Signs of the times in adland and the media
Welcome to an Easter edition of Best of the Week, written on Friday in Evandale, Tasmania.
Today: Signs of the times in AI, in the markets and in agency brands. And goodbye to the man who put behavioural economics on the map.
Happy Pencil Day. Now there’s an underrated technology.
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HOLD THE DATE: REmade - Retail Media Unmade, October 1
Signs of the Times: Agency mergers; AI voiceovers and the decline of Seven West Media’s market value
SotT: Another WPP brand bites the dust
This week saw the death of what little remained of one of Australia’s great digital agencies.
What was once The White Agency, and then merged with Grey to form WhiteGrey, has now in turn been folded into AKQA.
On a global level that torches the century-long heritage of the Grey brand. Locally, The White Agency went back nearly two decades.
It follows a pattern. Earlier this month WPP’s The&Partnership merged with mSix&Partners (which admittedly never made much of an impact locally) to create the unmemorable new brand T&Pm.
But that’s as nothing to the lost brand value of J Walter Thomson, Young & Rubican and Wunderman which all ended up merged into WPP’s VML brand last year.
The same goes for some of WPP’s great PR brands - Hill & Knowlton and Cohn & Wolfe, now part of Burson.
These mergers have been pragmatic. The holding companies own too many agency brands in a permanently shrinking market where clients are less concerned about conflict than they used to be.
The way in which these brands die slow deaths may look like inept marketing, but there’s a pragmatic reason. “Merged” agencies have a shot at keeping both sets of clients. An actual closure puts the client’s business in play.
Unless the trajectory changes, one day, there’ll be just one brand: WPP.
SotT: 10X for Nine
On Monday we briefly hit a new milestone.
Seven’s market capitalisation fell to $270m, while Nine sat at $2.8bn
It meant that for the first time in the history of the two companies, Nine’s market capitalisation was more than ten times that of Seven.
Less than six years ago, when Nine and Fairfax Media merged, that would have seemed impossible. Nine and Seven were broadly the same size.
The seeds of Nine’s success were planted by previous CEO-but-one David Gyngell who saved the company from administration and invested in Stan, and then nurtured by Hugh Marks who built a formidable management team.
The seeds of Seven’s drift were sown by proprietor Kerry Stokes, who opted for the failed joint venture with Foxtel, Presto, over the opportunity to own half of Stan, and who failed to invest ahead of the curve on non-legacy media.
While Nine has its own challenges, at least its ownership of every form of broadcast platform, included free to air television, talk radio, subscription streaming and ad-supported video gives it a better opportunity to monetise its expensive sports rights. If they get it right, the Olympics will be a case study.
The downwards trend of Seven’s share price suggests the market is wondering whether the company will be able to afford its sports rights commitments in the medium and long term.
SotT: An artificially intelligent Scott Cam
I hear that the murmurings in the room at the Screen Forever conference were audible during a session featuring Nine’s reality maestro Adrian Swift.
The man who brought the world Married At First Sight revealed the network has already been using AI for its voiceovers, including The Block’s Scott Cam and Travel Guide’s Denise Scott
TV Tonight reported Swift as saying: “Particularly when you’ve got an Olympics that mostly takes place overnight. We’ll use AI a lot on that.
“Our other use of AI is where we have -and I’ll mention them - Denise Scott and Scott Cam, both of whom had various kinds of colds, coughs and fevers. So for our guide voiceovers on our cuts, we used AI versions of their voices….scarily accurate!”
It may not have gone down particularly well with the production industry audience - whose jobs AI is eating - but Swift was merely sharing an inconvenient truth about the changes the technology is creating.
On Wednesday, actor Sara Poyzer shared an email from her voiceover agency in the UK, implying that the BBC had replaced her with an AI generated voice. The debate on Twitter under her post is fascinating, even if it feels a little like the sort of conversation that horsedrawn cart manufacturers would have had if social media was around when Henry Ford began to ruin their business.
Swift’s clarifier at Screen Forever that it was just for early production guide voiceovers - “It’ll never replace the real thing, I stress” - doesn’t change the reality. Across media, and particularly social media, we’re already hearing more AI voices than we realise.
I wonder though, whether that’s a phase. The more we hear them, the more that AI-generated intonation becomes noticeable - and skippable.
Fast and slow
This week, Daniel Kahneman passed, at the healthy age of 90.
Although he was not an adman, he influenced a generation of campaign strategists, A copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in what makes consumers tick.
Economists think humans behave rationally. Behavioural economists know exactly the opposite to be true.
That was in large part thanks to Kahneman. More in the coming days.
Vale.
One year on
The Wall Street Journal had a powerful front page on Friday.
Yesterday marked a year since the WSJ journalist Evan Gershkovich was arrested in Russia on what appear to be manufactured spy charges. Gershkovich, who had been covering the Ukraine conflict, is being used by Russia as a bargaining chip for a prisoner swap. Hopefully it happens soon.
Index on an end-of-quarter up
The Unmade Index ended the quarter on 579.4 points, up by 1.49% for the day but down by 7.9% since the start of the year.
Thursday's lift was led by Nine which rose by 2.4% to a market capitalisation of $2.8bn. Ooh Media improved by 1.14% to $959m.
In the audio sector, ARN Media rose by 2.33% to a $275m market cap. Southern Cross Austereo rose by 0.53% to $229m.
Meanwhile, in a sign that the ARN takeover of Southern Cross Austereo is on track, SCA revealed that shareholder Spheria has withdrawn its request for an extraordinary general meeting to try and unseat chairman Rob Murray.
In case you missed it
On Monday, we discussed the latest inroads AI is making on the advertising sector:
On Tuesday we examined potential routes for the free to air networks to come together in the streaming sector:
On Wednesday we bemoaned the decline of joint industry currencies as Coles went it along on retail media measurement; and we shared more detail of our AI conference HumAIn.
On Thursday we talked to the local and global bosses of Paramount+, Beverley McGarvey and Marco Nobili as it prepares to launch its advertising tier in ANZ
Time to leave you to your Saturday. Unmade will be back on Tuesday.
Have a great Easter.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media