Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on a pleasant Saturday morning in Evandale, Tasmania.
There was plenty going on this week. With the industry having psychologically checked out earlier than usual prior to Christmas, there’s also been an earlier than usual pre-Australia Day return. This week Nine’s executives learned their fates in a big structural shakeup. And in the US, we may be entering TikTok’s final hours which will inevitably have knock-on effects here in Australia.
With the year getting under way, this is the perfect time to upgrade to a paying membership of Unmade to lock in 12 months of events access. Your membership includes:
A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including HumAIn, REmade, Unlock, and Compass, all returning in 2025.
Member-only content and our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade.
Upgrade today
The TikTok block clock runs out
The United States season finale sure has a lot happening.
We woke up in Australia this morning to the news that the Supreme Court of the United States is not going to stand in the way of TikTok effectively being banned in the US from Monday, our time.
The response to the final, late petition from TikTok on a law which was many months in the making, is not a long ruling, just 17 pages. For as long as the China-centric ByteDance controls TikTok, it will be subject to the law - the snappily titled Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act - because of concerns that the platform could be used as an intelligence or even propaganda weapon.
The deciding argument comes down to one paragraph in the ruling: “Even if China has not yet leveraged its relationship with ByteDance Ltd, to access US TikTok users’ data, petitioners offer no basis for concluding that the Government’s determination that China might do so is not at least a “reasonable inference based on substantial evidence”.
The concern is not so much that TikTok is already being used by the Chinese intelligence services to spy on people or gather blackmail material, but that it could be. It is reasonable of the US government to conclude, the Supreme Court ruled, that Chinese authorities could compel ByteDance to assist them.
And the protection of free speech argument doesn’t win the day because the limitations are on the business, not on creators’ rights to say what they want.
The law compels tech providers to stop assisting TikTok in the US. Unless there’s a twist, Apple and Google will be obliged to remove it from their app stores. As a more immediate impact Oracle may be legally obliged to stop providing access to its servers.
The ruling will no doubt have implications in Australia too. However, they won’t be as immediate, or as obvious, as it might first seem because of the Trump factor.
The attention now shifts from SCOTUS to POTUS.
The biggest unknown is Donald Trump, who takes over from Biden on Tuesday, Australian time.
Trump started the ball rolling towards the end of his last term, issuing an executive order against TikTok back in August 2020. But the move fizzled, hampered by appeals and slowed down by lobbying.
Out of office, Trump has softened his stance; at least one of his backers is a TikTok investor.
It now likely comes down to what Trump decides is in his own best self interest. Although we may be about to see TikTok go dark in the US, it could be for a short time.
TikTok appears set to pull the plug on its American users, rather than see its audience fade as new users are unable to sign up, and it’s unable to push out updates through the app stores. That will have an immediately noticeable effect - TikTok says it has 170m daily users in the US.
However, once Trump is back in the West Wing, he could try to issue an executive order granting some kind of stay of execution. That’s if he wants to. For every TikTok supporter in his ear, there’ll be an Elon Musk, or now Mark Zuckerberg who’d be delighted for it to stay banned. They’re among the potential buyers if ByteDance decides to sell rather than close it in the US.
The Australian politics is fascinating.
If it was a straightforward ban with bipartisan support in the US, the pressure to follow suit in Australia would be enormous. If Americans need protection from Chinese spying and propaganda, why don’t Australians? It’s easy to see how Opposition leader Peter Dutton might try to wedge Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the issue.
But if Trump then decided to save TikTok, that would leave the Australian government facing an embarrassing U-turn if it had already moved against the platform.
Australia’s influencer economy has increasingly moved towards TikTok. These days there’s a trickledown of short form video; stuff goes viral on TikTok, then gets reposted to Meta’s Instagram and Facebook before eventually popping up on YouTube Shorts days or weeks later.
A ban will affect the local makers of that content. For most marketers and their agencies, the consequences would be less severe - a reallocation of budget and shift in strategy. I suspect the ad dollars will stay within the influencer sector rather than being reallocated to established media.
And imminent as the TikTok switchoff now seems, it’s hard to escape the sense that having avoided it so many times before, there might yet be one more late escape.
We’ll know soon.
Nine lives
Nine’s acting CEO Matt Stanton continued to roll out the strategic changes at Nine this week. In his four months as caretaker, Stanton has made more moves than his predecessor Mike Sneesby did in almost four years.
On Wednesday, Nine announced its management restructure. It came just a day after Peter Tonagh was announced as joining the Nine board.
PT on board
We’ll cover that first. Tonagh’s appointment will add some much needed heft to a board previously light on domain expertise.
It also provided an alternative explanation for Tonagh’s sudden exit as deputy chair of the ABC, slipped out on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Just as managing director David Anderson decided to quit early rather than deal with ABC chair Kim Williams, it looked like Tonagh had done the same. That was fuelled by Tonagh’s exit announcement being replete with warm sentiments for Anderson and his replacement Hugh Marks, but nothing about previous Foxtel colleague Williams. What wasn’t clear though was that Tonagh had somewhere else to go.
Tonagh is a proper media heavyweight, coming up through Foxtel as chief financial officer and then chief operating officer. He was briefly CEO of News Corp, although that looked like he lost one of those two-into-one battles Rupert Murdoch was notorious for inflicting upon his executives, when Tonagh was pitted against executive chairman Michael Miller. Five months later Tonagh returned to Foxtel as CEO when Richard Freudenstein left.
News Corp’s exit from Foxtel, announced just the day before Tonagh’s ABC resignation, cleared the way for him to make the move to Nine. Long gone from the News Corp empire, its unlikely he’d have been contractually barred from working for Nine, but his crossing the street would still likely have drawn fire.
It also seems likely that Tonagh is soon a future chair of Nine. Why give up a deputy chairmanship at the ABC unless you have a shot at something bigger than simply board director?
Meanwhile, at the executive level, Stanton made his move. As big shakeups do, it has created survivors and castaways.
The rise of Matt James
Perhaps the greatest survival story is that of sales boss Matt James who back in October was reportedly on the verge of being made redundant at Nine’s Melbourne MD. With the exit of sales boss Michael Stephenson to ARN Media, James is instead acting chief sales officer.
The staying power of Alex Parsons
One of the few of the Sneesby gang to come through the shakeup was, a little surprisingly, chief digital officer Alex Parsons. He appears to have fallen upwards, to lead a Marketplaces division focusing on Drive and Nine’s majority stake in Domain.
Parsons, who was Nine’s chief digital officer before its merger with Fairfax, was shown the door in a restructure by then CEO Hugh Marks in 2017. After the merger, Parsons came back to oversee the sale of the old Fairfax events division and then took on Drive and CarAdvice. It’s hard to find people knowledgeable of the automotive sector who see the Drive project, which included killing off the CarAdvice brand, as a success. Under Sneesby, whom he worked with at ninemsn, Parsons became chief digital officer.
One indicator whether Parsons - a perfectly nice man, by the way - is part of a long term plan, will be if he takes one of Nine’s three board places on Domain alongside Stanton and board member Mickie Rosen. Nine’s third Domain board seat was vacated by the exit of Sneesby lieutenant Rebecca Haagsma who departed for the AFL at the end of the year.
Perhaps, much like when Parsons babysat the Fairfax events division, it’s a holding move until Nine decides what to do with its Domain stake.
The end of the CMO experiment
The most high profile executive ousted in the reshuffle was chief marketing officer Liana Dubois. In truth she was a sales person cosplaying as a CMO after being given the role by Sneesby in 2022 following a career in advertising sales.
CMOs tend to operate as a club, so it wasn’t entirely a bad idea for Dubois to use her job title as a trojan horse to get closer to marketers. But in the day job, Nine’s brand strategy did not build as fast as that of Dubois’s personal profile. Dubois became more of a face of the company than the CEO.
Going forward, Nine’s marketing will be split across its divisions.
With Seven West Media making its own CMO Mel Hopkins redundant back in June, we’re back in old media habits of TV networks apparently thinking they don’t need brand expertise at the top table. We’ll see how that goes.
The return of Amanda Laing
The biggest move, which leaked ahead of time, is the return to the business of Amanda Laing, effectively as a number two to Stanton assuming he gets the top job permanently. During her time at Foxtel, Laing added streaming experience to the TV knowledge she gained in her previous stint at Nine. However, this new role will be the closest she will have been to day-to-day TV operations.
What next for radio?
Although Nine Radio will be part of Laing’s remit, nothing in the restructure dampens the sense that the unit should be for sale. The rumour is that the price tag is $25m based on an annual profit for Nine Radio of $8m.
Private equity or private individuals seems the most likely potential acquirers. One might assume that managing director Tom Malone might be part of it. Any deal would also likely need equity to lock in some of the key on-air talent in Sydney and Melbourne.
The end of Stan-d alone
The restructure also signals that Stan’s existence as a fiefdom independent of the main Nine culture is at an end. CEO Martin Kugeler is out, and the division will report in to Laing.
Launched by Sneesby as a joint venture between Nine and Fairfax, Stan received (and perhaps deserved) special status. At one point it probably added $1bn to the company’s valuation.
The more Stan is folded back into the main operation, the less it looks like a big bargaining chip for the future.
This week’s moves are a step on the path of Nine moving on from its newsroom culture scandal and from its Sneesby strategic paralysis. But there are still many more steps to take.
How the Foxtel sale and Stephenson exit unfolded:
The Foxtel sale, and ARN Media makes another big move with Stephenson's hire
Seven jumps on the index
After days of light trading across the Unmade Index, Seven West Media shares jumped late on Friday with a hefty trade from an as yet unknown buyer pushing the share price up by 10% for the day. SWM’s market cap landed on $253m.
Meanwhile, Nine finished the week with a downwards blip of 1.2%.
The Unmade Index closed up by 0.28% for day, landing on 444.3 points. The index is also slightly up since the start of the year, having opened on 431.9 points.
CotW: Zombieproof
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s AUNZ managing editor Brittney Rigby writes:
Innocean's new campaign for Kia imagines Aussie suburbia infested with zombies to launch the brand's EV range. It promotes the car's features - like Smart Park Assist, Kia Voice Command, and a cool box - in a novel way, positioning them as 'zombie-proof' to ensure the car owners' survival during the apocalypse.
It's notoriously difficult to innovate in the auto category, and the zombie category for that matter. Director Francois Rousselet - who's recently directed films for Canal+ and A$AP Rocky, plus the John Lewis Christmas spot - wanted to give the film a "summertime vibe, which felt really fresh for the zombie genre," Innocean's CDs told LBB.
Super watchable - every time I've watched, I've noticed something new - and interesting for the category. The first big car ad of 2025 is fun.
Time to leave you to your weekend.
A big week awaits me. I’ll be in Sydney from Monday morning. Friday afternoon sees our first episode of MediaLand on ABC Radio National at 5.30pm, and on podcast too. Please do join us!
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
All the best for the new radio adventure Tim 👌👏🏻