BOTW: Can marketers find an edge in the media mix?; TV’s good-bad week; Another AI shock
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on Friday afternoon at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania, with the more-than-slight distraction of dolphins playing in the bay.
Today: How marketers find an edge in media buying; the (latest) AI video revolution; and TV’s mixed week.
Happy Tim Tam Day for yesterday.
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Winning against the house
I’ve had quieter Thursdays. I started the day in Sydney moderating a couple of panels at Commercial Radio Australia’s Heard conference (it still feels odd being at The Ivy in daylight). And by the end of the day I was at a family birthday dinner in Burnie (Boomtown, baby).
We’ll share a recording of those panels in our podcast feed next week.
One topic I found myself thinking about since, is the question of where marketers can find an edge in their media buying, if they break out from the herd.
It’s not a new concept. The first time somebody explained the planning and buying sides of media agencies to me was back in the UK, nearly 25 years ago. He used the real example of his agency’s cat food client, Felix.
The brand’s image was a black and white cat, which made sense for advertising in newspapers, which were yet to have colour on every page. That meant those inside, non-colour pages were relatively low cost inventory
The agency commissioned research to discover which newspaper group’s readers were disproportionately likely to be cat owners. Then they’d gone to the newspaper group, and negotiated a preferential deal if they gave them most of their print budget.
The yin and yang of media agencies: planning and buying. As a result, the tiny media budget stretched many times further than it should have done.
Oddly, I just stumbled on a post somebody wrote about the project back in 2017. It’s well worth a read – the media planner mentioned in the article, Kevin Brown, was indeed the person who told the story to me.
About 15 years ago, I remember a not dissimilar conversation with strategist Julian Cole. He was evangelising the new advertising targeting opportunities recently launched by Facebook. For their price, Facebook was offering brands a huge edge. The ROI of this new product was massive. That price soon went up as digital marketers discovered it for themselves, but those who found it early found a temporary edge.
Which brings me to this week’s discussion.
One of the propositions discussed on stage is whether radio has the potential to offer a similar edge for brand campaigns. With so much emphasis on performance in radio, could brand campaigns deliver a bigger ROI given that the medium is relatively cheap?
Mark Ritson made the argument in his presentation later in the day. And In one of the panels I moderated, Paul Sinkinson, MD of Analytic Partners, shared details of the trial he’s been working on to test that proposition. So which medium does offer the cheapest ROI, I asked? He argued that eventually the ROI always goes down as marketers move to what works.
The science of media mix modelling will likely result in those discrepancies being more quickly discovered, particularly when the herd all moves in that direction.
But, particularly for smaller brands, that’s one of the things a media agency should be able to deliver: Finding a buying edge for an individual brand while it exists.
Could Seven West Media get swallowed up?
It was a funny old week for television, with highs and lows for Seven and Paramount.
On Monday, Seven got to cheer about its Super Bowl ratings. Despite an average national audience of only 800,000, the length of the show saw Super Bowl push Nine’s Married At First Sight (average audience: 1.4m) down to second place for reach. The big game reached 2.55m; MAFS got to 2.51m.
And on Tuesday Seven’s share price tanked after releasing it’s half year financial results. We covered it on Wednesday, but one additional point has since occurred. Yesterday, Crikey’s Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer raised the question of whether Seven West Media will remain on the ASX in its own right.
They argue that the real value of the network for major shareholder Kerry Stokes is in the influence Seven and The West Australian offer in Perth, which particularly benefits his industrial interests which sit within Seven Group Holdings, his other ASX vehicle. So could SGH take direct control?
Stokes is a fan of creeping up the share register of his takeover targets. He did it to take control of the Seven Network in 1996. He did it for West Australian Newspapers in 2009. He did it for Boral in 2021.
And indeed, just before the market closed for Christmas, Seven Group Holdings revealed that it had crept up the SWM register from 39.2% to 40.2%. It’s starting to look like the plan.
Meanwhile, Paramount had a similar good / bad week.
It was able to cheer its own Super Bowl numbers in the US with a total average audience of 123.4m, and reach of 202.4m. And the group also saw the triumphant return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show on Comedy Central
But the rest of the week saw a series of headlines about global job cuts at Paramount.
The Paramount coverage looks overblown, for now at least. They amount to about 3% of the workforce. That’s smaller than the cuts made at most other media companies in Australia over the last few months. Unless Paramount’s Australian operation, Network 10, is disproportionately affected (which is of course possible), the headlines didn’t deserve to be as big as they were.
Hello, Sora
As is almost becoming routine, OpenAI announced a revolutionary new AI tool this week.
The text-to-video tool Sora turns a simple prompt into realistic looking video. So far, Sora has only been selectively released, but it looks to have incredible capabilities. Those in the video special effects, and wider advertising, industry will have shuddered.
Fifteen months in, the pace of change in generative AI still isn’t slowing.
Unmade Index slides some more
The Unmade Index lost another 1.54% yesterday, taking its slide to 4.3% for the week. The index is once again hovering only just above 600 points, on 600.9.
Yesterday’s worst performer was Domain, losing 6.2%. Meanwhile Ooh Media gave back most of the steady gains it’s been making over the last fortnight, losing 3.9%, with most of that fall coming in the last minutes of trading.
COTW: Leave early
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their Campaign of the Week.
LBB’s APAC reported Tom Loudon writes:
VML launched a state-wide campaign urging Victorians to leave early during extreme fire danger days, emphasising the importance of preparedness and the risks of staying behind in powerful commercials directed by Rune Milton.
The campaign for client the Department of Justice and Community Safety, utilises various mediums including social media, digital platforms, radio, press, and TV commercials, alongside a newly introduced digital tool for creating personalized fire plans.
In case you missed it on Unmade this week:
On Monday, we began the week remembering media buyer Harold Mitchell:
On Tuesday, in a post for Unmade’s paying members, Tim Burrowes explored why this year’s Super Bowl advertising was so strategically unadventurous:
On Wednesday, Seven West Media’s half year update spooked the market:
On Thursday, we spoke to Vinyl Group boss Josh Simons and The Brag Media co-founder Luke Girgis about their plans as the ASX’s only listed music business:
On Friday, Cat McGinn warned that the marketing industry risks being left behind thanks to the government’s go-slow on legislation around AI:
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
Abe Udy and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
