Ooh Media kicks off Upfronts season with a rethink on retail media; Wipeout on the Unmade Index

Sep 04, 2024

Welcome to a Thursday update from Unmade, as Upfronts season begins with Ooh Media’s Outfront. Further down, a bloodbath on the Unmade Index takes it to yet another new low.

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Ooh Media Outfront: Number one for wealthy metro audiences and animated dragons?

Ooh Media partied at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal

A decade ago the idea that an outdoor advertising company would throw one of the bigger Upfronts events of the year would have seemed unlikely.

It used to be that the TV networks threw the biggest Upfronts. And indeed the only Upfronts. When a 1% shift in advertising spend was worth tens of millions of dollars if they could shift sentiment about next year’s programming slate, the networks could justify dropping a million bucks on a party.

Last night Ooh Media kicked off Upfronts season with a bash on a beautiful Sydney evening at the Overseas Passenger Terminal.

The gossip on the night was that Seven West Media - whose redundancy list included the two people who ran their Upfronts last year, marketing boss Mel Hopkins and sales chief Kurt Burnette - may not be in a position to hold an Upfronts at all. Ten will again run its more low key in-studio briefings in a fortnight’s time. And Nine is yet to reveal its plans for its event, likely at the end of next month.

Ooh Media borrowed a little more from Nine, whose position for many years was “Still the One”. Weaved through the message of the night was Ooh Media’s claims to be number one on all the key metrics including market share, audience share and profitability.

In the chatter ahead of the formalities, one agency person observed that Ooh Media can’t claim to be number one for ease of dealing with. That, they said, belongs to rival QMS.

There was a tacit acknowledgement of that in the presentation. Boston Consulting Group has been in the building to help Ooh Media rework its processes and rethink its approach to retail media.

Ooh Media will respond to briefs faster was the promise, including using AI to do so. The details of what that means in practice were not revealed.

Ooh Media’s strategy bosses Andrew Every and Cassandra Cameron promised a more responsive company

Another Upfronts tradition also made its way into the Ooh Media preso: the reannouncement. Ooh Media’s retail media play ReOoh, announced last year, is now REO. Or Reo. Or reo, depending on which ongoing crime against grammar Ooh Media’s branding people are committing.

Ooh Media’s chief marketing officer boss Neil Ackland reannounces Reo

The main premise of Reo has changed. Last year ReOoh was focused around helping retailers get up and running with their in-store screen networks, with some hints that Ooh Media might also take on some sales representation. Now Ooh Media as an outsourced media sales house for the retailers is the central part of the arrangement. They were frustrated not to be able to announce their first clients last night. That doesn’t surprise me though - something we’ve noticed with organising our REmade retail media conference is that retailers have layer upon layer of compliance.

What Ooh did announce was new contracts including Waverley Council (Bond Beach et al), more of the northern beaches in Sydney, and the Eastlink Motorway in Melbourne. The emphasis was very much on Ooh Media’s upmarket metro audiences.

And no Upfronts preso is complete without a light sprinkling of bullshit. That came with the somewhat convoluted premise that the company’s digital billboards will be the new home of “episodic storytelling”.

Alongside that came what it labelled Faux Out of Home, or FOOH in which “bespoke, interactive digital scans for its most iconic classic large format sites” can be used to create, for instance, a video of a dragon flying out of the billboard. Not that the punters looking at the billboard would see it, but if they happened to see the video on social media they’d understand why there are images of flames on the billboard. It’s a stretch.

Also interesting for what it says about priorities are the things that don’t make it into the preso on the night. With the emphasis on metro commuters and the wealthy social set of Bondi Beach and Manly, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Ooh Media doesn’t do the regions.

Perhaps reflective of the market, there was very little said about creative focused around time of day which should be a core attraction of digitised billboards.

And the word programatic was not uttered on stage even once.

The event felt like a reset for Ooh of the back of a poor half: A reminder to the market of the company’s scale; a promise to be easier to deal with; a reworked plan for retail media. Now it will need to deliver.

Declaration: My travel to the event and accommodation were paid for by Ooh Media.

'Sometimes you have to cop to a bad quarter' - Ooh Media drops a mediocre set of numbers

Tim Burrowes and Cat McGinn

Aug 19

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Unmade Index takes a caning

Yesterday’s bad news about Australia’s stalling economy rattled the Unmade Index which lost a drastic 3.2% yesterday, worse than the ASX All Ords’ 2% fall.

The Index landed on 444.7 points, its worst ever, and the first time the index has been below 450 points. The index began at the start of 2022 on a nominal 1000 points.

Nine was hammered, losing 5.5%, leaving its market capitalisation only just over $2bn. That was a one day hit of $100m in valuation. The last time Nine’s share price was this low was in April 2020, early in the Covid crisis.

Southern Cross Austereo lost 7% while ARN Media lost 3.4%