BOTW: Supermassive alien upstarts; The Guardian does the right thing on betting ads (what took so long?)
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on a wildly windy night at Sisters Beach, with England opening up the batting in the background. Jeez, I love The Ashes, although all the sports betting ads are spoiling it a bit. More on that shortly.
Today: What lies behind the new burst of startup energy; The Guardian takes the high ground on betting ads; and another massive week in AI disruption.
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There’s something happening here; But what it is ain’t exactly clear
Tim Burrowes writes:
In agencyland, there’s disruption in the air. And that makes it an exciting time to be a marketer as new options emerge for hungry, different agency partners.
Some of it is the growing sense of an impending recession, which always shakes things out.
Then there’s the roaring freight train of generative AI, which will create more change in the industry over the next two years than the previous two decades.
Or maybe it’s simply that marketers are developing a new appetite for work that network agencies mostly aren’t giving them. That creates a market place for more people to make the leap.
Whatever the reason, the most interesting agency launches are coming from former network executives doing things for themselves.
On Thursday we saw the arrival of Supermassive (which is a great name) founded by three execs previously within the Havas top tier.
Behind Supermassive is Laura Aldington, previously CEO of creative agency Host/Havas; Simone Gupta, previously CEO of Havas PR; and Jon Austin, executive creative director of Host/Havas.
For Havas, it marks a changing of the guard after last year’s departure of ANZ chairman Anthony Freedman who’d been running the group from London in recent years.
Freedman’s DNA was still all over the place though. Havas bought Host from him in 2011 and merged it with the under-firing creative agency Euro RSCG. He also sold sister PR agency One Green Bean into the group, where it sat alongside Red Agency.
For a time, Host and One Green Bean were two of the most distinctive agency brands in the country. Host had the unusual model of an outsourced (usually to The Glue Society) creative operation, and often did amazing work, and One Green Bean was the first local PR agency to really nail the rise of social media.
Aldington was in on nearly eight years of Host while Austin was there for a decade. Gupta was with the group for a bit less time – coming back to Australia in 2020 to run One Green Bean before taking on the wider group PR role, running Red Havas too.
The new guard is led by James Wright, who returned to Australia as Havas group CEO a few months back. He was the person who turned around The Red Agency (now Red Havas) locally a decade ago before parlaying that into a global gig. With Austin’s departure, new Host/Havas boss CEO Gayle While gets to make an immediate creative appointment. We’ll have more on Wright and While’s agenda next week.
Meanwhile, Aldington, Gupta and Austin will get to build out an agency around the proposition of “effective non-traditional advertising and earned media”. At its best, Havas was one of the few groups that genuinely integrated PR with creative output across sister agencies at a strategic level. With Supermassive the trio will do that under a single banner.
It’s similar territory to that occupied by Thinkerbell, and where Dentsu Creative has set out its stall.
But Supermassive is by no means the only new indie in town, or indeed the only one to come out of Havas. It’s quite the incubator.
Seven months ago came the launch of Bread Agency, founded by Mary Proulx and Amaury Treguer. Proulx was head of social and influence at One Green Bean while Treguer was executive director of social at Red Havas. Their specialisation is social media as a commerce platform.
And this week the people behind another new model went public. Justin Drape and Michael Canning put their toes back into adland, with the launch of Exceptional Alien Studio.
Drape was co-founder of The Monkeys (which sold for $63m) and Canning was ECD at M&C Saatchi along with blue chip agencies like Leo Burnett and 72andSunny in the US.
They kicked off Exceptional Alien a couple of years ago as a high end, app-led take on travel guides. Like a more tightly focused Monocle magazine. This week they launched Exceptional Agency Studio, which puts them back in the world of advertising as they seek to bring brands into the conversation.
It’s definitely not a traditional agency, but it’s also not not an agency. The work they do for brands won’t be limited to the Exceptional Alien platform. Any marketer would be interested in working with those two.
Earlier this month we saw three Dentsu refugees go again. Like Drape they presumably don’t need to do it for the money. Justin and Dominique Hind, who built With Collective before selling it to Dentsu, have co-founded Reunion, alongside Stephen Knowles who founded and sold Accordant to Dentsu.
While the Reunion model is less sexy than Supermassive or Exceptional Alien Studio, it’s still industry-forward: like With Collective, it promises data-led creativity.
And that’s just this month.
Former M&C Saatchi CEO Jaimes Leggett recently launched Today The Brave. Then there’s Milk + Honey, founded by Andy DiLallo (TBWA, M&C Saatch, Leo Burnett and JWT) and Steve Jackson (Saatchi & Saatchi, Droga5, DDB and Innocean). And creative studio Bear Meets Eagle founded by Micah Walker (Wieden + Kennedy, The Monkeys and Mojo). They also represent interesting creative alternatives for marketers.
And I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty too. (Feel free to spruik your new offering via the comment button if I’m missing you.)
Sometimes when a big agency name launches something, it’s hard to tell whether it’s in truth just a one-person consultancy while they desperately try to find another well paid network job, or something more real. There are simply far fewer half million dollar network jobs around. That’s going to reduce further as holding companies consolidate and clients get more comfortable about conflict. Those who step off the merry-go-round may discover that it becomes a losing game of musical chairs.
However, what most of these new offerings have in common is that they offer something defined and specialist. Marketers are interested in talking to indies with skin in the game, particularly if it’s something the networks can’t offer.
There are going to be some awesomely interesting pitches coming up. I’m jealous of clients who get to see them.
The Guardian gets out of betting
If you wanted to see Australia’s sports establishment at its worse, last night’s Ashes coverage from Nine was a good place to start. Free of the post-8.30pm restrictions, the lunch break at Edgbaston was wall-to-wall betting ads, each followed by speedy, mandatory loss-making warning.
It was a hypnotic slab of loud, innovative ways to lose money. Maybe it’s because I’m not a regular AFL or NRL viewer so am not used to the sheer quantity, but I kind of felt embarrassed for Nine.
The Guardian announced this week that it was getting out of sports betting.
Good.
At a time when TV networks seem likely to be much more closely regulated, sending ad dollars online instead, the Guardian’s move is on a principle that will actually cost it money, in the millions. But if you’d told me that The Guardian had banned sports ads years ago – like it did for oil and gas companies back in 2020 – I’d have believed you.
For progressive media mastheads accepting money from brands known to create harmful addictive behaviours among some people is even harder to defend.
For more mainstream media brands, they need more regulation to save them from themselves. In a competitive, profit-based environment, their shareholders expect them to take the money if it’s legal. After all, it’s what drove up those expensive TV rights in the first place.
But with more regulation, the playing field will be levelled. There will be short term pain for all the networks, but changes will drive down the value of the next rights deal.
The Week in AI: Holding on to a rising balloon
Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s AI conference for media and marketing, humAIn – human creativity x AI writes:
BREAKING: Humans Willing to Learn from History As Long As There Is Quite A Lot Of Money At Stake
Major tech companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe began discussions with leading media companies such as News Corp, Axel Springer, The New York Times, and The Guardian about using their content to train artificial intelligence technology. These negotiations are in the early stages and could result in media organisations being paid a subscription-style fee.
The discussions are a response to concerns about potential copyright infringement, and those involved cite the issues around content funding models from the early internet era. Google has recently announced a generative search function, which returns an AI-written information box above its traditional format of web links. Discussions are currently underway to establish a pricing model for news content used as training data for AI models, with figures between $5 million and $20 million a year being suggested.
Are Friends Synthetic?
Meta and Microsoft joined the Partnership on AI’s (PAI) initiative for responsible practices for what’s now being termed “synthetic media.” The group aims to promote the responsible development, creation, and sharing of AI-generated media. The initiative, backed by companies including Adobe, BBC, OpenAI, and TikTok, seeks to minimize misinformation and ensure users understand the content they’re viewing may be AI-generated. The partnership will focus on responsible synthetic media disclosure, and share case studies among supporters who distribute, create, and develop synthetic media technology.
What fresh hell is this?
DDB Melbourne and Mango launched a campaign using generative AI for Funlab, the company behind Strike Bowling and Holey Moley, encouraging businesses to host their corporate parties at Funlab venues instead of their offices. The campaign, “Office Party from Hell,” uses grotesque AI-generated text to video to highlight the absurdity of forced office fun. The campaign was brought to life in under a week using the new generation of Text to Video AI technology.
DDB Group Melbourne Creative Director Giles Watson said: “The thing about AI-generated video at this stage is… it’s pretty absurd. But not as absurd as having your office party at your own office.”
Follow the money
Accenture, the global consulting firm, announced a $3 billion investment in AI to take place over the next three years. The firm plans to double the size of its Data & AI practice team from 40,000 to 80,000 via hiring, internal training, and external acquisitions. Accenture also announced its AI Navigator for Enterprise, a new platform to help clients define AI business cases and choose architectures/models. The firm will also establish data and AI readiness accelerators across 19 industries and launch a new Center for Advanced AI.
And Salesforce launched AI Cloud, its enterprise AI solution. The platform integrates various Salesforce technologies, offering real-time generative AI capabilities. The core of AI Cloud is the new Einstein Trust Layer, which the software giant claims will ensure data privacy and security. Salesforce’s AI Cloud addresses issues of trust in enterprise-level generative AI by protecting sensitive data within AI applications and workflows, acknowledging concerns around data privacy, security, and compliance.
Voiceboxing clever
This morning (Australian time) Meta revealed its new AI speech generation tool Voicebox. According to the announcement: “In the future, multipurpose generative AI models like Voicebox could give natural-sounding voices to virtual assistants and non-player-characters in the metaverse. They could allow visually impaired people to hear written messages from friends read by AI in their voices, give creators new tools to easily create and edit audio tracks for videos, and much more.”
Three weeks to go
Unmade released the full program for our half-day conference on AI in marketing, humAIn. The event takes place in Sydney on July 12. Design platform Canva, which is developing a series of generative AI tools and held its first developer conference this week, was among the new speakers announced. View the humAIn program here.
COTW: Mars – For You Who Did That Thing
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s ANZ reporter, Tom Loudon writes:
This week’s campaign of the week comes from Thinkerbell, for Mars.
“For You Who Did That Thing You Did” captures the feeling a small victory brings. Thinkerbell has created a spot imbued with optimism and satisfaction.
The simple, fun campaign is a fresh approach to everyday life. It doesn’t worry about emphasising the brand or highlighting itself, striving to be engaging content rather than an interruption.
Unmade Index nudges upwards
Seja Al Zaidi writes
The week ended on a slightly positive note on the Unmade Index. Our measurement of the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks finished Friday up by 0.36% to land at 631.8.
The two largest stocks on the Index saw some modest positive action, with Nine lifting 0.51% and Domain 1.75%. Communications agency holding group Enero also rose 2.2%.
Southern Cross Media saw the biggest fall yesterday, dropping by 3.27%, while publishing and marketing firm IVE Group dropped 1.32%. Ooh Media has seen its share price hit an 11 month low, dropping to $1.17 yesterday.
Time for me to leave you to the weekend.
I’ll be back on Monday with Abe Udy for Start the Week. Then there’ll be some hectic travel. I’ll be over in Europe for the next three weeks or so (no, not Cannes. As far as I know, I’m still banned because of Mumbrella’s scam coverage eight years ago.) I’ll be dropping by MAD//Fest, among other events.
If you happen to be a London-based reader (or a friend I’ve forgotten to mention to that I’m coming), please do hit me up if you’d like to grab a coffee.
And in the meantime, don’t forget to take advantage of our membership offer before it expires. It’ll never be available at a bigger discount.
And we’ve just published the full program for humAIn – human creativity x AI. You really should come.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
