BotW: Amazon joins the fight for video ad dollars; a damp election campaign launch; and the Naked legacy
Welcome to Best of the Week, kicked off on QF1563 home to Tassie and wrapped up this morning on a bright, chilly morning in Evandale.
Today: Here comes Amazon (and Paramount); how not to run an election campaign; end of the Adams era at RN; and (as we often seem to be saying) the Unmade Index hits a new low.
Happy Geek Pride Day.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:
Member-only pricing for our HumAIn (May 28) and REmade (October 1) conferences;
A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);
Member-only content and our paywalled archives;
Your own copy of Media Unmade
Enter Amazon
On Wednesday, another piece fell into place on the evolution of the local TV market. Amazon’s Prime Video revealed it will launch its advertising tier in Australia in five weeks time, on July 2.
With an Amazon subscription in around 5m (of Australia’s 9.3m) households, that’s not dissimilar reach to a metro free to air network, even if the number of average minutes consumed is likely far less.
What was interesting about the message to consumers is that although there is an ad-free option for $2.99 per month, that was downplayed. The sense is that Amazon’s strategy is about offering a large, logged in audience to advertisers as the primary video revenue stream.
It’s a direct assault on its free to air rivals. Prime positions its ad tier to customers as having “meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV”.
The Prime launch will comes a matter of days after Paramount Plus kicks off its $6.99 local ad tier next month.
That’s two giants head-to-head: The retail media network of Amazon, plus its video offering is a significant new 800lb gorilla in the jungle. Paramount’s advertising suite across Paramount Plus, along with Tenplay, the Pluto-powered channels and free to air via Ten is the only place in the market offering all the acronyms – BVOD, SVOD, FAST and free-to-air – in one place.
For a market in an advertising downturn, the key question is whether there is marketer demand for even more video inventory. The problem in streaming video always used to be of advertiser demand exceeding supply. That’s changed.
A small canary: For the first time I can recall, my inflight Qantas entertainment on last week’s London trip had no paid advertising, just house ads.
Things can only get wetter
A general election campaign got under way in the UK this week. Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4.
It’s a wonderful object lesson in how not to do political communications.
Sunak made his Downing Street announcement while rain hammered down. I presume his strategists thought his refusal to indulge in the frivolity of umbrellas might make him look tough, or stoic. The alternative – having somebody hold a brolly for him would have only made him seem even more of an effete billionaire.
Maybe the stoic look might have worked, if protestors had not cranked up a PA system and begun playing D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, which became the anthem of the 1997 New Labour election campaign.
In such moments, control counts for a lot. Downing Street actually had a much better alternative available. It has an expensively fitted Press Briefing Room. That would have been both dry and sound proof.
The image of Sunak trudging away form his lectern and into the door of Number 10 will follow him for the rest of his career.
There was a highly enjoyable read in Media Week on Thursday, based around the 20th anniversary of Naked Communications, the media strategy agency that shook the established groups out of their complacency before dying once it was acquired by Photon Group (now Enero).
The story is well told, even if there’s an element of ‘you had to be there’ to understand just what a big deal the Heidi / Witchery lost jacket hoax was at the time. Everyone, myself included, publishing updates several times a day at one point, on Mumbrella, got completely carried away.
But one element missing was due credit for the original DNA of the agency. Naked was cloned from London where a similar trio of Jon Wilkins, Will Collin and the late John Harlow blew up the media strategy world a couple of years before.
The success of Naked Australia was down to the lightning-in-a-bottle mix of door-kicker Baxter, client whisperer Wilson and System 2 thinker Ferrier. But they’d never have come together without Harlow, Wilkins and Collin.
From the narrow perspective of a journalist who enjoys interesting people, the local beat became far more lively this week with the news that Baxter is becoming the regional CEO of media mix modeling platform Mutinex. It’s a role which will should leave him relatively unrestrained from offering a point of view on the market. Good.
The early interviews of Baxter and Mutinex founder Henry Innis have already put a target on their back. Baxter’s comments about marketers in his B&T interview raised some eyebrows, and hackles. “The number one thing that marketers need to know is what works and what doesn’t work. As amazing as this sounds, 99.9% of marketers don’t have a fucking clue, and if they have no idea what their budgets are doing, they deserve to be fired.”
I’ve recorded a podcast with them which we’ll be uploading on Thursday. As you’ll hear next week, it’s slightly more restrained than their words in the written article, but nonetheless, they’re clearly planning to light some fires.
Radio National’s nighttime transition.
Speaking of cloned DNA, the ABC finally announced one of its key generational transitions this week, with 84-year-old Phillip Adams being replaced by 76-year-old David Marr on Radio National’s Late Night Live.
In DNA terms, Marr is a good fit for the left leaning Adams whose national treasure status gave him an unofficial exemption from the principle that those employed by the national broadcaster should not let their allegiances show.
Marr’s time with the Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian will see the audience expecting more of the same.
The question is whether Marr finds himself on a tighter leash than the freedom Adams carved out for himself over 33 years in the chair.
Thanks to its daylight hours replay and longevity, the show is far more important to the Radio National tone than the 10pm timeslot might suggest
As former ABC Media Watch presenter Jonathan Holmes wrote of Adams in his book On Aunty: “His guests are still interesting, his interviews stimulating – if you are sympathetic to his values. If you’re not, he must be infuriating.”
Marr, a generationally great journalist, is a good appointment, albeit only for a relatively temporary period until the network goes into its traditional long Christmas shutdown in late November.
The transition marks an opportunity for the management to recapture some lost ground when it comes to neutrality ahead of what surely – surely – must be a bigger rethink in 2025 for the entire, moribund network.
Unmade Index hovers over 500
The Unmade Index lost more ground on Friday, dropping 0.33% to 505.4 points.
The index – which tracks the movement of Australia’s listed media and marketing stocks – is now running at its lowest point since we launched it at the beginning of 2022 on a 1000-point opening.
If it falls below 500 points that would mean that the market value has halved in little more than two years.
Yesterday, Seven West Media had the worst of it, losing 5.13% to land on a market capitalisation of $285m, close to its March low point.
Meanwhile Ooh Media slipped below an $800m valuation, ARN Media dropped below a $250m valuation and Southern Cross Austereo is once again well below $200m.
COTW: Umm…
In each edition of BotW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week
LBB’s APAC reporter Casey Martin writes:
This week’s campaign of the week comes from SICKDOGWOLFMAN on behalf of WorkSafe Victoria. SDWM have used a giant furry creature to showcase risky workplace situations that can happen to anyone.
Each interaction lasts only a few seconds but encourages younger workers to act on their instincts when something is wrong with their workplace. If it makes you go ‘Umm…’ than it’s not right.
In case you missed it:
On Monday we started the week with a podcast chat with Open AI as our guest cameo:
On Tuesday we pointed to a correlation between TV networks ending their investment in children’s programming, and a generational switchoff of linear viewing:
On Wednesday we dug into a new report examining the rise of media agency groups selling on media to their clients rather than buying it on their behalf:
On Thursday we talked about the next phase of Australia’s largest independent publisher Mamamia.
On Friday we asked whether the endgame for media is being owned by AI companies as creators of human training data:
Time to leave you to your weekend.
If you haven’t already had enough of me, please listen to an interview I recorded as a guest on futurist Ross Dawson’s Amplifying Cognition podcast which was published this week. We recorded it sufficiently long ago, that I’d forgotten enough of our conversation about how AI is already disrupting the media and marketing industries to enjoy hearing it as if it was somebody’s else’s conversation..
You’ll also find Ross on the stage at Tuesday’s HumAIn conference. He’s taking part in our debate on whether AI is media’s extinction level event. I’ll be moderating.
And if there’s room in your life for yet about 13 minutes of me, then I also popped up on Listnr’s The Briefing this morning, discussing the cancellation of P Diddy and other musicians. We recorded that one at the World Square studios yesterday.
It’s not too late to get a ticket to HumAIn, by the way. It always feels fake when event organisers start claiming tickets are nearly sold out to create some artificial sense of urgency. We’ve got a great turnout, but there are still plenty of tickets, so relax.
Ahead of HumAIn , I’ll be travelling back to Sydney tomorrow. If anybody’s got a better suggestion on where to watch Southampton’s midnight play-off final game than Cheers Bar, I’m all ears.
And Abe Udy and I will be I’ll be back on Monday with the Start the Week podcast. If Saints get promoted, then I may still be drunk when we record it.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
