Where to next for the commercial TV industry?
Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade. Today: Spinning the TV numbers, and the China panic takes the Unmade Index down further - is the Domain deal in question?
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OzTAM boss Halligan makes her pitch
The spin cycle started early.
Having arrived at that imperfect moment of the Future of TV Advertising conference where it was too late to join the breakfast briefing, and too early to go into the first session, I found myself killing a few minutes in the windowless anteroom where tepid filter-coffee was being served.
The conversation from a duo behind me drifted across: “We’re pretty happy with the coverage in Mi3. The deal with them was no snark.”
A peek at the name badge revealed the comment came from one of OzTam’s stakeholders, delighted by that morning’s uncritical coverage of boss Karen Halligan’s push to recapture ground as the industry’s undisputed currency.
It set the scene for the day.
The TV industry may be getting the stages of grief in the wrong order. Last year, the mood at the event felt angry. This year felt a little more like denial, from some quarters at least.
The free-to-air players talked a good game of collaboration throughout the day, almost as if their marketing body Think TV wasn’t a zombie ghost ship, neither dead nor alive since the exit of Foxtel, Ten and CEO Kim Portrate.
The morning’s opening presentation from Halligan seemed like it might be an audition for that vacancy, should Nine and Seven ever decide what to do about it. Halligan did not sound so much an independent umpire, as one of the players. She shared slides with messages like “BETTER CLIENT OUTCOMES” and “Audiences haven’t left FTA or BVOD”.
Trade press reports of the transition of audiences from free-to-air to streaming were incorrect, she told the room. “What I wanted to say is that if you read some of the trade press in Australia, what's being said and what the reality is, they're two different things.”
She just couldn’t figure out where the naughty trade press were getting their data from, she said. “And I reached out far and wide,” she added.
I found myself wondering whether she was referring to this report in Unmade:
But she couldn’t have meant us, because we linked to our sources for the data - an authoritative survey conducted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Local data indeed. Just to be helpful, here’s the link again:
Admittedly it was behind our paywall. To be extra helpful, here’s the data she reached out far and wide for:
Halligan’s presentation was a curious strategy if OzTAM is genuine about hoping to get the streamers on board. It felt like advocacy on behalf of its three owners, Seven, Nine and Ten. I’m not sure it will be possible for OzTAM to position itself as a neutral third party if it’s also in the business of promoting one side of the equation.
There was more repetition as the day went on. When asked about getting the local players to work together better in a panel I moderated, Rod Prosser, sales boss of Ten’s owner Paramount volunteered: “we need to do better”.
I had a flashback to leading a similar conversation at Mumbrella360 a dozen years ago. That time it was Matt Stanton, boss of ACP Magazines and chairman of the magazine industry marketing body Magazine Publishers of Australia. “We need to do better,” I remember him acknowledging.
These days Stanton runs Nine of course. Spoiler alert: Magazines did not, in fact, do better at marketing themselves, although they regularly pledged to do so right until most of them went out of business.
It could of course be different this time. Almost all of the people who could come together to make a difference were in the room.
But the issue goes beyond television. The existential threat is to a local media industry which is unable to cut costs at the same speed revenue is going elsewhere.
Yesterday the media agencies argued the problem for local media players is not so much them shifting spend to the global platforms, as it is fragmentation, with the rise of retail media and the creator economy. Perhaps.
Want to read more about the conference? Check out Mumbrella’s coverage of the principal media debate. Fascinating to see local agency bosses claiming on the record that it doesn’t happen in Australia.
China crisis taints the Unmade Index
The ASX panic about the escalating American-Chinese trade war seeped into the Unmade Index again today.
Among the big casualties were Nine and Domain, which lost 4% and 2.3%. Both stocks have now fallen to their lowest point since US real estate player CoStar announced its bid to buy Domain, which is 60% owned by Nine.
CoStar revealed its takeover attempt in mid-February well before Donald Trump’s tariff battles roiled financial markets. It is currently in a period of due diligence while it examines Domain’s accounts, and would be free to walk away from the deal at any time.
Elsewhere on the Unmade Index, Enero’s price fell to its lowest point since 2013, leaving the agency holdco with a market capitalisation of $52m.
Vinyl Group sagged by 8.3% to its lowest point since last August.
The Unmade Index lost 3%, worse than the ASX All Ordinaries which lost another 1.9% today.
The Index has now lost more than 10% of its value over the last four trading days.
Time to leave you to your evening.
Hal Crawford and I just recorded a late afternoon recording of the Mumbrellacast. We discussed Halligan’s complaints about the trade press and principal media. As I write, Abe Udy is editing the podcast on board a flight to Sydney; if the Qantas wifi holds up for Abe, you should find it in your podcatchers within an hour or so.
Have a great night.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
