BOTW: Was VOZ worth the wait?
BOTW: Was VOZ worth the wait?
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on a wintry dawn morning at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania. After nearly a week in Victoria, it’s good to be home.
Still, my stay in Melbourne was fruitful. I ordered a halal snack pack for the first time.
This morning’s writing soundtrack: A wobbly audience member live stream of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live in Dublin. Thanks for the piracy facilitation, Mr Zuckerberg.
Happy National Beverage Day. Pepsi Max til I die (early).
Today: What do the early Total TV numbers show? And AI execs get scared.
Unmade’s paying members have an unfair advantage over their peers. They get access to our paywalled archive and exclusive Tuesdata reports. They receive cheaper tickets to our events, including humAIn. And rumour has it that people who support independent journalism are generous lovers.
VOZ numbers don’t close the viewing gap
Tim Burrowes writes:
It was a long time coming, but we finally have overnight VOZ data. The first tranche dropped on Monday afternoon.
For the first time, the TV industry has an agreed metric for overnight viewing across all platforms - or Total TV, as the TV networks are calling it.
VOZ (which stands for Virtual Australia) stitches together the overnight metro and regional linear broadcast ratings from OzTam with panel data for those streaming via connected TVs and other devices.
For a while now, the networks have been arguing - to varying degrees - that this should be the true measure. Forget about the 10am publication of the linear overnights, and wait until 1pm for the whole picture. (Some still argue for waiting 28 days, but we’ll come on to that).
Seven has been loudest about making the switch, not least because it’s the only network that owns most of its regional operation via what used to be Prime. And Seven happens to do disproportionately well in the regions.
Just as important for the TV industry is the ability to argue that although old school audiences are falling, once you add in BVOD (broadcast video on demand), everything is much the same as it ever was. Think TV’s Kim Portrate and Steve Weaver made that argument when they appeared on the Unmade podcast back in March.
But does it hold up? I’ve been comparing the new numbers with ten years ago.
Let’s take data from the first night of VOZ - which was last Sunday April 30 - and compare it to the exact the same week a decade ago.
We’re at the end of Week 18 of the official OzTam calendar. Here’s the top shows for that week back in 2013:
As you can see, it was a big Sunday night that week, with Seven’s My Kitchen Rules averaging 4.3m viewers. That was made up of 3.1m metro viewers and another 1.2m in the regions.
The Voice (the reality show that turned around Nine) had a good week too, pulling in around 2.7m viewers on three different nights.
Hell, even Larry Emdur and Kylie Gillies’ Celebrity Splash diving contest, seen at the time as a ratings disaster, launched with 1.769m viewers.
So how do those numbers stack up, ten years on? Here’s how the first day of Total TV looked:
Even the most watched show of last Sunday, Seven News only rated 1.439m. Crushed by Celebrity Splash.
Notably, not a single show cracked 1m metro viewers.
Seven’s best reality effort of the night Farmer Wants a Wife only did 992,000 in total, even after an 8% uplift from BVOD viewing.
Nine’s family friendly Lego Masters totalled 840,000. And the grand finale of Ten’s I’m A Celebrity only averaged 866,000.
But perhaps the best direct comparison is Seven News. 2.2m back then, 1.4m (and most watched program) now. So a drop of about a third.
Looking later in the week, the best ratings program to date has been the Monday episode of Seven News, with 1.7m Total TV viewers. It was also the only show to (narrowly) crack 1m+ metro viewers.
One of the most stark things about the data finally being out there is that BVOD just isn’t providing the instant uplift I was expecting to see.
Putting the numbers on a chart shows just how little BVOD is adding overnight.
Green is metro and red is regional viewing. The tiny splash of yellow is BVOD.
Of course, this isn’t the whole picture. The argument that the TV industry still needs to make is that there’s a much bigger BVOD long tail. Those tiny yellow BVOD viewers will carry on accumulating, as viewers can always view another night, and for buzzy shows they will do.
Take the example of Alone Australia, on SBS, which has become the poster child for free to air catchup viewing in 2023.
That was a smart sponsorship buy from Kia.
The extra element which (obviously) isn’t included in the overnight Total TV data is time shifted viewing over the next 28 days.
In Alone’s case, that uplift has outstripped the original broadcast numbers. That won’t be the Total TV norm, although we’ll have to wait until the end of the 28 day period to be sure of that.
Clearly viewers have many more choices than they did a decade ago. Most notably that’s the subscription streaming services, but also the broadcasters’ own BVOD services.
Although streaming ads are monetised in a different way to linear broadcast TV, viewers who stay within that BVOD system still help deliver that cumulative audience.
And for advertisers, the opportunity is (potentially) to plan and buy audiences on a more granular level.
Overall though, the Total TV numbers disprove more than they prove.
The Week in AI: Bing opens up and the bot job cull begins
Cat McGinn, curator of humAIn | human creativity X AI writes:
Everywhere all at once
Microsoft opened up Bing Chat to all users. Anyone with an account can now use the AI powered search client. Microsoft will prioritise user behaviour such as booking restaurants, travel and shopping. The service offers personalised recommendations pulling in data from the individual’s search history.
Godbabies out with the bathwater?
Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather of AI’, said he had quit Google’s AI research lab DeepMind because he wanted to be free to speak out about the risks of AI. Hinton’s work on neural networks and ‘deep learning’ made a significant contribution to the development of AI (including building the first-ever chatbot in 1986).
Hinton warned AI could surpass human intelligence in as little as five to 20 years, and might not align with human objectives, leading to it manipulating humans and gaining power. He cited the competition between the US and China as a reason the AI arms race will be impossible to pause.
GhostwrAIters Assemble
One reason Hinton became uneasy about AI was Google’s large language model Palm “which could explain why a joke was funny.” In the US, members of the Writers Guild are out on strike over working conditions; one of the issues fuelling the strike is generative AI. The union seeks assurances that writers won’t be obliged to edit AI-generated scripts, all credited writers must be human, that “screenplays, treatments, outlines, and other “literary material,” can’t be written by ChatGPT or its ilk.
Regulators, mount up!
Both the UK and US governments announced plans to regulate and intervene in AI development. The UK Competition and Markets Authority launched a review of AI foundation models, while the White House advised tech firms to ensure product safety. Regulators faced pressure to intervene as AI language generators like ChatGPT raised concerns over misinformation and job market impacts. The UK's review aimed to address market evolution, consumer opportunities and risks, and develop guiding principles.
DeckchAIrs on the Titanic
A leaked internal document from Google, shared on forum platform Discord claimed neither Google or OpenAI are able to compete with open source AI development.
“We aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI. While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.’
The piece argues that open-source models are becoming faster, more customizable, more private, and increasingly powerful, often outperforming their commercial counterparts offered by the likes of Google and OpenAI’s.
Bot Or Not?
IBM boss Arvind Krishna said the company would freeze hiring with expectations that around 8,000 “non customer facing” roles would be replaced by AI.
Lacklustre end to a tumultuous week on the Unmade Index
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The week ended with a further dip in the Unmade Index, following a series of profit warnings and downgrades from ASX-listed media and marketing companies.
Ooh Media and Domain closed the week with slight recoveries, with their share price increasing by a respective 2.52% and 1.58% yesterday. It comes after both companies saw falls in their share price earlier in the week.
Agency holding company Enero, parent company of BMF and Hotwire, saw the biggest decline in its share price yesterday of 4.63%.
Seven West Media fell 2.7%, continuing its downwards trajectory. Audio company HT&E posted a 3.24% fall in share price, and Nine saw yet another dip, experiencing a 1.49% decline.
Campaign of the week: Origin story
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB’s AUNZ reporter Casey Martin writes:
This week’s campaign of the week is from Paper Moose from brewing company Young Henry’s. Tasked with answer the question, “what gives Young Henry’s alcoholic ginger beer its bite?”, Paper Moose created a spot that is worthy of any campfire.
The spot retells the urban legends that surround the ginger beer in B-movie style, drawing inspiration from some of the world’s greatest cult classics.
Read more about the campaign at LBB
Time to leave you to your weekend. I’ll be back with Abe Udy on Monday for Start the Week. Last Monday we were most of the way through recording when Grant Blackley quit.
If you could make your big announcements before 8am that would be helpful, m’kay?
If you didn’t notice during the week, we announced the first panel for humAIn - marketers from Optus and Afterpay, in discussion with the team at Big Red and BRX aboud how they’re already using AI. The earlybird discount ends in 11 days.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
