BOTW: Thinkboxing, Melbourne's radio battle, and sabotaging The Apprentice
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written in Evandale, Tasmania, on Friday after a trip into Sydney for the Future of TV Advertising conference.
Also today, the upheaval begins for the Melbourne radio market, and how a comedian hacked The Apprentice Australia.
Happy National Crabmeat Day.
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Perthbound
I’ll be taking a quick trip to Perth the week after next - from Monday March 18 to Wednesday March 20. I’d love to catch up with anyone in the industry who wants to do so while I’m in town. Please email me at tim@unmade.media
TV’s nervous breakdown
Talk about tough love.
The verdict from Omnicom Media Group’s Kristiaan Kroon in the last session of the day could not have been more pointed. The television industry has gone from the most cohesive sector to the most dysfunctional, he told the Future of TV Advertising conference audience.
In an odd way, it was a relief to hear him say it. It wasn’t just me thinking it. I’d been feeling the same thing all day. With tetchiness on stage and frowns in the corridors, it felt like an industry in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Having been promised Fight Club, it wasn’t so much an arena as a divorce court, and about as much fun. The Fullerton’s underground conference floor was not a particularly pleasant place to spend the day.
The most obvious symptom of TV’s breakup was last year’s moves by Foxtel Media to go its own way, resigning from industry body Think TV in June and announcing what will, to all intents and purposes, be an alternative media metric to OzTam, in October.
Wednesday morning saw a press release from Foxtel Media. YouTube, Samsung Ads, Disney Advertising and SBS have signed up for its streaming thinktank, the Video Futures Collective. Seven, Nine and Ten were not invited to join, although Foxtel says they’re welcome to sign up in the future.
Everyone is aware that the new measurement system presents a threat to the dominance and credibility of OzTAM, owned by Nine, Seven and Ten.
Nine’s Nick Young, in punchy mood, sniped from stage at the timing of Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain’s press release. It’s the third time in five months I’ve been at an event where the Nine representative - a different person each time - has been the most combative person on stage. They’re certainly not going down without a fight.
Frain used his own ten minutes on stage to showcase more detailed, and for the most part, uplifted audience numbers under his alternate Kantar system.
But the Foxtel fissure was not the real reason for the fear in the room. TV is in a bigger advertising slump than ever seen before. That’s scary in an economic slowdown, and existential when the change is likely structural.
Conference organiser Justin Lebbon kicked off the event by putting on screen a quote from Tess Alps, founder of the UK equivalent of Think TV - Thinkbox: “TV’s not dead; it’s having babies”.
That may be true, but much of the current angst is because the local broadcasters don’t have custody of most of those babies.
Those ad dollars are leaking out to the likes of Netflix, and soon Amazon’s Prime Video. Those players were in the room too, if not on the stage.
Meanwhile, OzTam’s new CEO Karen Halligan also had the UK organisation in mind. On stage she dismissed the Video Futures Collective as “a thinkbox”. I think she meant think tank.
The goodwill and head of steam built up by Think TV over the last seven years has evaporated. The brief period when the networks went from infighting to uniting against the common enemy of the overseas platforms is over. The room was full of competitors, not collaborators.
Two weeks ago, I was at an event focused on the audio industry. They compete just as hard, but it also feels like they are still united by the love of being in radio.
The same could be said of outdoor, with Kroon making the point that before the launch of measurement system MOVE, the out-of-home sector was similarly divided.
Danny Bass, CEO of Dentsu Media, pointed out on stage that the networks are going through the seven stages of grief. They seem stuck somewhere between anger and denial.
What a strange day it was.
K&J prepare to descend upon Melbourne from the heavens
This coming Thursday we’ll see the release of one of the the least anticipated set of metro radio ratings for some time, ahead of one of the most anticipated battles.
Survey 1, covering January 14 to February 24, will be overshadowed by the long awaited launch into the Melbourne market of The Kyle & Jackie O Show on Kiis FM. Simulcast from their studio in the new ARN Media headquarters in North Sydney, Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson will finally give the market the opportunity to find out whether a national FM breakfast show can succeed.
Egos and ad revenues are at stake.
If the stakes we not already high enough, the arrival on Nova Melbourne of Jase Hawkins and Lauren Phillips - ousted from Kiis to make way for Kyle & Jackie O - takes it up another notch.
They started their show, rejoined by their former news reader Clint Stanaway, on Friday.
If Friday seemed like an odd day to start a new show, it was likely to get ahead of the Kyle & Jackie O Show, which will begin this Tuesday.
And if Tuesday seems an odd day of the week to launch a show, it’s because of Monday’s public holiday across half the country.
I suspect that for Kiis Melborune’s stand-in host Byron Cooke, it can’t come soon enough. It can’t be good for the psyche to go day after day being forced to tell listeners, that, soon, somebody much better than you will be taking the chair you’re occupying.
Somewhat bizarrely, Kiis has been running a cringey “Bank of KJ” promotion in which hard up supplicants call in and, in return for sharing their sad stories, get cash. While they sob through their good fortune, they are then urged to thank Kyle & Jackie O who aren’t even part of the call. It promotes the duo to deity-status, with their high priest Cooke interpreting their will for their followers on earth.
Yuk.
Ross Noble on how not to get fired
My podcast recommendation of the week (well, any week) is the Richard Herring Leicester Square Podcast.
The current episode is a cracker for insider gossip on the making of Nine’s Celebrity Apprentice.
Guest Ross Noble - who reluctantly took the Apprentice gig while unable to work during Covid - reveals his increasingly desperate attempts to get himself fired and to subtly sabotage the production so he could go home. The harder the comedian tried, and the more ridiculous his behaviour, the more the producers fought to keep him.
The anecdotes about what got cut are possibly better than what went to air.
COTW: Metalwork
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:
Creative agency Bullfrog has taken a new approach to the nutraceutical sector of the industry, creating a spot showcasing a woman who will not let her joint pain stop her from pursuing her passion for being a blacksmith.
Breaking away from the traditional format of happy smiles, long walks on the beach, and a voice-over telling the audience all the benefits of the product has provided Epijoint with a brand identity that stands out from the rest.
Unmade Index flat as The Cat buys into SCA
The Unmade Index stood still on Friday, rising just 0.07% to finish the week at 571.8n points.
The most intriguing development of the day emerged after the market closed.
19 Cashews, which is a vehicle controlled by ACM proprietors Antony Catalano and Alex Waislitz, revealed that it had taken a 6% stake in Southern Cross Austereo.
Earlier this year, SCA swiftly rebuffed a takeover offer intended by Catalano as an alternative to the one on the table from ARN Media.
In case you missed it…
On Monday we previewed a week that was to be dominated by Meta’s decision to pull back from the news ecosystem:
On Tuesday, in our members-only post, we looked into the silver economy:
On Wednesday, in the same week the ASX hit an all time high, the Unmade Index hit an all time low; we asked if the industry had finally hit bottom
On Thursday we explored the insider story behind media and podcast The Squiz:\
On Friday we focused on retail media, and the Temu phenomenon:
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
Abe Udy, Cat McGinn and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media