Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: We try to figure out why the boss of an ad agency is campaigning for people to stay away from our AI conference HumAIn. And the Unmade Index moves into a sixth day of losses.
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Catch me if you can’t
Sometimes I can be quite slow on the uptake. When I was skimming Mediaweek on Monday morning, I allowed myself a little too much schadenfreude as I chuckled about an unfortunate mishap. Alongside a post about the downside of technology, Mediaweek managed to serve up a bunch of crypto ads featuring fake Larry Emdur being arrested by the AFP. I’d written about that very ad in Saturday’s Best of the Week.
It was only a few hours later, when I read the Mediaweek article properly, that I realised it was about us.
Jasmin Bedir, CEO at ad agency Innocean, took aim at HumAIn, Unmade’s conference on the impact that AI will have upon marketing and media.
Admittedly she didn’t name us, but the opening words of her article narrowed it down: “They all sound so enticing, the solution we’ve all been waiting for to be on the ‘cutting edge’ of media and marketing – and oh hey, look, there is an AI conference for us all just in time to learn more about them.”
You may notice that we have indeed used the words “the cutting edge of media and marketing” to describe our aspirations for HumAIn.
But why, of all the conferences in all the towns in the world, shouldn’t you walk into mine? It’s not something Ms Bedir makes entirely clear in the piece, written for one of our rival publishers. She even argues that conferences can be helpful as ”the go-to method for learning and networking. Those events are always fun. I’m not judging you – I’m a regular there too.” Except when it comes to the topic of AI, it would seem.
She suggests that the program, which my colleague Cat McGinn has spent the last six months carefully curating, is full of conmen in the style of Leonardo Di Caprio’s fake pilot in Catch Me If You Can. “As a matter of fact, stop listening to the talking heads. Say bye-bye to the knowledge workers and super charming sales execs and their super polished gimmicks,” she suggests.
“These guys don’t have the answers we’re all looking for – they are mere passengers like the rest of us. But unlike you and I, these guys are more like a Frank Abagnale and what we really need are actual pilots.”
Cat is overseas this week so not in a position to defend herself against this attack on her curation skills. But I’m happy to be offended on her behalf. To see a project Cat has been devoting most of her working time to unfairly attacked is as irritating as it is perplexing.
Nobody is more diligent than Cat in putting together a program. Annoyingly so, to be honest. While some can knock out a conference program in a week or two, Cat strains over it to the point where I have been known to become somewhat testy.
She put together a fantastic advisory panel to guide her with that content. Starting with the As, our advisory panel is: ex-WPP-strategist-turned-AI-advisory consultant Ashadi Hopper; cybersecurity professor Dr Alana Mauraushat; content marketing expert Andres Lopez-Varela; BRX boss Bridget Cleary; ethical AI practitioner Dre Horton; Elle Green from The Martech; Bastion’s group director Jenni Ryall; ANZ’s head of customer centricity Kate Young; Media.Monks head of strategy Mitch Incoll; Pip Bingemann from Springboards.ai; co-founder of AI innovation and incubation lab Silverside AI PJ Perreira; Future Media author Ricky Sutton; Tom Braybrook from GroupM’s Acceleration Australia; former IAB boss Vijay Solanki and creativity consultant Wade Kingsley.
Only after talking at length to the advisory panel members - and many, many others in the industry - did Cat begin to take decisions about HumAIn’s content. When we ran HumAIn for the first time last year, it was about the possibilities. This time it’s about the practicalities. The presenters are anything but the passengers of whom Jasmin speaks.
Imagine the authorisation hoops we had to jump through to get the blessing from Nissan for Carsales to talk about how they’ve been using AI in audience targeting, for instance. Ditto for the likes of Foxtel, SBS, Southern Cross Austereo and Howatson & Company to talk about how they’ve been using it in the day job and for clients. All practitioners, not talking heads.
Guess who’s funding the trip to Australia of Jeremy Somers, the founder of the world’s first AI creative agency NotContent.ai which has already done work for the likes of brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Yahoo! and Converse? That would be us.
Somehow, over five hours, starting with a welcome from Innovation Minister Ed Husic and concluding with our Great DebAIt on whether AI is media’s extinction level event, we’re jamming nine sessions into the afternoon. You can see the whole program for yourself via this link.
Returning to the Mediaweek piece, Jasmin doesn’t really explain why this event, the sole one of its type, is the only time one should not attend a conference to learn more about a developing area.
However, taking aim at the AI Upfronts - in which five presenters each get eight minutes to talk about a product focused on media and marketing - she suggests something which makes me wonder whether her entire column is based on a huge misunderstanding.
In a paragraph which Mediaweek has chosen to highlight in bold, she contends: ”But it’s not where we should get our information from when it comes to AI, in particular not when said conferences are actually sponsored by the AI startups with their third-party tools. So resist, my friends – by all means, buy a ticket to that conference, but don’t expect wisdom for yourself or your staff.”
The only problem with that bold (literally) assertion is that HumAIn does not actually have any sponsors. I wish we did; but we don‘t. We’ve invited those startups with their “third party tools” to take up those four eight-minute slots because we think they’ve got interesting products to talk about. They’re not paying us.
Just like our October event REmade - Retail Media Unmade, we try to find spaces where new communities are emerging. And one of the drawbacks of organising an event at the cutting edge is that means few organisations with products mature enough to market via sponsorship. So the entire event is being funded via the (reasonably priced) $360 ticket sales which Ms Bedir and Mediaweek do not want you to purchase.
Unlike one or two publications I can think of, we’re not pay to play. We’ll have a correction to your article, please, Trent.
As far as we knew, Unmade had no bad blood with Jasmin Bedir. Just three weeks ago, Cat hosted her on the Unmade podcast and we thought the conversation went quite well.
Afterwards Cat even followed up by inviting Jasmin to join us at HumAIn. Although she declined, she cited a diary clash as she had another conference to attend, not an ideological opposition to conferences.
And I’m still genuinely puzzled by the antipathy to the idea of holding an event to talk about the most fundamental development the marketing industry has ever seen. Agencies like Innocean will look completely different in five years, if they continue to exist at all. That seems worth discussing and learning about.
So, I’d invite you: Please, take a look at the program Cat has put so much effort into. If you think we’ve put together an afternoon full of plausible conmen, then by all means skip it, and instead go along to the next Mediaweek 100 awards where of course any correlation between winners and sponsors in entirely coincidental.
But if you think HumAIn is an event worthy of consideration, I’ll make it a little easier for you to make up your mind, and join us in Sydney on May 28. We’ve created a special voucher code giving you 10% off the price of coming along. Use the code frank-sent-me.
Unmade Index moves into sixth day of declines
The Unmade Index stretched its decline into a sixth successive trading day on Tuesday, losing another 0.19%. However, that was a better performance than the wider ASX All Ords which lost 1.84%
Our index of locally listed marketing and media stocks landed on 537.9 points.
Among the audio stocks, ARN Media lost 1.76% while its takeover target Southern Cross Media gained 2.2%.
There were mixed results for the TV-led stocks with Nine falling 0.32% to hover only just above a market capitalisation of $2.5bn while Seven West Media bounced back above a $300m market cap with a 5.41% gain.
Time to leave you to your day.
I’ll be back on Thursday with an audio-led edition of Unmade. We’ll be talking about the launch of Australia’s newest news masthead, The Nightly.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Jasmin's comments are a longer version of my own a couple of weeks ago. To be fair, even if you leave with a heavier dose of cynicism than when you arrived , it's probably better than no cynicism at all. I'd go if I were still in the game.