Why Ooh Media saw a market wipeout; and our first humAIn speakers revealed
Why Ooh Media saw a market wipeout; and our first humAIn speakers revealed
Welcome to a Thursday update from Unmade: Today, we have our first speaker news from our conference humAIn - human creativity X AI and we examine an eventful 72 hours on the Unmade Index, including yesterday’s 24% price crash from Ooh Media.
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Optus and Afterpay marketers to reveal how they’re already unleashing AI
Cat McGinn, curator of humAIn, writes:
We can today announce the first speakers for Unmade’s conference humAIn - human creativity x AI.
humAIn takes place in Sydney on July 12 and aims to help media and marketing professionals understand how the artificial intelligence transformation will affect their work. The event will feature marketing and agency leaders sharing how they’re already using AI inside their organisations.
The first session to be announced sees marketers from Optus and Afterpay share how they are using generative and predictive AI within their marketing functions.
The session, “AI Unleashed: Embracing artificial intelligence in marketing today” will see the panellists discuss how to build a culture of experimentation, build capability and ship outcomes now, rather than waiting for ‘perfect’.
Joel Moran, growth and brand director at Afterpay and Cameron Luby, senior director of brand marketing at Optus, will join the discussion, alongside Bridget Cleary who has launched tech consultancy BRX as an offshoot of Big Red, the Ted Horton-owned creative agency where she was previously CEO.
Cleary, and Marty Hungerford, Big Red’s chief digital officer, will discuss how the agency is adopting AI tools internally, as well as working with partners and clients to help them adapt.
The panel will share examples and case studies of how they’re using AI for planning, campaign development and execution, where they see the major efficiency drivers of AI in the near future, and their perspectives on creating a workplace culture which enables staff to adapt to the speed of the technological evolution.
Meanwhile, Unmade is still taking speaker proposals for two previously announced sessions.
The AI Upfronts will help our audience find the AI-powered products and services that offer genuine utility to the marketing and media sectors, now and in the near future. And The Great DebAIte, will see two opposing teams dispute the proposition “Generative AI is not a threat to media and marketing jobs, but a much-needed tool to expand what’s possible at speed and low cost”.
Those interested in participating can email cat@unmade.media.
Delegates can save $90 on tickets by registering before the early bird discount expires on May 17. The event is capped at 320 delegates. 217 tickets are still available
The profit warnings have started
Tim Burrowes writes:
This week saw three of the Unmade Index’s companies issue different forms of profit warnings to the market.
Profit warnings emerge because boards are obliged to disclose to the market material information, including the unlikelihood of them hitting the profit number previously expected.
After relatively routine profit updates from Seven West Media and Pureprofile earlier in the week, yesterday saw one of the biggest negative reactions I can recall to a profit warning from a company within the media and marketing space.
Out of home company Ooh Media started the day knocking on the door of being a $1bn market capitalisation company. By 4pm it was worth $700m.
We’ll come back to Seven and Pureprofile, and start with Ooh. The market was spooked by a presentation from CEO Cathy O’Connor to the annual Macquarie conference. At the end, she included a trading update:
Most of that information was already in the public domain, thanks to Standard Media Index’s monthly tracking data.
The phrase “particularly soft”, referring to Ooh’s April performance clearly worried the market more than its upbeat assessment of May and June. Those two words cost shareholders more than $300m.
Reading between the lines, the update also seems to suggest Ooh has been losing share to rivals QMS (which holds the City of Sydney contract) and JC Decaux.
Yet there’s nothing in the update which really explains why the company should have lost a quarter of its value in an instant. It does look like an overreaction.
By contrast, the stock market was sanguine about Seven West Media’s update, which came from CEO James Warburton 24 hours earlier, at the first day of the Macquarie event. The SWM stock price blipped upwards by 1.3%, despite his confession that the TV market had declined by 11%, rather than the single digital fall the company previously forecast.
Perhaps investors were also mollified by SWM finding another $15-20m in savings. The market likes it when jobs are cut.
And a third company to inform the market this week that its full year profit number would be smaller was research house Pureprofile. Yet on the day of the announcement, which was part of its quarterly financial update to the market, the PPL share price grew by 3.85%, the best on the Unmade Index that day.
The major reason for the movement was the decision for Pureprofile to finally get out of the increasingly low margin programmatic advertising business. Having already shuttered its Pure.amplify Media unit in the UK, it announced the same for Australia.
Although Pure.amplify delivered $2.9m of the company’s annual Australian revenue, that only translated into $200,000 profit in the quarter just gone.
Of wider significance than the closure of the shrinking programmatic operation is what it says about the direction of the Pureprofile.
It’s the end of the original vision of founder Paul Chan, who left five years ago. Chan visualised a research business where panels of people completing online surveys would share so much information about themselves, they could be targeted by advertisers at a higher revenue rate. But while a solid idea in practice, the company was never able to execute, particularly after it got into financial difficulties which saw it teeter on insolvency. Matters were not helped by a costly and ill advised investment in performance marketing operation Cohort.
Under CEO Martin Filz, who came on as Pureprofile CEO three years ago, the company has gone back to a much simpler research model, split across its data & insights division and its growing self service platform.
Yesterday saw the Unmade Index fall by a hefty 3.81%, to 650.2 points.
Most of this was attributable to Ooh Media’s price fall. However, it was also a bad day for SCA which hit yet another new low in market capitalisation of $193m. Seven West Media saw its market cap fall below $600m.
The writer’s super fund owns shares in all the companies discussed above
Time to leave you to your Thursday. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media