BOTW: The biggest job in radio, but is it an impossible one?
Welcome to Best of the Week, mostly written on Friday afternoon at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today’s writing soundtrack: Lemon Jelly – Lost Horizons
Happy National Hammock Day. I have a hunch that’s one for the northern hemisphere.
Today: The ABC acts on its audio crisis. Could it become a competitor for commercial radio once more?
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Rescue Mission (near) Impossible: Can Ben Latimer come in from commercial radio and reverse the ABC’s audio decline?
There is no hotter hotseat than the one Ben Latimer will take possession of in just over a week’s time. He was announced on Wednesday as the new Head of Audio Content for the ABC.
Latimer will be walking into what is arguably the biggest job in Australian radio. He will be responsible for almost all of the ABC’s radio and streaming content. That’s more stations and more listeners than any rival commercial radio outfit.
Three of the ABC’s most urgent problems are now his.
The flagship ABC Radio National has shed so much audience is risks losing its social licence. The ABC’s city stations have lost significant audience share compared to their commercial counterparts. And the 18-24-year-old target audience of Triple J are increasingly choosing commercial radio, or leaving radio altogether.
That’s just the top of his inbox. In audio, Latimer will also be responsible for sport, ABC Classic and the digital offerings of Double J, Unearthed, ABC Jazz, ABC Country and ABC Classic. The ABC’s six-year-old Audio Studios, responsible for creating podcast-first content also falls within his remit.
Latimer is an ABC outsider, who made his name in commercial radio. His appointment comes as a relief. The worst possible outcome would have been for the role to go to an ABC insider.
One reason the public broadcaster’s audio output has drifted so far off course is because those ABC insiders have defaulted to doing what they’ve always done, even as budgets shrink and audience habits change. Particularly at Radio National, there are a lot of protected fiefdoms it will take an outsider to blow up.
Latimer is as well credentialed as anyone to take on the role. He spent more than a decade with Australian Radio Network, including as executive producer on WSFM’s Jonesy & Amanda Show.
He also spent nearly six years with Lachlan Murdoch’s Nova Entertainment, initially program director on Smooth FM and then head of programming at sister station Nova. Latimer had a major hand in luring Ben Harvey and Liam Stapleton away from Triple J, first to Nova’s Adelaide breakfast show and then to the bigger market of Melbourne.
I suspect that many ABC radio personnel will turn their noses up at having somebody from the commercial radio world now setting their priorities. Public service radio is different and we shouldn’t obsess over ratings, they’ll rightly argue.
When Harvey left Triple J he told news.com.au: “In community radio, ratings don’t matter. At Triple J, they try to say it matters but no one really cares.” Which is sort of true. The mission for the ABC is to be for everyone, not just advertising-friendly demographics. Ratings should not matter as much. But they do still count as a measure of whether audiences are being reached.
Perhaps the biggest shortfall on Latimer’s resume is a lack of time spent on news and current affairs-led radio which makes up much of the Radio National and city station output, particularly in primetime. Earlier in his career Latimer was content director on the now defunct News-Talk 5DN in Adelaide, but otherwise most of his experience has been with music stations.
However, accepting the caveat that a non-ABC person was needed to create change, that means no one person could step into the new role with experience across all genres.
The big question now is whether the new guard at the ABC can overcome the inertia of a demoralised workforce, mostly stuck in a way of doing things. Plenty of outsiders have tried and hit fierce resistance. For every Mark Scott who achieved change there were two Kim Williams or Jonathan Shiers who tried and failed.
One manager on their own cannot achieve that change, but there is other new blood.
Latimer will report in to the ABC’s new chief content officer Chris Oliver-Taylor, who came across from Netflix and previously ran production house Fremantle.
Other recent new arrivals from outside include Rachel Okine from Stan as Head of Scripted, and Susie Jones, also from Netflix, as Head of Factual.
Latimer will need to make unpopular moves, and ask difficult questions. Should Radio National merge its news and current affairs output with ABC News Radio (which appears to be outside his remit in the news division)? Would Double J be a better fit for the spectrum occupied by Triple J? In order to shift resource towards key areas, where should it be moved away from?
The end of year on air talent contract renewals process will likely be a bloodbath. It should be. However, there needs to be even more change behind the scenes.
It’s a daunting to-do list. In commercial radio, the audience problem would have been addressed long before things got to this point. But if there’s a bright side to the ABC’s dire situation, it’s the fact that the case for radical action is inarguable.
Big mandate. Big mission.
Week in AI: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Cat McGinn writes:
Oryx and Fake
Over 9,000 authors, including Margaret Atwood and Dan Brown, demanded compensation from tech companies like OpenAI, Meta, IBM, Stability and Google for using their copyrighted works in AI training. The writers argue that these companies’ use of AI is profiting unfairly from their work, and violating their intellectual property rights. They allege that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Chat GPT, Bard and so on have been trained using their work without consent, credit, or compensation, and demand fair compensation for both past and ongoing use of authors’ works in AI programs. They argue this misuse threatens the writing profession, diversity and literary culture.
DisintegrAItion
As your humble correspondent predicted, AI trained on AI, risks increased error and hallucination. Researchers at Rice and Stanford Universities found that training AI models with AI-generated content lead to the degradation of their output quality, a phenomenon they term “Model Autophagy Disorder” (MAD). Without fresh real data, the quality and diversity of AI outputs deteriorate. This self-consuming loop has implications for the future of AI, as generative models increasingly consume AI-synthesized data from the internet.
No drama Llama
Meta has launched a commercial version of Llama-v2, an open-source, large language model trained on several open test websites. Llama-v2,is a large language model (LLM) that uses AI to generate text, images, and code. Unlike other LLMs, Llama’s weights (the learned parameters during training) are publicly shared, making it easier to develop custom AI programs.
Despite concerns over its license not being approved by the Open Source Initiative, Llama-v2 is currently available for research and commercial use.
Meta claims its objective is to encourage responsible AI innovation.
Down day for Domain on the Unmade Index
The Unmade Index, which measures the performance of ASX-listed media and marketing stocks, slipped for a second day yesterday, ending the week on a 0.73% fall to land at 664.4 points.
The two biggest stocks, Nine and Domain, fell 1.45% and 2.61% respectively.
Other losers included ARN Media ( down 1.43%) and Southern Cross Media (down 1.03%).
The only stocks on the Index to see any positive movement were those on the shallower end of the pool, including The Market Herald which saw a 12.07% rise in its share price.
Campaign of the Week: Cadbury’s Cheer and a Half
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight their most interesting advertising campaign of the week.
LBB’s AUNZ reporter Casey Martin said:
This week’s campaign of the week is from Ogilvy and Wavemaker for Cadbury. Celebrating the Women’s World Cup, this inspirational spot encourages the celebration of women’s sport from the grassroots clubs to the professional leagues.
Letters: A listener is a listener is a listener
From CRA’s John Musgrove:
Tim, in response to your column of 15 July 2023, CRA strongly rejects the notion that there is anything misleading in the way DAB+ audiences are presented.
In the history of radio audience measurement globally, radio surveys have ALWAYS measured listeners, not the device of listening.
This is because advertisers buy based on audiences – they are less concerned about the type of devices people are using.
In the GfK surveys, DAB+ stations such as CADA and Triple M Classic Rock are presented showing their total cumulative audience (both over the air and online), which is completely consistent with the way AM and FM stations are presented.
Radio’s strength is that it is ubiquitous and evolving – most people do not listen on only one device but use many across the week depending on what is convenient and what they are doing at the time – whether they are at home, in the car or at the gym.
DAB+ stations are performing well because listeners are attracted to their content. Other positive factors include new formats attracting younger demos and the increase in new cars with DAB+ (more than 850,000 cars with DAB+ hit the road in calendar 2022).
The launch of the new Radio 360 methodology last month provides deeper insights into platform of listening, separating out broadcast and streaming audiences for the first time. Education of the market about how to interpret and use these new insights is an ongoing part of the process, particularly as listening continues to evolve.
In regards to Infinite Dial, the presentation clearly states that AM/FM/DAB+ includes listening “over the air and online”. Again this is consistent with measuring total audiences regardless of how they are tuning in.
John Musgrove, Head of Research, Commercial Radio + Audio
Tim Burrowes replies:
Thanks for the letter, John. I agree that listening should be measured across all platforms. The element that causes confusion is bundling together listening to stations on DAB+ and via streaming, then labelling it all as DAB+ listening.
Yes, the text of the Infinite Dial presentation used the caveat “over the air and online”. The spoken presentation to accompany the launch – which is what I quoted in the article – did not. Larry Rosin, boss of Edison Research, used these words: “An increasing number are also listening to DAB+. Last year our estimate was 18% of Australians saying they had used DAB+ in the week before. This year it jumps dramatically to a third of all Australians. Seven million people saying they’ve used DAB+ in the last week.”
That’s simply incorrect. That was the number listening to DAB+ or streaming. The actual DAB+ number would have been about half that.
This week’s Unmade highlights
In case you missed them, here are some of the best posts from the Unmade team across the week just gone:
AI’s transmogrification from miraculous to mundane
Cat McGinn, curator of our HumAIn conference, distilled how her thinking about AI had developed during the curation process…
How Netflix is being boosted by its ad tier
Netflix makes the weather for the entire screen industry. Tim Burrowes dug into this week’s new Netflix subscriber numbers…
The Scire plan
Chris Janz, founder of Scire, the biggest media startup of the year, gave Unmade his most detailed interview to date ahead of the launch of Capital Brief…
Are the big brands behaving better?
Seja Al Zaidi looked for trends in the last quarter of Ad Standards determinations
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
For those following along, the Sisters Beach Chess Club soared to seven or eight players last Saturday afternoon. I picked up a couple of cheeky wins against better players. I’m not expecting lightning to strike twice this afternoon though.
Abe Udy, Seja Al Zaidi and I will be back on Monday with Start the Week.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
