Tuesdata: The numbers that show media companies are cutting their own marketing

Sep 09, 2025

Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Unmade. Today: We’ve crunched the numbers and Australia’s biggest media companies are cutting their own marketing spend even faster than their clients are.

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The short and the shorter of it

Most of Australia’s biggest media companies are retreating from marketing themselves, research by Unmade suggests.

Despite the media world regularly telling their clients that the best way to get through a downturn stronger is to continue to invest in marketing, most have done the opposite.

Analysis of the latest results announcements on the ASX suggests that all of the big listed media companies have drastically reduced their marketing spend as they prioritise short term results for shareholders over long term brand building.

From treatises like The Long and Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field, to How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp, to the central arguments in Mark Ritson’s MiniMBA in Marketing, all warn that long term health relies on ongoing brand investment.

Received wisdom is that a healthy amount for B2B companies to spend on marketing themselves is 2-5% of their revenue, while consumer-facing businesses should spend 5-10%.

But financial numbers disclosed to the ASX draw a picture of most large media companies ignoring that advice.

Seven West Media invests only 1.2% of its revenue on marketing, according to its 2025 annual report. Ooh Media spends 1.3%. And Southern Cross Austereo invests just 2%.

Not all companies on the Unmade Index can be directly compared as the ASX does not stipulate that marketing expenses must be broken out. Nine does not share any data at all, while ARN Media includes “selling and marketing expenses” which appears to merge the cost lines of sales and marketing.

Of the companies disclosing their marketing costs, Seven cut most deeply for the second year running. After cutting its marketing costs by 19.2% in the previous year, Seven slashed another 29.5% off its marketing budget in the 2025 financial year, taking its marketing spend down to $16.5m. A decade ago Seven used to spend $59m on marketing itself.

Southern Cross Austereo, which was desperate to demonstrate to investors that it had the discipline to deliver better short term profits, got there partly by slashing its long term investment in marketing. It cut its marketing budget by 24.8% to $8.2m. A decade ago, SCA’s promotions and marketing budget was more than double that at $19m.

ARN Media’s data was for the bigger pool of “selling and marketing expenses”, which likely includes the cost of its sales team as well as marketing so is hard to directly compare. However, in the last half year, it cut that investment by 12.2%.

Ooh Media cut its marketing investment by 6.1%.

It’s all short. There is no long of it.

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Nine slips on Unmade Index as market prepares for dividend day

Australia’s listed media and marketing companies started the week in negative territory, with most of the Unmade index going backwards on Monday.

The biggest stock, Nine, lost 2.6% to land on a market capitalisation of $2.6bn. On Thursday, shares of Nine will go ex-dividend, meaning the stock will start trading with the $840m special dividend from the sale of Domain excluded from the valuation of what is currently the largest locally listed stock. Nine’s valuation will likely fall below $2bn.

Meanwhile, Seven West Media slipped by 3.3% to hit a $223m market cap. Southern Cross Austereo lost 3.2% to land on $179m. ARN Media lost 1%, finishing on $155m.

Among the stocks headed in the other direction, print and marketing conglomerate IVE Group gained 6.7%. Gumtree jumped by 30% and Pureprofile improved by 4.8%.

The Unmade Index – which charts the performance of all the ASX-listed media and marketing stocks – lost 0.95% on Monday to land on 577.6 points. This was a worse performance than the wider ASX All Ordinaries which was down by just 0.15% for the day.