BOTW: How long does AM radio have left?; Translating the ABC’s five-year plan; TMH woes will drag on
Welcome to Best of the Week, edited on a chilly Saturday morning in NW Tasmania.
Today: The ABC has a new five-year plan but can it admit (even to itself) that it has an audience problem?; Why the end of Market Herald saga keeps receding; And Instagram prepares an AI-bot.
Unmade’s paying members help us fund our independent analysis. In return they get full access to our archive, which goes behind the paywall after two months; a reduced price for our events, including humAIn and RE:Made; and our exclusive Tuesdata posts.
You can become an Unmade subscriber today and save 45%. The price will never be as low again.
The ABC has a plan: Less radio and more marketing
Tim Burrowes writes:
Five-year plans seem to come around more often these days.
Three years since the last one, the ABC yesterday announced a new five-year plan aiming to align with its new, longer funding cycle.
It was momentarily daunting when the plan dropped yesterday afternoon. A big policy document to read at the end of the week. Better recaffeinate.
Reader, my coffee didn’t even get cold. The 12-page document (or eight if you remove the picture-only pages) wasn’t content heavy. The FAQ email issued internally to the ABC’s staff took longer to read than the actual document.
Perhaps the large amount of white space assisted with the reading between the lines. The ABC will merge or close (“rationalise”) some of its radio operations as it belatedly tries to adapt to the digital disruptions which are already well advanced.
The five year plan doesn’t contain the word “redundancies”, but the staff FAQ does, four times.
It’s often hard to tell from the outside whether the ABC’s management is in denial about the challenges they face.
You may recall, that on Wednesday, we covered the first release of the Radio 360 audience data.
We pointed out that Radio National’s audience is still bleeding, including average listening to RN’s breakfast timeslot in Perth falling to just 1,000 listeners. This was picked up by news.com.au. and in turn by the Daily Mail.
That was enough to trigger an almost Trumpian statement from the ABC. It was, apparently, a gross misrepresentation.
The first paragraph of that statement was carefully crafted. The casual reader might assume that a specific, particularly bad quarter of an hour had been cherry picked, as occasionally happens when somebody writes about a TV show’s poor overnight audience.
In fact, that 1,000 number for RN Breakfast in Perth was the average in the 5.30 to 9am timeslot, in any given 15 minutes during the survey period from February 6 to May 20. Not just some one off.
The ABC statement then pivoted to cumulative audience – how many people tune in for at least eight minutes at some point during the week. But it left out the Perth cume number. That was just just 15,000 for the timeslot. Incidentally it was 16,000 in Adelaide, 51,000 in Brisbane, 120,000 in Melbourne and 59,000 in Sydney. That adds up to 261,000, so I’ve no idea where the ABC has got its “just over 300,000” number from, although I have asked them.
(Sunday update:
A spokesman for the ABC replied:
“Our statement based on:
• 308k for all GfK markets for RN Breakfast. S3 2023. 5.30am-9am
• includes Canberra, Newcastle, Gold Coast/Tweed as well as 5 Cap Cities.
Hope that clears it up for you.”
LOL.)
The final paragraph of that statement, around the number of weekly streams, is similarly unhelpful, nay, disingenuous.
Not that the ABC has made the number publicly available (thanks to its ongoing delays in joining the Australian Podcast Ranker despite repeatedly promising to do so), but I gather RN Breakfast is number 30 on the list of most popular ABC podcasts, delivering daily downloads in just four figures.
In itself, that’s not surprising, as live radio has never made for the most popular ABC podcasts, but suggesting otherwise is.
Just who is committing that “gross misrepresentation”?
The heavy spin is a puzzle. Yes, the organisation needs to put its best foot forward, and be seen to be defending its staff. But yesterday it announced four strategic pillars. Number one was trust. (The other three were delivering compelling content, reflecting contemporary Australia and “making sustainable choices in allocating resources”.
Being truth tellers, even hard truths about the ABC, is key to that trust.
Is there also an element of denial? Is it possible that ABC management is even now telling itself that RN is going okay?
Again, the document suggests they do know. While avoiding the word “marketing”(is that a dirty word in public service broadcasting?), the plan indicated that budget will shift towards more marketing.
That’s a good thing, by the way. What’s the point in making this stuff if the public can’t find it?
The internal note is less squeamish about using the m-word.
The evolution of AM
Another big clue on the future of AM radio emerged in that same Radio 360 data. An element I focused on, on Wednesday, was the extraordinary jump in streaming listening for Nine’s 2GB (with a 15% share of the total radio breakfast audience but 30.4% of the streaming audience) and 3AW (19.5% versus 35.7%).
My first thought was this must be some sort of error (double counted streams? People listening online who weren’t really in the city?) I’m vehemently assured not.
A couple of more compelling explanations emerged, not least in our comments.
One, relatively benign for the radio industry: is it likely that people listening to AM stations are more likely to switch to streaming when a higher quality version is available? That makes sense.
It would help explain why, just like Nine’s AM talk stations, the ABC’s AM-based city stations do better on streaming than they do in total listening. (ABC Sydney has a Monday to Sunday share of 6.5% of total radio listening, but a 9.9% share of streaming; ABC Melbourne has a 6% share of total radio listening, but 9.7% of streaming.)
The scary thing for most of the commercial radio industry is this though: what if people who stream turn away from radio altogether when it comes to music?
Why would you stream a radio station, with interruptive ads, when you could put on a Spotify playlist with exactly the same level of ease?
Take Smooth FM, the most playlist-based of all the networks. It’s share falls from 9.7% of total listening in Melbourne to 8.6% of streaming, and from 10.8% to 9% in Sydney.
It’s one reason why Southern Cross Austereo and ARN Media’s big pushes into talk-based podcasting is important, as a hedge against any decline of music radio.
Talk and personality will matter even more in streaming.
No resolution at the Market Herald
So what to do when you find the biggest shareholders of a company have behaved badly?
Having waited for the other shoe to drop on The Market Herald, this week it turned out to be a centipede. There are still several more shoes to drop. On Thursday, the Takeovers Panel did the bare minimum. The long term future of the ASX’s eighth biggest media company isn’t much clearer.
Having previously found that members of the Argyle family had been working together without declaring it, and that they had improperly increased their holdings, which left them in pole position to take over the company, on Thursday the Takeovers Panel released its ruling for what should happen next.
On the face of it, the Argyles look likely, in the short term at least, to control the destiny of the company which owns Hot Copper, Gumtree and Carsguide.
The panel told them that shares they obtained as part of the most recent two rounds of fund raising will have to be sold. And they will have to properly declare which shareholders are working together.
But they can retain most of their holdings, and it did not go as far as removing them from directorial control of the company.
It instructed them to appoint two additional independent directors. Which raises the question of how to find any directors with media experience who’d be willing to put their reputation on the line and join the current bin fire. And how to ensure they’d be genuinely independent.
But the main reason for anticipating more shoes to drop came in the final line of the announcement: “The Panel will publish its reasons for the decision in due course”. It may become clearer at that point, not only what happened, but whether any other regulators might be minded to take a look. Until that report is released, it’s worth reserving judgment on what happens next.
Week in AI: The Ubiquity
Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s AI conference for media and marketing, humAIn – human creativity x AI writes:
Nothing but blue sky*
Instagram looks to be developing an AI chatbot, according to data leaked by an app researcher. The social network is said to be planning to offer 30 different AI personalities, which could assist users and influencers in composing their messages on the platfom. Meta, Instagram’s parent company, has been incorporating these tools across various aspects of its established business operations, such as advertising sales, for some time.
Strap this to your face, it definitely doesn’t contain supersmart borderline sentient robots, yeah?
At Apple’s annual big developer showcase, aka WWDC, the company announced several significant AI features including an improved iPhone autocorrect using a machine learning transformer language model, akin to ChatGPT. It also revealed an on-device AI that circumvents data privacy issues faced by cloud-based AI. Notably, Apple announced the new augmented reality headset, Vision Pro, and showcased its application of AI in various features without ever mentioning “AI”, referring to the capabilities only as “machine learning”.
Cat shows little interest in returning to bag
Mediaocean’s 2023 Mid-Year Advertising Outlook Report, based on a survey of over 700 marketing leaders, highlights generative AI as a dominant trend. The most significant current use of generative AI in marketing is copywriting and data analysis, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and finding insights in large datasets. The rapid adoption of ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users in just a few months, underscores its impact. The rise of generative AI is said to be leading to improvements in workflow efficiency and media effectiveness, with marketers investing in AI-powered technologies to optimise campaigns and deliver more targeted and personalised messaging.
*your humble correspondent wouldn’t mind an invite, that’s all.
CotW: A giant Bondi turd
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB’s ANZ reporter, Casey Martin writes:
Special Group is on the money once again this week with their campaign for Better Packaging Co.
Installing a large art piece – a four-meter-high poo made of plastic pollution – onto the shore of Bondi Beach, the campaign draws eyes and makes those pay attention to the sheer amount of waste that accumulates on our beaches and in the ocean every day.
Rough week on the Index for Enero
Seja Al Zaidi and Tim Burrowes write:
The Unmade Index broke three days of consecutive falls with a slight improvement on Friday, swinging upwards by 0.49% up to land at 625 points.
Enero, parent company of ad agency BMF, had the worst day, falling by another 5.73% after issuing a downbeat trading update on Thursday which had triggered a 9.5% fall in price. Enero’s $137m market capitalisation is the company’s lowest in three years.
Seven West Media remains stranded with a market cap just below $600m having dropped back below that threshold on Thursday.
Southern Cross Austereo fell by 1.34% yesterday, while Ooh Media dropped 0.41%.
Time to leave you to your (in most states) long weekend. Because of the public holiday, there’s be no Start the Week Podcast on Monday. We’ll be back with Tuesdata.
Have a great weekend
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
