BOTW: Time up, betting ads; What is Scire?; When to tell and when to sell
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday afternoon and a golden Saturday morning at beautiful Sisters Beach, Tasmania.
Today’s writing track: The Smiths – The Queen is Dead. Happy Make Up Your Own Holiday for tomorrow.
Today: The tide turns for gambling ads and the mood music gets louder for TikTok. The next big publishing play exits stealth mode. And News Corp, Ooh Media and Snapchat spruik their wares.
Apologies that the email is a bit later than usual. There’s no more interesting explanation than it taking a little longer to finish than expected.
Before we get into today’s topics, I’m excited to share a bit of news about Unmade: We’ve grown the team. Three new members of staff have joined us.
Belinda Cusack has joined Unmade as Chief of Staff; Cat McGinn has come on board as Head of Curated & Commercial Content and Seja Al Zaidi joins next week as a journalist.
Cat and Belinda have both been working with Unmade since we began to create the RE:Made – Retail Media Unmade conference which ran at the beginning of this month. They’ve now moved into permanent roles.
As Chief of Staff, Belinda (belinda@unmade.media) will lead the company’s operations. A marketer by background, Belinda’s previous roles included more than a decade working for professional publisher LexisNexis.
Cat (cat@unmade.media) will be the brains of the company’s event content, and responsible for building the communities that sit alongside them, including RE:Made and humAIn. Cat is deeply embedded within the Australian media and marketing world. We originally worked together at Mumbrella a decade ago, The program she put together for RE:Made was widely (and deservedly) praised.
And Seja (seja@unmade.media) will join us in Unmade’s first pure journalist role. She’ll work with me on Unmade’s newsletter content, with a particular focus on deeply researched analysis for our Tuesdata posts for Unmade’s paying members. She’ll also contribute to Unmade’s podcast output. Until this week, Seja was working as a business journalist at Ausbiz whilst contributing to sister title Startup Daily. Before that she was a journalist at Mumbrella.
Unmade’s growth comes thanks to the support of our advertisers, sponsors and paying members. We’re determined to be a helpful, independent voice in a commoditised market. You can support us on the journey (and get full access to our archive which gets locked after two months) by becoming a paying member.
The infinite arc
Most media and marketing trends take so long to play out, it’s not always easy to call the moment they become unstoppable.
We’re currently experiencing at least three such moments.
First, TikTok. CEO Shou Chew testified before US Congress for the first time, in a gruelling hearing that went on for several hours yesterday morning.
Concerns about the platform’s abilities to suck in data about users have moved to front of mind, while TikTok’s links to China have placed it into the geopolitical crosshairs. TikTok was close to top of the news agenda across the world yesterday.
Things are unfolding in the same way they did with Facebook four or five years ago, as news of bad behaviour gradually emerged in a drip-drip process.
There’s a big piece in the AFR today revealing that TikTok lied to the newspaper (or to use the AFR’s more polite terminology, “contrary to the company’s previous claims”, when it denied last year that it collected users’ GPS data. It makes future denials from TikTok about acting on instructions from the Chinese authorities all the less credible.
It’s starting to look like an unstoppable tide which will either see TikTok banned from western countries’ app stores, or more likely ByteDance forced to sell the platform to a non-Chinese company.
Another incoming flood is around further regulation of gambling ads. What remains at stake for the industry is whether it can voluntarily take enough steps for itself before it’s forced to do so through legislation.
The revenues flowing through the media and into the sporting codes via TV rights deals have created an addiction to money pulled from problem gamblers. Rear Window columnist Joe Aston acknowledged it in the AFR on Thursday, describing them as “the vehicle of normalisation for this filth”.
Momentum for change is building. For the next three or four years, none of the major sporting codes need talk up the value of their TV rights, because all the major deals are locked in. The loss of some of those gambling ads would be the TV networks’ problem, not the sporting codes.
Outgoing AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan, able to speak with the honesty of someone who won’t have to negotiate the next deal, is becoming a little more outspoken, telling 3AW: “I think there is probably too much, yeah. I don’t have a problem that other people do around wagering, I just think the volume is too much. It’s in your face.”
On Thursday it emerged that News Corp appears to be pulling back from its push into gambling via its investment in Betr. The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that News Corp’s two directors have left the Betr board.
Today we saw News Corp’s Telegraph make its own call for more to be done to address problem gambling in its editorial around today’s NSW election.
And the third long-developing trend whose moment has come is, of course, AI. There was a fascinating interview released yesterday morning with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, talking to Kara Swisher about the possibilities and pitfalls. I noticed an evolution of Altman’s language. The terminology is no longer AI, but AGI – artificial general intelligence, computing as smart as humans.
This week alone, Google launched its AI chatbot Bard (although not yet in Australia), Microsoft unveiled Copilot for Office 365 (RIP, Clippy), Adobe revealed its AI art generator Firefly and Canva launched AI-driven design tools.
Our humAIn conference is only a little more than three months away, and I’ll never have been involved in organising an event where some much will change during that time.
Telling and selling
The contrasts in how media brands tell their stories was on display this week during a hectic few days in Sydney.
On Monday I was at News Corp’s D_Coded event, which is aimed at digital marketers. Positioned to emphasise the company’s off-platform reach beyond its mastheads (including Foxtel Group and REA Group), it was a bombastic sell.
One of the curiosities of the presentation was that at various points there were at least three calls to marketers that they should shift some of their BVOD – broadcast video on demand – advertising budget in News Corp’s direction. These were scripted, so there was nothing off-the-cuff about it.
After a number of years where the main enemy has been Facebook and Google, it was intriguing that News Corp focused on the BVOD dollars, which have flowed to Nine, Seven West Media and Paramount (and to a lesser extent SBS) rather than the wider video on demand market.
In a classic Frenemies moment, Kim Portrate (who is boss of both Think TV, which represents those BVOD players, and of the Premium Content Alliance of which News Corp is a shareholder) made a swift exit at the end of the presentation.
That’s life in a concentrated market. News Corp’s executive chairman Michael Miller summed it up in my podcast interview with him on Thursday: “I sometimes feel that some days I’m going to sit opposite a company and compete. Some days I’m going to sit next to them and complement.”
Speaking of that concentrated media market, Chris Janz and David Eisman dropped their first hints of their first big publishing project since leaving Nine.
A simple website is now live for Scire, which hints at big ambitions: “a generational company”.
The mission statement is bold:
It’s no secret Australia has one of the most concentrated media industries in the developed world.
In other English-speaking markets, new journalism outlets underpinned by innovative business models have emerged, bringing audiences additional choice. But in Australia the information landscape is still dominated by a handful of legacy corporations founded many decades ago.
There are reasons to be alarmed about this situation, particularly when trust in the news media is declining and the integrity of the information we consume is under threat.
We believe Australia deserves better.
And the callout to journos adds another clue: “We are seeking editors, senior correspondents and journalists to work in newsrooms across the country, with a particular focus on business, politics, power and technology.”
It looks set to be the biggest news launch since the arrival of The Guardian in Australia in May 2013.
Lots more on Scire soon, I suspect.
Meanwhile, Tuesday saw a media brand tell its story in the opposite way to the News Corp preso. Ooh Media unveiled its How Aussies Move survey at a breakfast event in Barangaroo.
I don’t think the name Ooh Media, or even the word billboard was uttered during the entire presentation. It was all about the consumers. The marketers and agency staff in the room were expected to join the dots on Ooh Media’s place in that world. Telling, not selling.
And I saw a third way of a media brand telling its story too. Snapchat’s global bosses were in town. They did a round table for the trade press. It was on background, which is why I haven’t written more about it.
The message is that Snapchat is not like other platforms – it’s about talking to friends, not the mass amplification of platforms like TikTok, Instagram et al. In the politicised panic about polarising algorithms, that could become an important distinction.
Campaign of the week: Suncorp Team Girls
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight the most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB Australia reporter Casey Martin writes:
Suncorp has created a love letter to female friendships. Titled ‘Every Girl’s Endgame’ Leo Burnett’s work not only celebrates one of Australia’s most popular sports, but also acknowledges the effect that team sports have on girls and young women.
Instead of promoting the sport as a competition, it’s positioned as lively and encouraging; female sport viewed through a female lens
Unmade Index finishes strong
The Unmade Index closed the week slightly ahead of where it started, with Friday delivering a third straight day of slight improvements with the index up by 0.31%, closing at 650.7 points.
In a day with little movement among the big media and marketing stocks, ARN’s owner HT&E led the index, rising by 0.95%.
Time to let you enjoy your Saturday
I’ll be back with Ave Udy for Start the Week on Monday.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
