Upfronts are always big and glitzy. Nine's was consequential too
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Upfronts are always big and glitzy. Nine's was consequential too
Welcome to an end of week edition from Unmade. Today: Figuring out what was important at Nine’s Upfronts (Spoiler: It was the Olympics and the AI). Plus. Southern Cross Austereo’s share price retreats back to its low point.
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Nine is first to set sail
Tim Burrowes writes:
Some things change and some things stay the same.
I went to my first Nine Upfronts 15 years ago. It was held in the cavernous studio at Nine’s old Willoughby headquarters. Back in July 2008, a few hundred of us stood around while newly returned CEO David Gyngell celebrated finally finding a ratings hit with Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. “Thank fucking god for that. I might not be standing here if this bloke hadn’t turned up,” Gynge told us that night.
The audience was bigger on Thursday. Depending which Nine executive you spoke to at the afterparty, there were 1,000, 1,300 or 1,600 people inside the Hordern Pavilion. And anything from 3,000 to 7,000 to 10,000 watching the live stream.
And there was still some Gordon Ramsay on the schedule, with footage from his latest show Food Stars, a mashup of Shark Tank and Hell’s Kitchen in which entrepreneurs pitch product ideas to Ramsay and Boost Juice founder Janine Ellis.
On Thursday, there was less talk about the commissioned content slate than ever before. The same from guests at the afterparty across the way at The Hall of Industries. There were two main topics:
First, I heard the same joke several times: I wonder if Nine have got the Olympics? That had been unmissable in the show. After a more meaningful (and longer) than usual Welcome to Country it was a good 40 minutes into the event before Nine talked about anything but its $305m investment in the Olympics.
Paris 2024 will be a big deal. Brisbane 2032 even bigger.
Much was made about Nine’s multi-media capabilities and multi-platform ownership of the Games rights. Across TV, radio, video streaming and audio streaming, Nine will go all out for the Olympics. For Nine, the next year will focus on a fortnight in the French summertime. And the next decade will be about a distant fortnight in the Australian winter.
The multi-platform element of the Olympics is something that only Nine can boast. It’s the only media company with assets in every key medium (well, except outdoor).
The second big conversation starter was driven by one of the last announcements of the night.
For five years, Nine and News Corp have both been trying to get to the small end of town’s digital dollars. Much of the marketing budgets of small and medium sized businesses have been gobbled up by Meta and Alphabet.
Nine’s main vehicle for this push was Voyager, which plugged into its automated buying platform Galaxy. The promise was that for a minimum ad spend of $15,000, a small business would get a free 30 second ad made for them by an external production house which could then be used across Nine’s TV and streaming assets.
It was a really good strategy, but didn’t visibly change the game.
The new version of Voyager is Nine Ad Manager, which is - no doubt intentionally - a much more similar name to that used by the digital platforms. The new, even lower price point is $500. And instead of a production house, the ads will be created and voiced by AI. Yes, the robots are now taking the jobs.
Campbell showed off a couple of use cases.
The AI took existing brand assets for the mid market restaurant chain Fratelli and used it to spit out a 30 second ad for the branch over the road from the event. This could be then targeted by postcode, at people streaming 9Now living locally. Or even at those likely to come to a future football match nearby, based on the location of the team involved.
This was not high art. The ad was the kind of thing you might see for a local Chinese restaurant, at a cinema.
The next use case felt even more elegant, particularly given Nine’s majority ownership of Domain: Creating property ads. Real estate agents will love it. Not least because it’s agents’ clients that will fund the marketing budget, and the agents will presumably get to clip the ticket.
Where I live in regional Tasmania, I already get to see plenty of SME advertising on broadcast TV. Sheds and farming equipment and suchlike. And it works. I’m moving house soon. Yesterday I turned off the Bass Highway to see Mike at Midway Furniture purely because I’d seen an ad for his store - voiced by him - a few days before.
Mind you, the Fratelli ad worked too. I needed to sneak away from the Upfronts afterparty for a quick catchup with a contact who’d been at the event. Of course we chose Fratelli.
Now everyone watching 9Now will get the same experience. If Nine Ad Manager takes off, that will mean a radical change in the video viewing environment. Certainly, it’s yet another challenge to big brand ads; but maybe it means they’ll cut through even more.
The factor driving the conversation around the AI on the night though was around whether the product poses a threat for media agencies. Why unveil it to a roomful of media buyers?
Again, that speaks to the changed environment. When media agencies were all powerful, nobody would have dared do that. But now Upfronts have a wider audience: more SMEs and more equities analysts.
This was an intentional signal that although TV broadcast audiences are falling fast, Nine is embracing the disruption.
The AI innovation was off-the-shelf rather than developed in-house. The giveaway was that although the voiceover on the night had an Australian accent, the one at the media briefing a few days before had still sounded American.
Soon this type of thing will be ubiquitous. But Nine was first to market. This will be the first major use of generative AI in really large scale media production locally.
That shows impressive nimbleness for such a large organisation facing such a daunting period of upheaval.
Nine Ad Manager may or may not move the dial. What matters is that the media players who embrace that sort of disruption are the ones who might get through to the other side.
A decade ago, I heard a talk - I can’t remember who from, and neither Google or ChatGPT have been able to help me find it - from a media futurologist.
He was talking about the disruption to journalism business models as recruitment advertising left newspapers and display advertising threatened to go the same way.
Those looking for new ways of funding themselves, were heading out to the ocean in leaky boats. Not all of them would make it to the other side, but some would. At the time he used the analogy - dammit, I wish I could remember who it was - there was no certainty that digital subscriptions would be the answer. But as we now know, that was the boat that made it.
Now it’s the turn of the TV networks to set off in those leaky boats, as broadcast audiences fade away.
It’s appropriate that Nine was first to set sail for Upfronts season. It’s the first to embrace that scary AI future. If you want to cross that ocean you have to set sail.
Poor performance persists on the Unmade Index
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
Another negative day visited the Unmade Index yesterday. Our measurement of the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks fell 0.90% to 627.3 points.
Only two stocks emerged in the green - Enero Group, rising 1.84%, and Domain, lifting 0.75%.
Ooh Media and Seven led the board down, falling a respective 1.72% and 1.54%.
Southern Cross Austereo also performed poorly, dropping 1.36% back down to its all time low of 72 cents. Nine fell 0.99%.
After sinking to a record low market capitalisation two days ago, ARN Media stalled, recording no activity in its share price.
Time to leave you to your Friday.
I’ll be back with more tomorrow for Best of the Week.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
