Welcome to a Tuesday update from Unmade. The full edition is for our paying members.
Today: The media industry is becoming characterised by market failure, but is there any appetite from politicians to solve it?
To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.
Your annual membership gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.
You also get access to our paywalled archive.
Upgrade today.
Who will fix media’s many market failures?
This week, Screen Producers Australia, the people who make our TV and movie content, put out a gloomy press release labelling the Australian screen industry as in a state of “ongoing market failure”.
The reason for the release was the annual data from the Australian Communications and Media Authority on where the commercial broadcasters are spending their money. Answer: On sport and reality TV, not on local drama or kids programming. Australian stories are being told on screen less than ever.
In large part that’s because previous governments gave in to the lobbying of the TV networks to loosen the rules around their content quotas.
In the short term, no longer being required to make kids content boosted the network profit margins a little. In the long term, they cost themselves their own future, with a generation coming through that never got into the habit of watching commercial free to air television.
As SPA’s CEO Matt Deaner put it: “This is what happens when regulation is dismantled and nothing replaces it.”
And it’s not just the screen industry. More widely, Australia’s media industry is in a state of market failure never seen before.