
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
After a tumultuous week, the Unmade Index dropped a further 1.8% on Friday to an even lower 644.5 points. The Index measures how ASX-listed media and marketing stocks are performing on a daily basis.
The biggest laggard of the day was Domain - it fell 3.99%, a drop of 15 cents in share price. Seven West Media - which has been having a rough week on the market -followed suit, dropping 2.82%.
Ooh Media, Nine and Enero also performed badly, falling 1.79%, 1.47% and 1.49% respectively.
The only two stocks to rise in share price were ARN Media, rising 1.49% and IVE Group, which saw a 0.86% lift.
The index slid every day this week after finally breaking the 700-point ceiling for just one day at the end of last week.
Next week sees Ooh Media reporting its results on Monday, while Nine and ARN Media will make their confessions on Thursday.
Time for me to leave you to your weekend.
I’ll be watching tonight’s battle for the wooden spoon, before trying to rekindle some Englishness before Sunday night’s final.
And we’ll be back with Abe Udy for Start the Week on Monday.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
