Have marketers and agencies given up on setting measurement standards? News media as the AI canary
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: Why the rise of media owner-led measurement systems represents a failure of the marketers and media agencies. Also, we reveal details of HumAIn’s panel on the impact of AI on news media. And SWM bounces back on the Unmade Index.
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AI read the news today, oh boy
Cat McGinn, curator of HumAIn writes:
In our latest update on HumAIn’s program, we will be discussing the impact and opportunities of AI for Australia’s news media.
The news media sector is a canary in the coal mine in terms of AI transformation. Newsrooms usually run on the whiff of an oily rag, so the productivity gains AI offers for content generation and time savings for journalists and editors can be significant. However, the possible risks and challenges need careful navigation.
Our session “AI and the Future of News” will bring together experts in the fields of AI technology, journalism, ethics, and digital media innovation to explore AI's profound impact on news production, distribution, and consumption. They will explore the potential benefits, approaches and the guardrails news organisations must consider.
The panel includes Melanie Withnall, Head of News and Information for Southern Cross Austereo. She will discuss how she has been exploring ways of using AI for audio production, and issues around fact checking to combat the rise of deepfakes and other AI misinformation. Withnall was previously manager of ABC Radio Sydney and currently leads a news team of 50 journalists across more than 30 markets.
Also speaking is Michael Davis, the co-author of the Centre for Media Transition’s groundbreaking report into genAI for journalism. Davis is a research fellow at the centre, which is part of UTS. His research focuses on the impact of generative AI on news and the digital information ecosystem and regulatory responses to misinformation. He previously worked at the Australian Communications and Media Authority on misinformation policy, the news media bargaining code, and impartiality in news.
Also on the panel is Shaun Davies, who is a consultant on responsible AI use. He was director of content safety for Microsoft’s Start news feed globally and earlier in his career was Australia editor for BBC News and head of digital for Newshub at MediaWorks in NZ.
The fourth speaker will be Ricky Sutton. Sutton was a news editor for News Corp in the UK and Australia before working on Fairfax Media’s video offerings and then founding video platform Oovvuu. Last year Sutton began writing the Future Media Substack newsletter which focuses on the collision of technology and media.
In another session focusing on the impact of media, the topic for this year’s Great DebAIt is the proposition “AI is the news media’s extinction-level event”. Potential panellists are welcome to email cat@unmade.media.
HumAIn takes place in Sydney on May 28. Previously announced sessions include: a keynote from Jeremy Somers, the founder of the world's first AI creative agency Not Content; award-winning AI entrepreneur Stephen Hunt presenting a primer on how to get started in adopting AI, and The AI Upfronts, in which innovators pitch their new AI products for the media and marketing world.
Earlybird tickets for HumAIn, with a saving of 20%, are on sale for just another fortnight.
Remember JICs?
Yesterday, Coles360, the retail media division of Coles, became the latest media owner to launch its own measurement system.
Coles360Impact is well resourced. It’s powered by retail media technology company Circana who provide similar services in other markets. And it’s led by Andy Ford who was previously the local measurement boss for Meta which means he is well placed to know about how to operate measurement systems within walled gardens.
According to Coles360’s GM Paul Brooks, the development has come in response to marketers asking for better campaign measurement. “We’ve now built the pipes, teams, processes, partnerships and relationships to offer post campaign reporting at scale,” was his quote in the launch press release.
It’s a similar development to last October’s announcement from Foxtel Media that it was turning to Kantar for its own measurement system.
The gold standard was once full-on JICs (joint industry currencies), jointly run by media owners, media agencies and advertisers.
That means that marketers and agencies were free to set their own terms for what they wanted measured. Now the media owner may not actually be marking their own homework, but they are deciding the scoring system and who gets to mark it.
The biggest single disruptor of JICs was the rise of the digital platforms which each runs their own walled garden. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that a legitimate focus on consumer data privacy is also a means of creating a non transparent black box where the advertiser needs to take the platform’s word for it. Globally, Facebook became notorious for a series of clarifications around the misleading nature of some of its data, particularly around video views.
If not a full JIC, the next best thing is at least a currency with buy-in from all the key media owners, so there’s a common language.
In an ideal world, the retail media sector would have come together to agree some standards.
Pragmatically, there are barriers in retail media. While the IAB has had a point of view, a significant part of retail media takes place in the physical world beyond the IAB digital remit.
And even more pragmatically, there’s a high degree of political scrutiny of the activities of the supermarkets. Any attempt by Coles and Woolworths to come together to create an agreed measurement system could have attracted regulatory interest, as collusion.
That’s where the media agencies and the major brands should have been doing more, not just to passively ask media owners for the data but to get involved in making it happen.
A further dimension is the rise of increasingly sophisticated media mix modelling systems like those offered by Mutinex and, maybe, Prophet. Individual marketers are starting to outsource their ROI calculations rather than acting as an industry.
Coles360 is filling a vacuum that should not have existed in the first place.
REmade, Unmade’s annual retail media conference, returns on October 1.
Unmade index dips as Seven improves
The Unmade Index lost ground for a third day running on Tuesday despite a rally from Seven West Media. The index fell by 0.94% to 568.8 points.
Seven’s share price bounded by 5.56%. But the index was tugged downwards by a 2.33% fall in Nine which has a larger market capitalisation.
Time to leave you to your Wednesday.
We’ll be back tomorrow with a quick turnaround audio-led edition on Unmade. In a conversation we recorded yesterday afternoon, I’ll be talking to the newly promoted local boss of Paramount and Network Ten Beverley McGarvey, and the company’s global boss of Paramount+ Marco Nobili. Among the topics: first quarter numbers, how to lead a team while speculation about the company’s future is swirling, and disunity in the free to air sector.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Livestreams for any of them?