BotW: What's Snext for Nine? TV's evolutionary moment
BotW: What's Snext for Nine? TV's evolutionary moment
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Saturday morning in Evandale, Tasmania.
Today: After Mike Sneesby’s career obituary, who should get the biggest job in media?; And with the VOZ marketplace-that-isn’t weeks away from going live, when will the TV industry turn the page on the story of linear decline?
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After Sneesby
It was a memorable few days. I was in Sydney in the middle of the week for the IAB’s MeasureUp conference (more on that further down).
In the same way I still recall what I was doing in 2011 when John Hartigan left News Ltd (remonstrating with an electrician who had just turned off the power in Mumbrella’s newsroom without warning), or in January when the announcement arrived that Kim Williams was the new ABC chair (on a train to a funeral, rewriting the day’s newsletter with laptop balanced on knees), I’ll remember the moment the phone belonging to the person I was having coffee with started blowing up with news of Snexit (credit to Capital Brief for that headline, by the way).
After Mike Sneesby’s departure, now we turn to the question of who’s the right choice to lead Australia’s biggest media company.
The best person for the role is not automatically the one with the highest profile. When Hugh Marks was announced as David Gyngell’s successor at Nine in November 2015, the lawyer and production executive wasn’t well known to the advertising market. But he proved to be the right person to lead Nine’s transition from rescued TV network to multimedia giant, mainly thanks to the takeover of Fairfax Media. He had both domain expertise and a strategic brain.
Sneesby, who had launched Stan, wasn’t the best choice to replace Marks in 2021, instead a compromise candidate from a board divided into a Nine faction led by chair Peter Costello and a Fairfax faction led by deputy Nick Falloon.
The final three candidates had consisted of then Stan boss Sneesby; the company’s then publishing boss Chris Janz; and TV production talent Carl Fennessy.
The board now has another chance to get it right, although just like last time no single candidate will have the full skill set. It’s too complicated a business for that.
The cues might suggest that the job is chief finance and strategy officer Matt Stanton’s to lose. Stanton, who joined Nine two years ago, will be acting CEO. He’s already familiar to investment analysts, fronting results calls alongside Sneesby and chief sales officer Michael Stephenson.
Stanton called the shots for Nine’s Olympics rights acquisition, and has walked the floors more than Sneesby in recent months.
Stanton’s biggest previous excursion into medialand was in magazines. There’s an element of history repeating itself. Stanton was financial director of Emap Australia (Zoo magazine was the most famous brand) as it was sold to ACP, where he became chief operating and financial officer before eventually being promoted to CEO. He stuck around after ACP was sold on to Bauer Media.
The board will get an early look at Stanton‘s leadership skills when the report into the company’s culture arrives in the coming weeks. It’s starting to feel that the contents of the report, rather than Nine’s fall below a $2bn market capitalisation this week, may have been the definitive factor in the the timing of Sneesby’s exit.
Meanwhile, Stephenson is another internal candidate who will want a chance to persuade the board that he has developed since failing to make the final three last time round. Arguably the opportunity has come around a little too soon for Stephenson, before he can show the market whether he has the ability to develop a growth story of streaming outstripping linear TV’s decline.
Externally, the loudest noise is around a return to the business for executive Amanda Laing, who has spent the last seven years at Foxtel.
And perhaps the most underplayed potential candidate is Andrew Lancaster, CEO of Bruce Gordon’s WIN, and already a Nine board director. Gordon has a 25% economic stake in Nine, although media ownership laws mean he can’t vote the full stake until he offloads his Ten-affiliated licence in NSW. That certainly gives Gordon enough clout to block anybody he doesn’t want as CEO and an outsized say in who he does.
Alongside the board politics though is the bigger strategic question of what sort of CEO Nine actually needs.
There’s deal making to play out. Maybe the company’s 60% stake in Domain could be put to better use. The News Corpp-aligned Foxtel is for sale. That process will determine the structure (and price) of the next round of NRL rights bidding, crucial for Nine and Stan.
The case for Nine as the ideal owner of news mastheads the Australian Financial Review, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald gets weaker all the time. They don’t seem to increase the sum of the whole.
By that logic, the same applies to ownership of the Nine Radio talk stations. If Nine is more about entertainment, perhaps it’s better offloading the radio stations to their more natural home at News Corp, maybe as some sort of swap for Lachlan Murdoch’s Nova Entertainment. Not that Murdoch would likely countenance that until his family succession court dramas have been resolved in the US.
A simpler deal at the right price might be to bulk up in the more straightforward medium of outdoor, either of Ooh Media or QMS.
As well as from the CEO, that strategy must also come from the Catherine West-led board, which itself will be down to just five people with the exit of Sneesby in a fortnight. There’s recruitment to be done there too.
Sneesby’s three years are a demonstration of how quickly a company can drift off course with the wrong CEO. Nine’s future depends on the board getting it right this time.
The VOZ moment
Sometimes it just takes somebody to explain things in words of one syllable for the penny to drop.
There was such a moment on Wednesday when Dorus van den Biezenbos took to the stage at MeasureUp and explained what OzTAM has been up to around its VOZ video marketplace project.
The key fact which had eluded me and (given the fact that it needed to be explained at MeasureUp), at least some others too, is that the VOZ marketplace is not, in fact a marketplace. I’m sure those closer to the trading dynamic have understood that for months. But maybe not everybody else.
In fact, what launches on November 25 (according to van den Biezenbos’ slide, or December 29, according to the OzTam press release earlier in the week) is a much simpler proposition.
Advertisers buying BVOD impressions will still trade directly with each individual network system. But OzTAM’s VOZ will be a clearing house of a single identifier for each user, updated daily with data on what ads have been served to them. Effectively this solves the planning problem of reach and frequency, and crucially offers the ability to cap the number of times a viewer sees the same campaign.
That’s always been one of the major limitations of effective planning alongside broadcast television. An Optus case study shared earlier in the day at the conference demonstrated the uplift in return on advertising investment once heavy users (who might see the same message 25 times) could be served different executions, or excluded.
Initially, only the existing OzTam stakeholders of 9Now, 7plus, 10 play and SBS On Demand will be included, but van den Biezenbos told the conference that the system will be open to the global platforms who have advertising tiers, and that the only limitations will be technical rather commercial.
The free to air networks have lost their way in telling a growth story. After Foxtel resigned from ThinkTV, the industry marketing body, lost much of its funding, and dialled back its ambitions. With divided stakeholders, ThinkTV has been making hardly any noise. They’ve got a strong argument that YouTube gets more ad dollars than the ROI justifies. They need to prosecute it better.
Alongside that, OzTam’s communications got tricksy. It’s move back in January to limit the data available to the trade press around overnight numbers felt, to me at least, like it was trying to hide the bad news. I started to see it not as an impartial source of truth but more a tool of spin for its owners (forget the audience, feel the reach!) I haven’t fully recovered my trust in OzTAM as an independent, trustworthy voice since.
This week’s press release from OzTAM announcing the December 29 (or November 25) launch date perhaps summed up the emphasis on the spin rather than the substance. The announcement was angled (and all the trade press went with that too) on the launch of “ a refreshed brand identity”.
There’s a bigger prize for the TV industry to play for than a new logo. Hopefully this marks the moment where the TV industry can find a way to stop sounding defensive about its fading linear numbers, and delivers a genuine growth story instead.
Unmade Index flattens
There was no clear direction on the Unmade Index yesterday, with ARN Media, Southern Cross Media and Nine among the stocks moving upwards, while Seven West Medis slumped by 2.9%
The Index, which charts the performance of Australia’s lsited media and marketing companies was almost flat, drifting down by just 0.07% to another new low of 437.4 points.
CotW: Coffee fit for an Aussie
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:
In a three part series, McDonalds showed its support for Australian Paralympic Athletes by equipping them with coffee made by 'take-away baristas'. A hilariously over the top feat made possible by DDB Australia, these 'take-away baristas' were put to the test by Don Elgin and other Australian Paralympians in order to ensure that the coffee can be served no matter what is thrown their way.
In case you missed it
On Monday, we previewed what was going to be a big week for the media world around government policy:
On Tuesday, in a piece of fortunate timing, we shared with our paying members an analysis of Nine’s decline in valuation under Mike Sneesby:
On Wednesday we assessed the government’s decision to postpone some of the most stringent changes to the Privacy Act
On Thursday we offered the verdict on Mike Sneesby’s time in charge at Nine:
Time to leave you to your weekend.
I’ll be jumping onto yet a flight back to Sydney tomorrow night for Paramount’s Upfronts. I’ll be writing about those, and doing a podcast interview with Ten’s sales and content bosses Rod Prosser and Daniel Monaghan, in Tuesday’s edition.
Havve a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media