Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we talk to two of the co-founders of Mercha - Ben Read and Sam Hardy. Plus, the top of town pushes down the Unmade Index.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

* A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including HumAIn (2025), REmade (September 2025), Unlock (31 October), and Compass (November);

* Member-only content and our paywalled archives;

* Your own copy of Media Unmade. 

The Unmakers: Meet Mercha - ‘A digital platform in an analogue industry’

Mercha can claim to be the first branded merchandise player in Australia to have fully digitised its processes in what remains marketing’s arguably most analogue sector.

Last month the company wrapped up a $300,000 crowd-funded seed round, valuing it at around $10m.

In today’s edition of The Unmakers, Unmade’s Tim Burrowes talks to CEO Ben Read and chief revenue officer Sam Hardy about why the promotional marketing sector has taken so long to scale up in Australia. As Hardy puts it: “Mercha is a digital platform in an analogue, old school industry.”

Over just three years, Mercha has ramped up to a turnover of $2.9m in the last financial year.

Promotional merchandise is also a sector facing headwinds as sustainability moves further up the agenda. Mercha claims to be part of the solution by focusing on products that people will want to keep. Says Read: “It is shocking to me that 66% of promotional products end up in landfill. That is just disgusting to me. It should never happen.

“We're trying to be better than an industry that is not trying hard enough.”

By way of example, Hardy adds: “We had a radio station out of Sydney ask us very early on in the piece to do 250,000 whistles for a New Year's Eve event. Plastic whistles next to the harbour. And it would have been great, the revenue. But we turned it down.

“I draw the line on offering people crap that's going into the bin or offering people product that's not made fairly.”

Unmade Index red up top, green below

The Unmade Index slipped on Wednesday after Nine, the biggest locally listed media and marketing stock lost 1.6% to fall back to a market capitalisation of $1.9bn.

The move added to the daylight between Nine and its 60.1% owned subsidiary Domain. Domain slipped by 1.2% yesterday.

Ooh Media was also on a losing trend yesterday, slipping by 1.1%

In the mid market, ARN Media and Southern Cross Austereo both saw slight improvements.

Vinyl Group, which this week announced the acquisition of blockchain music collectibles business Serenade, rose by 9.5%. In the company’s annual report released on Tuesday, it said it had written down the value of its Vampr “LinkedIn for musicians” platform, founded by CEO Josh Simons, by $1.8m, but remained “bullish”.

The Unmade Index slipped by 0.7% to 461 points.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. As disclosed in the podcast, at the time of recording this interview, I was considering taking part in the Mercha crowd funding round on Birchal, via my super fund. I did choose to invest

We’ll be back with an end-of-week update tomorrow.

Have a great day.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead. In today’s audio-led edition: We chew over what the ACCC’s concerns over Cartology and Coles 360 may mean for Australia’s retail media sector; Bruce Gordon retires; and yet another significant week in AI developments

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

* A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including HumAIn (2025), REmade (1 October), Unlock (31 October), and Compass (November);

* Member-only content and our paywalled archives;

* Your own copy of Media Unmade. 

Can retail media networks succeed if they are non-retailer owned?; AI’s latest threat; Bruce Gordon hands over

Last week, the ACCC lit the fuse on a new battleground for retailers - does their ownership of retail media networks give them too much power? In today’s podcast, recorded the day before our REmade - Retail Media Unmade conference, we discuss the implications.

Also today: Google’s AI Overviews are finally coming to Australia, which will alarm many publishers; and Google also unveils a powerful new research tool, Notebook LM. And Meta goes hard on AI-generated content.

And Bruce Gordon, proprietor of WIN and kingmaker at Nine, moves into retirement.

Further reading:

* Unmade: Cartel-ogy: The ACCC comes for retail media

* Unmade: Brands beware: ACCC’s supermarkets attack is PR used as an offensive weapon

* ACCC: Supermarkets inquiry August 2024 interim report

* The Australian: Consumer trust in Coles and Woolworths plummets following ACCC action

* Australian Financial Review: Google to test its artificial intelligence-powered search in Australia

* Australian Financial Review: Billionaire Bruce Gordon retires from WIN as succession questions loom

Today’s episode features Tim Burrowes and Cat McGinn.

(pic)

Editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Time to leave you to start your week. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade.

Tomorrow is Unmade’s third birthday and we’ll be sharing a post with some updates on how we’re travelling, and where we go next. So our usual, audio-led episode is a day earlier than usual, featuring the team at Man of Many at a point when independent digital publishing is a front page political issue.

Further down in the post, the Unmade Index hits another all time low as the valuation of ASX-listed media and marketing companies falls to the lowest point since we started the index two-and-a-half years ago.

Producing independent analysis of the media and marketing industry that goes beyond press releases takes time and resources. If you like what we do, you can support us by becoming a paying member. Upgrade today

Scott Purcell and Frank Arthur’s trip into the independent media establishment with Man of Many

Man of Many has a different founding story to most digital titles.

Neither of its two founders Scott Purcell and Frank Arthur came from a publishing background. Purcell was a credit analyst at Westpac and Arthur was an industrial designer for a street furniture company.

The then housemates started Man of Many as a way of talking about the men’s lifestyle products that interested them.

From something which was essentially a blog, Many of Many has become a company of increasing substance. With a staff of just under 20, the company now talks mental health and carbon neutrality, as well as continuing to champion luxury consumption.

Through persistence and participation, Many of Many has become a significant voice within the publishing ecosystem. If there’s such a thing as an establishment within independent media, then MoM is a member.

They’re signed up for The Digital Publishers Alliance, the Online News Association and the Australian Press Council. Man of Many has been a long time entrant (and sometimes winner) in Mumbrella’s Publish Awards. They’re shortlisted for website of the year and brand of the year amongst other categories this year.

Man of Many says it is now Australia’s largest men’s lifestyle site (albeit, as is discussed in the interview, with much of their traffic comes from overseas).

In today’s podcast conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Purcell speaks not just the language of watches and whisky but also brand values and carbon neutrality.

Pragmatically, MoM has successfully applied to be on the Australian Communications & Media Authority’s register of news businesses. Depending what the governmenrt chooses to do about designating Meta or other platforms, that could be crucial for publishers.

Not that Purcell necessarily welcomes the prospect of a Meta designation by Treasury minister Stephen Jones: “We're hoping that there won't be one because I think the impacts of that will be quite detrimental to the broader market. We are an ACMA registered news organization, which was meant to be a requirement under the code for negotiation. But unfortunately, that hasn't really resulted in any further bargaining power for us.” So far, anyway.

If the government does decide to create a digital levy on the platforms, Man of Many will inevitably be one of the voices arguing that lifestyle journalism is a form of public interest journalism that deserves funding. “I think that it is important for it to be quite a broad definition of public interest journalism and that the funding goes towards independent and a diverse set of media,” argues Purcell.

Further reading:

* The business book recommended by Purcell in the interview is Traction, by Gino Wickman;

* See more about Man of Many’s credentials on their About page;

* Man of Many’s advertising page

Unmade Index hits a new low

The Unmade Index hit a new low point yesterday, dropping by 1.06% to 465.2 points.

The previous low came when the index dipped to 465.9 points on July 5.

The Unmade Index, which covers the market capitalisation of all the local ASX-listed media and marketing companies, began at the start of 2022 on a nominal 1000 points. Yesterday’s number marks a fall of more than 53% of their collective value.

Among the larger stocks, Domain saw the most movement, losing 3.1%. Stocks in Domain have lost 15% since it updated the market on its full year numbers last week. Ooh Media lost 2%.

Enero dropped by another 5.2% yesterday, to its lowest point since the early weeks of the Covid crisis in April 2020. Enero lost one of the zeroes from its market cap after falling below a $100m valuation.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.

I’ll be back tomorrow with Unmade’s three year birthday update. As is the annual tradition, I’ll be sharing details of our financial performance and audience numbers. And we’ll also be announcing a big upgrade on the privileges for Unmade’s paying members.

If you’re interested in retail media, don’t forget that discounted earlybird tickets are on sale for another four days for the next edition of REmade on October 1. And our call for entries for the REmade Awards is live for just another fortnight.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* A rubbish start to earnings season;

* The week in results;

* A twist in the government’s sports siphoning laws;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Unmade: Seven sets course for an unremarkable decade

* Unmade: SCA disappoints the market

* Unmade: Enero uncovers another Photon legacy to tidy up

* Australian Financial Review: Fewer sports behind TV paywalls under proposed reforms

* The Australian: Australia’s big banks sharply cut back their advertising for home loans

* The Australian: ABC advertising spend hits $8.92m as it works to fix radio, TV ratings

* Sydney Morning Herald: Delta flies high as Netflix increases Australian content

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Matildas mania;

* Is the uplift in Tassie tourism because of the ads?;

* Could a QMS sale be on the cards?;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes, Seja Al Zaidi and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Football Australia chases record TV deal after Matildas success

* The Australian: Matildas’ historic success a bargain for Seven with record audiences tuning into the World Cup

* The Australian: Tourism Tasmania’s marketing campaign attracts visitors, boosts local economy

* Sydney Morning Herald: QMS boss bats away suggestions of sale

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s episode features an interview with Adam Ferrier and Jim Ingram, co-founders of full service agency Thinkerbell. The agency recently bought back consultancy PwC’s stake in the business, returning it to full independence.

It’s been six years since the launch of Thinkerbell, a communications agency with foundations in creativity, media strategy, public relations and until recently a foot in the consulting world too. Back when Russel Howcroft was leading PWC’s marketing consultancy arm, the company took a ten percent in the fledgling Thinkerbell which started with the simple proposition of “measured magic”

That part of Thinkerbell changed direction last month when the founders bought back PWC’s stake in the agency as the consultancy struggles with its own existential crisis.

Now that Thinkerbell is fully independent, it was an ideal time for Unmade’s Tim Burrowes to speak to founders Adam Ferrier and Jim Ingram to try and discover why Thinkerbell has succeeded when so many others have not.

The discussion ranges from Thinkerbell’s new start, to the future of the CMO, the rationale for Ferrier’s above-the-parapet TV profile, AI in Thinkerbell, and the secret sauce of their ‘Tinker’ and ‘Thinker’ agency structure. They also tackle some of the agency’s defining work including February’s show stopping '“Tall Poppy” mini film for CGU.

“The marketing science meets hardcore creativity was a really obvious meeting place for where we started the agency,” Ingram says, explaining the synergy of the varied backgrounds of co-founders Ferrier, and Ben Couzens along with Margie Reid who brought order to the agency when she joined soon after launch.

"When the ideas are being had, the concept of how they’re going to be executed and bringing them to life, all starts to happen at the same time as part of the creation process,” Ingram adds.

On the PwC departure, Ferrier says "It feels like the right time to leave.

“We’re now enjoying being 100% rather than 90% independent. Transparency of process is absolutely fundamental to good business today.”

Ferrier also did his best to avoid offering advice on how PWC should tackle its own PR crisis, despite being pushed.

He was more frank about his motivations to be on TV so often. “It must be my ego that drives it. That’s not mutually exclusive to good business sense. Will Leach once told me there’s no business model in flying under the radar.”

Today’s podcast was produced by Seja Al Zaidi and edited by Abe’s Audio the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Our thoughts on Advertising Week APAC;

* TV bosses lobbying in Canberra;

* Earnings season predictions;

* News Corp kills ad platform project;

* Another editor departs Mumbrella;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes, Seja Al Zaidi and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Unmade: Television’s audience decline goes main stage

* The Australian: TV bosses head to Canberra as lobbying efforts heat up

* Sydney Morning Herald: Smart TV showdown on cards as networks fine-tune pitch to Canberra

* Australian Financial Review: News Corp kills major Accenture-advised advertising platform project

* Australian Financial Review: Mumbo jumble

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Last month, Unmade held our humAIn conference, focused on the impact of AI on the marketing world.

We ended the day with the Great DebAIt, in which our panellists tackled the threats and opportunities of AI head on.

The debate saw two opposing teams, with backgrounds across media and marketing, dispute the proposition that “generative AI is not a threat to media and marketing jobs, but a much-needed tool to expand what’s possible at speed and low cost”.

The speakers debating the proposition were:

* Dre Horton, Co-Founder, Knowing.Me

* Wade Kingsley, Founder, The Ideas Business

* Henry Innis, Co-Founder and CEO, Mutinex

* Cam Price, Co-Founder and CEO, Leadstory

* Larissa Thorne, Director of Digital and Content, Keep Left

* Emile Rademeyer, Executive Director, Creative Strategy, Vandal

Our audience vote had the final word on the debate. To find out who won, listen on.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Today:

* Foxtel drops more hints about Project Magneto;

* DDB doubles down on digital with RAPP;

* ARN’s cryptic message for Kyle and Jackie O;

* The Logies make a splash for Seven;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Sydney Morning Herald: Foxtel aims to disrupt with ‘Project Magneto’ in quest to translate users into profits

* Sydney Morning Herald: Streaming subscriptions continue to grow despite surge in cancellations

* The Australian: Performance marketing agency RAPP opens in Australia

* Unmade: How to mess up your marketing funnel

* Australian Financial Review: ARN buys skywriting to impress Kyle and Jackie O

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing by Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

In today’s podcast conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Will Hayward, CEO of Private Media, discusses innovating within the confines of a challenging media landscape; where the company plans to take Private Media’s business model; the economics of publishing; and the personal toll of the company’s defamation battle with Lachlan Murdoch.

Private Media runs four publications in Australia: news and investigations platform Crikey, small business masthead SmartCompany (which Hayward describes as the ‘reverse of Crikey’), Inc. Australia and public sector-focused The Mandarin.

While Crikey might be Private Media’s most famous asset - including controversial columnists like Guy Rundle in its ranks, and a mission to “tell the truth and shame the devil” - Hayward is as keen to discuss his passion for niche categories that attract readers who are obsessed with a particular subject matter.

“I am very passionate about boring categories. People outside the category think it’s boring, people within the category are obsessed with how much information there is. It needs to be sufficiently big so it can support an advertising product and subscription product, if not also an events product. It’s likely to be run by someone not from a commercial background, rather than someone likely to go into it because there’s money there.”

“The category needs to be information dense. I don’t think the future of media is more Buzzfeeds, more Vices, those products are really hard to build and run in a sustainable way, and clearly the market is showing that to be true, with Vice going bankrupt and Buzzfeed running at a third of its revenue.”

Hayward’s interest in publishing niches is one thing he has in common with the executive chairman of News Corp, Michael Miller, who evangelised deep niches when he was interviewed for the Unmade podcast back in March.

Hayward also discusses how Private Media is planning its growth beyond its current sites. “Within the centre of the company we are working very hard to build a great media product and make great media experiences irrespective of the category we operate in, and deploy that across all of our products. The obvious question after all that, is if you have built a really good product and growth strategy, why apply it to only four things? Private Media is currently thinking about what inorganic growth might look like in the future.”

Hayward also insists he wouldn’t change much about last year’s2022 legal confrontation between Crikey and Lachlan Murdoch, where Murdoch filed a defamation lawsuit against the publisher for claiming his family were "unindicted co-conspirators" in the US Capitol riots thanks to the role of Fox News in stoking unrest. He reveals that the saga led to him seeking professional help for the impact it had on his mental health.

“Litigation is a very tense emotional battle that draws a significant personal cost. it’s hard to reflect on that without going into emotional things,” he says on the matter.

“I had the cast-iron belief we did the right thing. While it caused me a huge degree of personal unhappiness, I felt with absolute certainty it was the correct moral action to take.”

Time to leave you to your Thursday.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Today:

* Flat landscape ahead for Australian marketing industry;

* ‘Biggest horror decisions’ in Aussie media;

* Is Netflix losing its grip on the region?;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Sydney Morning Herald: Tricky six months ahead for media despite ad market green shoots

* Sydney Morning Herald: Can I have that one back? Australian media’s biggest ‘horror decisions’

* Australian Financial Review: Asia-Pacific emerges as weak spot in Netflix streaming figures

* Unmade: Investors still think Netflix subscribers are worth $1300 each. That's crazy

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back tomorrow with Tuesdata.

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with Chris Janz, co-founder of Australia’s biggest media launch of the year, Scire.

In today’s edition of The Unmakers, Chris Janz, co-founder of Scire, talks to Unmade’s Tim Burrowes about the company’s plans for its first publication, Capital Brief, which launches in around six weeks’ time.

Janz was previously chief digital and publishing officer of Nine, and in the running for the CEO vacancy which eventually went to Mike Sneesby in 2021. Earlier in his career, Janz edited News Corp’s news.com.au, before moving into business, including digital publishing company Allure Media which was later acquired by Fairfax Media. He was also publisher of the short-lived HuffPo Australia.

Janz, and Scire co-founder David Eisman, worked together on Fairfax’s now celebrated Blue Team, who led a secret project which saved the company’s newspapers, including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age from exiting from print.

Capital Brief will focus on business and, as Janz reveals in the interview, will put out its main newsletter in the afternoon, a new cadence compared to existing publications in the space.

This week Scire revealed a raft of new journalist appointments including former Australian Financial Review banking specialist Andrew Cornell, who led ANZ Blue Notes, which was perhaps the biggest brand-funded corporate newsroom in the country. Wall Street Journal correspondent Philip Wen, Nine’s departing foreign affairs and national security correspondent Anthony Galloway - who Janz says ‘understands how power really works’ - and ex-Sydney Morning Herald and The Age economics correspondent Jennifer Duke, who will be based in Canberra, are among the other new arrivals.

Others include Bronwen Clune covering startups; Jack Derwin covering markets and finance; Kate Burgess covering mining and energy; Laurel Henning covering the legal and regulatory beats; and Dan Van Boom covering technology.

They’ll all be led by Capital Brief’s editor-in-chief, John McDuling, Nine’s former national business editor, who was the first hire announced.

Capital Brief is intended to appeal to ‘those people driving the new economy, the new Australia’. Janz says it’ll be focused on what the ‘future of Australian business is all about’.

“One of the challenges of business journalism sometimes is it can drift into just servicing the big end of town. We hear a lot about the ASX200, the ASX50.”

“We’re about looking at the broad spectrum of Australian business as it is today and looking forward.”

Janz also discusses the investors behind the company, Shearwater Capital, and the rules of engagement if Scire journalists find themselves writing about the owners’ investments.

During his time at Nine, Janz was in the room for negotiations with Alphabet’s Google and Facebook under the shadow of the News Media Bargaining Code. After leaving Nine, he then helped overseas publishers with similar negotiations.

He has a pessimistic prediction for how the publishing environment will change when the previous deals expire. “The Meta renewals are up within the next 12-ish months. There’s a real challenge ahead for people who’ve built parts of their business off the back of that revenue. When you have what might be $100m a year disappearing from the funding models through Meta withdrawing from the country… I think it is going to pose a challenge.”

Today’s podcast was recorded and edited at the Sydney studio of Abe’s Audio the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* ABC management to overhaul troubled radio stations;

* Optus and Seven reveal Women’s World Cup sponsors;

* Scire’s Capital Brief reveals journo hires;

* Clemenger BBDO announces all-female leadership hires;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes, Seja Al Zaidi and Abe Udy.

Today’s edition also includes highlights from last week’s HumAIn panel, Art + Science: AI for Content.

The panel includes Ivy Hornibrook, product lead at Canva, Emile Rademeyer of Vandal, Mary Proulx of Bread Agency and Rick Durham from Meltwater. Elle Green of The Martec was the moderator. 

Further reading:

* The Australian: ABC management working on a report to urgently overhaul its troubled radio stations

* Australian Financial Review: Less than 8pc of the ABC’s flagship news viewers are under 40

* Unmade: Triple J five-city audience at yet another new low in its target demo

* The Australian: Guthrie returns to disrupt the airwaves

* Unmade: 'The critics are saying they're going to give us six months': Trying to make sense of Disrupt Radio

* Australian Financial Review: Women’s World Cup offers broadcaster Optus a shot at redemption

* Unmade: Home advantage but will the World Cup become an Australian moment?

* The Australian: New venture’s D-Day with host of ex-Nine journos

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

In today’s audio-led edition, rumblings about a tech tax get louder; clues from earnings season as Ooh Media’s profits slip; and the ABC invites the Bruce Lehrmann defamation judge to host Media Watch.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

* Member-only pricing for our HumAIn and REmade (October 1) conferences;

* A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);

* Member-only content and our paywalled archives;

* Your own copy of Media Unmade.

Digital levy drumbeat get louder; Is this the week ARN tries yet again to capture SCA? ABC thinks out of the box for Media Watch

Publishers smell money in the air, and they’re launching a landgrab before the dollars drift to the ground. With the government dithering about whether to designate Meta under the News Media Bargaining Code, lifestyle publishers are arguing that what they do had a value too. If Meta or anyone else gets designated, they want to be allowed into the negotiations.

Also today, we check in on earnings season with Ooh Media reporting a down half this morning, and ARN likely to update the market on its SCA takeover ambitions when it does its half yearly update on Thursday.

And The Australian reveals that The ABC has been rebuffed in what would have been a wonderful casting move. It tried to interest Justice Michael Lee in replacing Paul Barry as Media Watch host. In a parallel universe it would have been a great idea.

And it was the morning after Larry Emdur won the Gold Logie.

Further reading:

* The Guardian: The door to an Australian tech tax is clearly ajar. Can Labor make it happen?

* Unmade: A digital levy for platforms now looks likely

* Australian Financial Review: Lifestyle, culture websites argue for their slice of Meta’s pie

* The Australian: Financial markets say FTA advertising market won’t improve until consumer confidence lifts

* Unmade: Labor will do the TV industry a favour if it bans gambling ads

* The Australian: Southern Cross Austereo takeover deal is pie in the sky – for now

* The Australian: ABC’s pitch for Federal Court judge Michael Lee to take Media Watch hot seat declined

Today’s episode features Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Time to leave you to start your week. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with Disrupt Radio’s chief commercial and innovation officer, Rob Shwetz. We left the interview with almost as many questions as we went in, but perhaps with a better sense of what Australia’s newest radio network does not want to talk about.

Tim Burrowes writes:

I find business fascinating. I adore startup stories. And I’m a media nerd. So I should be absolutely in love with the story of Disrupt Radio, which combines all three.

The network launched last month, online, and with DAB+ licences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

But the more I find out, the more sceptical I become. For a radio network using public airwaves, there’s a lot of undisclosed information about its ownership.

Listening to today’s interview with Rob Shwetz, chief commercial and innovation officer at Disrupt Radio, may leave you with almost as many questions as you had before you started. However, the conversation should help you understand why I’m puzzled by so much of the Disrupt Radio launch.

Unless you work in the media industry, I wouldn’t blame you if you have missed the story of Disrupt Radio so far. I certainly wouldn’t be expecting many listeners to have yet had the awareness to tune in. There’s been some publicity, but I haven’t seen any paid ads looking to attract an audience, although the company says it has done some outdoor.

The best known presenters are Enterprise Breakfast host Libbi Gorr and Startup Nation host Jules Lund. Thinkerbell’s Adam Ferrier is a weekly co-host on Gorr’s show, while another ad industry stalwart Siimon Reynolds presents The Business Lounge.

Among the curious things about Disrupt Radio is that the management won’t say who its financial backers are. In the interview, Shwetz claims not to know, despite having worked alongside Roberts on the launch for the past five years.

Given that there’s a staff of about 20, that suggests an annual cost base of at least $2m, and probably more.

I suppose it’s in keeping with Disrupt Radio’s communications strategy, which Schwetz describes in the interview as “PR by stealth”.

Similarly, Shwetz says he has no idea what the marketing budget is for the station during this current financial year already under way. To be clear, marketing is one of his responsibilities.

Schwetz’s previous background has included director of client strategy at Fairfax Media’s client content arm, Made. And he also spent five years as group strategy director of Mediacom in Sydney. Earlier in his career, he lists six years as strategy director for brand, media and creative at Publicis.

Yes, it’s a fast-moving startup (albeit one five years in the planning), but he is the person in charge of marketing. Most CMOs would know by now what their budget for FY24 is.

There are other things which are a puzzle. Did wealthy (and busy) former rock star Bob Geldof really travel over from the UK and spend a week in Melbourne co-presenting the breakfast show with Libbi Gorr just out of his love of the radio medium? That feels a little unlikely, despite Shwetz’s insistence that it’s the case. “There’s nothing more than him coming and loving the medium”.

Similarly, one of the hitherto less commented-upon presences on the daily lineup is UK polemicist Rod Liddle, who interviews entrepreneurs for a daily show called Global Disruptors (or perhaps Disrupters; they spell it both ways on the Disrupt website).

Liddle is a great get. It’s strange they’ve done so little to promote this. Liddle is a massive name in UK media. He was a hugely controversial (and successful) editor of BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today program, and currently writes for News Corp’s daily tabloid The Sun and broadsheet The Sunday Times, along with influential right wing weekly The Spectator. He writes beautifully. Yet they haven’t mentioned him. It would be like Andrew Bolt popping up on a hospital radio station in the UK and nobody thinking that seemed comment-worthy.

Could it be that there are UK investors involved in the station? Maybe even Geldof, most prominent globally for his role in creating Live Aid, but he’s also been an investor in media ventures. Shwetz says not.

Shwetz declines in the interview to name any investors. Incidentally, since recording the podcast, I’ve emailed Disrupt Radio to ask that question directly.

Perhaps sports radio minnow Sports Entertainment Network, run by Craig Hutchinson, has a stake. The DAB+ licences came from SEN, Shwetz said during the interview, and staff work from their offices. “It’s quite a close commercial and working relationship with SEN”.

Shwetz also declines in the interview to share how listening numbers have been via streaming so far, although he claims they have exceeded expectations.

He makes an ambitious statement about the network’s aims for audience, saying the company aims to hit a weekly cumulative reach of 250,000 to 300,000. That would be about the same as ABC Radio National.

Not that Shwetz would commit to signing up to the ratings system, claiming that they haven’t had time to think about it. Remember, this is a startup five years in the making.

I wonder what level of data they will provide to early sponsors, who include Telstra and GWM.

To be clear, this interview was not a case of catching the wrong person unawares. When the PRs for Disrupt Radio proposed Shwetz for the interview, rather than Benjamin Roberts who we had been asking to talk to for months, we questioned whether he’d be qualified. We sent through examples of four podcasts I’d previously recorded with other start ups and media bosses to give a sense of the topics I ask about, in case they were not regular listeners.

They replied: “We've put Rob up for this because he's actually more suited to your audience, as he is head of marketing, advertising and media relations. He's worked alongside Ben to develop and launch the company over the past 5 years which was how the station was founded.”

With Roberts off the table, we decided to go ahead with the Shwetz interview.

This may be a slightly frustrating read, because you may have got to this point feeling like you know less than you did at the beginning. Give it a listen and decide for yourself.

In all our podcasts, I finish by asking our guest what their supporters say about them, and what their detractors say. Shwetz’s reply was: “The critics are saying they’re going to give us six months.”

Fair enough.

For the record, I’d still love to talk to Benjamin Roberts.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Only Unmade’s paying members get full access to all of our content and archives. Sign up today.

Today:

* Peta Credlin and Tony Abbott’s new podcasting venture;

* A reboot for Domain’s Melbourne print operation;

* Twitter rival Threads finds its feet after first week;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* The Australian: Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin join forces for new Sky podcast

* Australian Financial Review: Tony Abbott’s next act? Podcasting

* Sydney Morning Herald: Domain and Broadsheet team up to sidestep struggling print revenue

* The Australian: Launch of social media app Threads a ‘nightmare scenario’ for Twitter owner Elon Musk, former Facebook exec says

* Unmade: New Threads, who dis?

Time to leave you to start your week.

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back tomorrow with Tuesdata.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Today’s edition features an interview with one of Australia’s most storied investigative journalists, Nine’s Nick McKenzie. It coincides with the publication of McKenzie’s book about disgraced SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s Nick McKenzie is one of Australia’s most acclaimed investigate journalists. With 14 Walkley Awards and a stint as president of the Melbourne Press Club under his belt, McKenzie’s latest battle had the highest possible stakes - with the future of investigative journalism in Australia and indeed his own career on the line.

The investigative reporting of McKenzie and colleague Chris Masters into the misconduct of Ben Roberts-Smith and other Australian SAS troops in Afghanistan resulted in the most significant defamation battle in at least two decades.

McKenzie’s book on the Ben Roberts-Smith saga, Crossing The Line, has now been published.

In conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, McKenzie discusses the realities of the investigative process, what it was like battling a formerly lauded Anzac war hero in courtrooms over the last five years and the personal toll it took.

“It’s a miracle that we won this case because the law is geared to favour applicants, it’s geared to favour rich people suing journalists,” McKenzie says.

“Knowing that the weight of law and precedent is against you, and knowing how hard it is to prove war crimes in a civil court, it was unbelievably stressful. To contest this case, we had to keep digging through evidence and information, we could never rest.”

The fight was also on company lines, with BRS, who was until recently employed as GM of Seven Queensland, being funded in the case by Seven West Media proprietor Kerry Stokes.

McKenzie decries the tribalism of Australian media. “That tribalism and competitiveness exists in all companies. The ABC’s at war with commercial media, commercial media’s at war with itself, everyone is fighting. That’s partly a function of there being some unpleasant people, but it’s also a commercial reality. We’re all fighting for our commercial lives - it’s a tough environment out there, there’s a limited ad market, there are fierce contest for sporting rights, there is literally commercial war at play.”

McKenzie undertook much of his work alongside his long-time ‘mentor’ - investigative reporter Chris Masters of the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Chris Masters and I endured a very difficult process. We were there for each other through that process,” McKenzie says.

“It’s not to say there wasn’t tension in the relationship; we’re two very different journalists with different ways of reporting. But that camaraderie and us applying our two different ways of doing journalism was so effective, so powerful.”

“I think journalism is best done as a partnership.”

Nine’s 60 Minutes report on the court case featured an image of Masters and McKenzie working in the NSW State Library. It was reminiscent of an iconic scene in All The President’s Men, the classic movie of investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s work on the Watergate scandal

Asked about the similarity of the images, it’s one of just a couple of occasions in the interview when McKenzie slips away from the question. The other is when he’s asked about the possibility of Nine or its streaming service Stan making a docu-drama about the case.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Could Kyle and Jackie O be on the move?;

* The pressure is on for Radio National;

* Twitter users face global meltdown;

* Regional mastheads face government ad spend cuts;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: ‘Sports rights for radio’: Kyle & Jackie O open to offers from rivals

* The Australian: Twitter limits number of posts users can read, prompting disruptions for some

* The Australian Financial Review: Twitter allegedly failed to pay to dismantle its Sydney office

* The Australian: ABC board tells management that radio network needs to be ‘urgently’ overhauled

* Sydney Morning Herald: Regional media reels amid ‘unprecedented’ government advertising cuts

* The Guardian: Shuffling the deck: Canberra Times drops 101-year-old bridge columnist as part of cost-cutting drive | The weekly beast

Production was by Seja Al Zaidi with editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Today’s edition of The Unmakers features adland royalty Justin Drape and Michael Canning, co-founders of travel platform Exceptional Alien. This month, they stepped back into the brand space with the brand-focused Exceptional Alien Studio.

Welcome to the latest episode of The Unmakers, Unmade’s podcast series where we talk to the people remaking the media and marketing world. 

Today’s interview features Justin Drape and Michael Canning.

In business terms, Drape has been one of the most accomplished creatives Australia has seen in recent years. He was was co-founder of creative agency The Monkeys, arguably Australia’s most successful creative agency startup of the last two decades. It was sold to Accenture for a $63m back in 2017.

Meanwhile, Canning has held a string of creative leadership roles at some of the best known agency networks, including M&C Saatchi in Australia, along with Leo Burnett and 72&Sunny in the US.

Two years ago, the duo swapped the agency world for publishing when they launched Exceptional Alien as a series of app-first local travel guides, fronted by celebrated creators.

The new Exceptional Agency Studio will see Drape and Canning offer their talents to marketers, not just creating content for brands on the Exceptional Alien platform, but helping with bigger brand challenges. Essentially, they’re back in the agency business.

Exceptional Alien is already building. “I think that we’re scaling, and I think success for Exceptional Alien will be an international audience that we’re already growing. That’s what we’re aiming for. We have team members in LA and New York. We have a lot of interest in partnerships that will be announced soon,” Drape says.

If you're an Unmaker with a story to tell about how you're changing the media and marketing world, we’d love to hear from you on letters@unmade.media.

Today's episode of The Unmakers was edited by Abe's audio and produced by Seja Al Zaidi.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Recriminations around ARN Media’s raid on SCA;

* Parliamentarians prepare to call for a total ban on betting ads;

* Disrupt Radio officially launches;

* Australia’s platform laws get picked up globally;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes, Abe Udy and Seja Al Zaidi.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Kyle & Jackie O’s boss ignites silent fury among his own investors

* Sydney Morning Herald: Southern Cross plots revival as new boss takes the helm

* Unmade: Why ARN raided SCA

* The Australian: Bob Geldof to co-host breakfast show on start-up station Disrupt Radio

* Sydney Morning Herald: Media, wagering outfits brace for ads ban ahead of gambling report

* The Australian: News laws in Canada put Google, Facebook under global pressure

Time to leave you to start your week

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with the new leadership team at Havas Australia, creative network CEO James Wright and Host/Havas boss Gayle While, a little over three months into their tenure.

The first 100 days of Wright and While’s leadership at Havas

Back in February, Havas Australia announced two key new appointments: the return from overseas of James Wright as CEO of Havas Creative Network, and Gayle While leading the advertising part of the business as boss of Host/Havas.

In Wright’s previous time in Australia he made a name for himself in the PR space turning around Red Agency (now Red Havas). While comes from a creative agency hinterland, including running Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne.

In today’s podcast, Unmade’s Tim Burrowes talks to Wright and While about their new remits, previous experiences in communications agencies and dynamic of their leadership alongside a team of creatives.

“It’s about bringing back some of our creative confidence, not just as Havas, but the ripple effect into the industry that can have,” While says.

“With so many headwinds being thrown at us, we’ve probably lost some of that swagger or bravery in the creative work, now is a brilliant time as an industry to show we’ve got great talent, an embarrassment of riches in creative talent.”

Wright wants to remake Havas as a ‘bold, progressive and sexy’ group, while balancing the mission to create ‘stickiness’ for their clients’ brands.

The duo also discuss whether the legacy of Havas PR agency One Green Bean and Host at the cutting edge of social media can be resuscitated.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Disrupt Radio announces the first AI newsreader;

* Fast food advertising faces a possible crackdown;

* What does Gen Z really think about out of home?;

* Michelle Rowland steps in on ABC job cuts;

* SBS announces new key hire of Victor Corones;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes, Abe Udy and Seja Al Zaidi.

Further reading:

* Sydney Morning Herald: Radio start-up brings legendary news anchor out of retirement

* The Australian: Bob Geldof to co-host breakfast show on start-up station Disrupt Radio

* Australian Financial Review: Teal push for new junk food advertising ban

* JCDecaux: Gen Z: The IRL opportunity

* The Australian: Michelle Rowland demands meeting with ABC boss David Anderson over job cuts

* AdNews: Victor Corones joins SBS

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Today’s edition features an interview with Colin Daniels, managing director of the first SXSW Sydney.

Colin Daniels, the man bringing SXSW down under

Entertainment and media festival South By Southwest is coming to Australia for the first time in October. The man responsible for bringing the event to Sydney is Colin Daniels - a veteran of the music industry including more than a decade running music company Inertia which he left last year after becoming managing director of SXSW Sydney.

Daniels has racked up an impressive nineteen visits to SXSW over the years. His vision for SXSW Sydney is for it to be a combination of film screenings, networking events, conferences and other interactive set-ups designed to appeal to “the United Nations of the creative industries”.

With less than five months to go, SXSW has now announced its first speakers including marketer and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, futurist Amy Webb, and GroupM CEO Christian Juhl.

In conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Daniels unveils what SXSW Sydney has in store for the Australian media and marketing community. The SXSW team has been developing the program in consultation with the local industry, although in the interview Daniels does concede he was initially hard to get hold of when interest in the event outstripped his ability to get back to everyone.

Adland has been leaning into the local program. “Our number one attendee for SXSW Sydney based on registration and interest is the marketing and advertising industry," Daniels says.

“For the media and marketing conference tracks, we had 200 submissions just from agencies and media organisations.”

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back with Best of the Week tomorrow.

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with Steve O’Connor, chief executive of outdoor giant JCDecaux and long-standing director of the Outdoor Media Association.

JCDecaux Australia & New Zealand boss Steve O’Connor has been in the out of home advertising game for a long time - about 30 years, to be precise. It’s been almost 24 years since O’Connor joined the Outdoor Media Association as a director. Five years into his tenure, he was appointed CEO of JCDecaux in 2004.

In today’s interview with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, O’Connor discusses JCDecaux’s journey to digitisation, and its progress in programmatic amid a rapidly evolving out of home landscape.

While O’Connor is largely bullish on programmatic, that does not necessarily mean that all billboards will be digital any time soon. “I don’t think we’ll ever be 100 percent digital,” O’Connor says.

“There will always be a role for classic billboards in regional markets, and a few locations focused on directional or point of sale outdoor - that’s always got a role to play,” he adds.

Also discussed is the ‘long, long term’ objective of a 90-95% split between digital and classic revenues. Close to 10% of JCDecaux’s digital revenues this year have been from programmatic - a sign that the ‘big bet made on programmatic’ is starting to pay off.

“We’re getting a good premium on our programmatic trading,” says O’Connor

The conversation also turns to the long-awaited arrival of the ad industry’s upgraded measurement system, MOVE 2.0, probably next year.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back soon.

letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade (with quite a few written words too).

Today, we talk to Foxtel’s streaming and advertising boss, Julian Ogrin; Seven’s slumping share price sees it at risk of being eclipsed by ARN Media; and we share more news of our retail media conference REmade.

‘We can be number one in digital advertising’ - Julian Ogrin on Kayo’s growth story

Tim Burrowes writes:

Julian Ogrin, the man tipped as the future boss of Foxtel Group, has been taking a higher profile of late. Over the last few days, he’s been the face (and voice) of the latest set of results from the company.

Ogrin is CEO of Foxtel’s streaming division including sports platform Kayo (“the home of Australian domestic sport”, as he puts it in today’s podcast), and entertainment platform Binge.

The rise of the two platforms - each of them passed more than 1.5m paying subscribers for the first time - is an unusual success story against a backdrop where most satellite and cable TV providers around the world have failed to react to the disruption of changing consumer habits.

Last week, News Corp publicly hung a “for sale” sign on Foxtel Group, of which it owns two-thirds. Telstra owns the other third. The company flagged “third party interest” in what looks like an attempt to flush out other potential bidders.

The urgency is because these numbers may be as good as they gets for Foxtel.

For Kayo, the fourth quarter is the one where local footy fans return for the season before beginning to churn away again. And looming in the next few months is the next NRL deal negotiation. Foxtel currently shares the rights with Nine, which will inevitably chase the full package this time, to spread across its subscription platform Stan too. The all-or-nothing battle will be an expensive one if Foxtel is to win it.

And Binge is almost certainly only months away from losing its HBO content to a local launch of Warner Discovery’s streaming service Max.

So now is the time to sell Foxtel - and for Ogrin - to sell the message of the company’s streaming growth.

In today’s conversation he alludes to a subtle repositioning of what Kayo (and Foxtel) stand for when it coms to sport. He talks about domestic sport five times. Having lost the English Premier League to Optus Sport in 2015, perhaps Formula One, last renewed in 2022, will be next to go.

The interview also covers the question of Kayo’s price. By global standards the $25-per-month entry level price, or full package for $35, is low. Ben Shepherd, who is often right about such things, predicted last week that we may see the price rise towards $50.

Ogrin hints: “We used to have three tiered products and we came back to two. Maybe we go back to three.”

Naturally, we asked Ogrin about the succession plans when the time comes to replace Delany. Naturally, he navigated around the question.

We also pushed him on the number of sign ups to aggregation service Hubbl. He used the word “proud” twice but declined to share numbers.

Ogrin also has Foxtel Media, the company’s advertising sales house, reporting in to him. Even in a down market, the division has reported growth. Ogrin claims Kayo is the only scalable advertising solution for streaming in the market. “We’re talking about seven hours of highly engaged viewing a week”.

“In the next 12 to 24 months we can be number one in digital advertising and we’re just going to go for it.”

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.

We’ll be back with another newsletter tomorrow.

If you’re interested in retail media, don’t forget that discounted earlybird tickets are on sale for another four days for the next edition of REmade on October 1. And our call for entries for the REmade Awards is live for just another fortnight.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Tabcorp set to auction rights for Melbourne Cup;

* The Market Herald awaits Takeover Panel outcome;

* The launch of Radio 360;

* Kochie’s last week at Sunrise, Shirvo announced as successor;

* Toxic workplace allegations hit Kochie’s streaming business Ausbiz;

* Mutinex continues its march;

* Business lobby groups take aim at Labor with anti-IR campaigns

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Tabcorp asks free-to-air broadcasters for Melbourne Cup bids

* Australian Financial Review: ‘They didn’t listen’: business takes aim at Labor’s union agenda

* Sydney Morning Herald: Channel 10 sues former star Peter van Onselen

* Australian Financial Review: Toxic workplace allegations hit Ausbiz as staff line up for exit

* The Australian: Radio ratings firm GfK’s new Radio 360 data set to launch

Time to leave you to start your week

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back tomorrow with Tuesdata.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with Jason Tonelli, boss of media agency Zenith and the new chair of the Audited Media Association of Australia.

It’s two decades since Publicis Group’s second string media agency Zenith rebranded itself globally as The ROI Agency (and a decade since a brief local repositioning as “the open agency”.)

New CEO Jason Tonelli has evolved the local position again - Zenith’s proposition is now “ROI Cubed”: the three I’s being investment, imagination, insight.

In today’s interview with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Tonelli discusses what Zenith intends to deliver for clients, working within the larger Publicis group where he’s spent the last decade of his career, and the wider planning and investment process.

Zenith’s core proposition is simply about doing media exceptionally well, Tonelli says. Zenith’s clients include Reckitt, Kellogg’s, TikTok, Aldi, H&M, Rio Tinto and Disney.

The agency is also investing in consumer research. Tonelli shares during the conversation that polling suggests that the public is leaning towards a “no” vote in The Voice referendum.

Unmade can also reveal that Tonelli is the new chair of the Audited Media Association of Australia. The AMAA was kneecapped by Australia’s print publishers in late 2016 when Bauer, News Corp and Pacific Magazines all resigned from the magazine audits in what proved to be the death knell of print circulation transparency.

Tonelli discusses how he hopes to return the AMAA to relevance through auditing in the digital space.

“It would be great to get auditing back on the agenda; it’s an important part of our industry,” Tonelli says.

Time to leave you to your Thursday.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back soon.

letters@unmade.media

Today:

* Scandal-hit PwC’s tech clients get nervous;

* A crucial week for Australia’s defamation laws;

* TV network rivals circle to snatch gambling ad dollars;

* Former Nine boss weighs in on content quotas;

* Has the podcasting bubble burst?

* David Koch to leave Sunrise

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Why PwC’s US tech targets will be deeply anxious

* The Guardian: Ben Roberts-Smith war crimes defamation verdict to be delivered on Thursday 1 June

* Australian Financial Review: Content quotas would spur next $700m MasterChef IP boom: ex-Nine CEO

* Australian Financial Review: TV networks’ rivals circle $180m gambling advertising cash cow

* Sydney Morning Herald: Is the podcast bubble starting to burst?

Unmade - 2023: The year podcasting becomes a $100m medium? https://www.unmade.media/p/botw-the-podcast-boom-if-agencies

Time to leave you to start your week

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features the story of the first ten years of The Guardian Australia .

Tim Burrowes talks to editor Lenore Taylor and managing director Dan Stinton about how The Guardian found its place within the Australian media establishment after arriving in May 2013.

Using a loan from philanthropist Graeme Wood, the publication assembled a team of some of the country’s best journalists, many of whom were refugees from Fairfax Media following the mass redundancies of 2012.

Taylor says that the tenth anniversary has inspired a deluge of gratitude from readers in her inbox with many arguing that The Guardian has indeed fulfilled a “much needed” niche in Australia’s media landscape.

Stinton, who will shortly move to the Perth-based tech platform Health Engine after five years running the business side of the operation, explains the Guardian’s funding model. The company’s ‘diversified’ revenue - which has almost tripled in the last three years - is generated through a combination of reader support (which has been a ‘rocketship’ for the publication) and other philanthropic funding, digital advertising, and licensing revenue, via the News Media Bargaining Code.

Taylor recalls former Fairfax Media boss Greg Hywood’s dismissal of the launch, asserting that there would only ever be two Australian news brands that would matter - Fairfax and News Corp.

The interview also covers some of the highlights of The Guardian’s reporting, including its ‘Life on the Breadline’ series which focused on Australians living in poverty, and the Snowden spying revelations. Taylor also points to the discovery of new writing talent including columnists like Van Badham and Greg Jericho.

She also addresses the topic of transexual politics, which has divided the newsroom of The Guardian’s head office in the UK.

According to Ipsos, The Guardian is currently Australia’s sixth biggest digital news brand.

The podcast was recorded in The Guardian’s Sydney studio and edited by Abe’s Audio.

The interview was recorded before yesterday’s apology from The Guardian after staff in the UK office used the phrase “gone walkabout” to describe the launch.

letters@unmade.media

Today:

* Coalition proposes $46m TV tax cuts;

* Survey reveals public support for government gambling ads ban;

* Children’s commercial programming takes a nosedive;

* A new Twitter clone from Meta;

* Media startup Scire announces new hires;

* Walkleys Foundation slammed for scrapping headline award;

* Stan steps down from Q&A - will his replacement save the ratings?;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Coalition pitches $46m tax cut to TV networks after gambling ad attack

* The Australian Financial Review: Strong support for Dutton’s sport betting ad ban

* The Australian: Commercial TV networks’ spending on children’s content plummets

* Australian Financial Review: Chris Janz’s (attempted) journalist poach-a-thon bears its first fruit

* TechCrunch: Everything we know about Instagram’s Twitter clone, due this summer

* The Australian: Walkleys slammed for scrapping award for ‘best headline’

* Crikey: How I hacked the Walkleys: confessions of a journalism award nominee

* The Australian: RN’s Patricia Karvelas set to front Q+A after Stan Grant’s shock exit

Time to leave you to start your week.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Did PWC tax workarounds help Google offshore its profits?

* Crackdown on gambling ads looms;

* Snapchat announces new local leadership of Tony Keusgen and Ellie Rogers;

* The ‘madness’ of ABC Radio National;

* Nine and News Corp rally against AI;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: PwC tax leaks: Apple, Google and Microsoft believed to be named in firm emails

* The Guardian: Albanese expresses personal dislike for gambling ads during sporting events as pressure builds for ban

* Australian Financial Review: Rowland hints junk food may follow gambling in Labor’s ad sights

* Sunday Telegraph: Campbell: Dutton takes a punt on gambling advertising

* Australian Financial Review: Adolescent Sportsbet puts an adult in charge

* Sydney Morning Herald: Radio was the ABC’s crown jewel, but new data shows how it has fallen

* Media Week: Snap Inc. appoints Tony Keusgen as managing director ANZ, replacing Kathryn Carter

* The Age: AI data the next flashpoint between media and technology

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Qantas goes to war with the AFR;

* Jules Lund comes back to radio;

* ABC looks for new management talent;

* Scam ads infiltrating the influencer world;

* TV networks oppose content requirements for streamers;

* Was VOZ worth the wait?;

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Sydney Morning Herald: TV networks oppose content requirements for streaming services

* The Australian: Prodigal son Jules Lund signs with new network Disrupt Radio

* The Australian: Minister hunts ‘digital’ experience for ABC board

* The Australian: ABC scouts management talent for youth brand Triple J

* Australian Financial Review: Four out of five influencer posts fail to disclose advertising ties

* Sydney Morning Herald: TV networks oppose content requirements for streaming services

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back tomorrow with Tuesdata.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Grant Blackley to leave SCA

* OzTam (re)launches new TV ratings system, VOZ;

* Chris Brown to take on The Block at Seven?;

* Vice woes mean local programming changes;

* Facebook’s billions in local advertising revenue;

* Twitter plans to allow publishers to help publishers charge;

* ACCC focuses on shady influencers;

* Coles Radio contract up for grabs

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* SCA on ASX: SCA appoints John Kelly as managing director and CEO

* The Australian: New TV ratings system VOZ will show total audience

* The Australian: Dr Chris Brown’s first project on Seven?

* Sydney Morning Herald: SBS loses flagship Vice news show as US media darlings falter

* Australian Financial Review: Facebook advertising revenues balloon even as local profits fall

* The Guardian: Twitter to let publishers charge users per article read, says Elon Musk

* Australian Financial Review: Take five posts at random

* ACCC: Digital platform services inquiry - March 2023 interim report

* Australian Financial Review: Coles Radio shake-up could give grocery giant $1b ad market boost

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* TV industry finally gets its 3D view - but will it be enough for Foxtel?;

* Pedestrian launches a TV channel;

* How streaming quotas will work;

* Will Eddie McGuire take a bigger 3AW gig?;

* Google’s smart speaker switchoff

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Television ratings overhaul took too long, OzTAM boss concedes

* Australian Financial Review: Pedestrian.TV, again

* Sydney Morning Herald: How Netflix, Amazon may be forced to make more Australian programs

* The Australian: Eddie McGuire to fix 3AW’s Dan ban?

* The Australian: Commercial Radio and Audio boss says Google was ‘asleep at the wheel’ over radio outage

Time to leave you to start your week

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features an interview with Kirsty Muddle, boss of Dentsu Creative, the biggest holding company yet to move to a single brand model.

Tim Burrowes writes:

The biggest implication of Dentsu’s creative rebrand deserved more attention than it got when it occurred last June.

The company was the first holding company of any significant size to move to a single global creative brand. Globally, that meant folding in DentsuMcGarryBowen, Isobar, 360i and its Dentsu-branded creative agencies. In Australia, this also included BWMdentsu, Isobar and PR agencies Haystac, and Cox Inall.

From the point of view of legacy, the disappearance of BWM, the people who brought us Rabbits (or Father & Son as it was officially known) was perhaps the most significant.

The bigger question: Is this the future of agencies? Not just a single creative brand, but with PR folded in too.

During our interview, Muddle argues that the key justification is for their benefit of clients - simplicity. No more “splinter cells”.

There is more to it than client-friendly simplicity. The major holding companies own more agency brands than they need, or are even viable in a world where marketers spend less with agency partners every year quarter.

If Dentsu’s logic is extended to its rivals, then the end point would see the already merged brands of WhiteGrey, VMLY&R and Wunderman Thomson eventually folded into WPP Creative; DDB, TBWA and BBDO merged into Omnicom Creative; Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and co become Publicis Creative, and so on.

That’s easier to achieve for Dentsu, particularly in Australia, when it starts with fewer brands in the first place.

Is it a strategy that agency groups would ever recommend their own clients follow? A lot of valuable heritage agency brands have vanished. Imagine if instead of Dove, OMO and Hellman’s we just had Unilever soap, Unilever washing powder and Unilever mayo. During the interview, Muddle argues that sometimes the answer is yes.

This may well be the end point for agencies, which are in their final years as we know them now. The multi agency group was an accident of their evolution - independents were acquired more for their client lists than they were for their output, so it made sense not to change the name above the door if it would risk that. And it was an answer to the perception that client conflict was insoluble within a one-brand agency group.

During the interview, Muddle makes the point that when auditors or lawyers do it, they call it specialising.

The value for brands of driving one idea through the earned media of PR and the paid media of advertising is also underrated. The few groups that have done it well needed both the right structure and creatives in place to achieve it. We’ll see whether Dentsu Creative can do it.

For Dentsu, if the proof is in the work, we’re still waiting. Muddle joined a year ago; joint chief creative officers Avish Gordhan and Mandie van der Merwe came on board six months ago. Muddle argues in the interview that it takes 18 months for defining work to make its way down the pipeline.

One answer from Muddle - who comes from more of a media than creative background - captures her pragmatic approach. “Do I understand and worship creativity in the same way? The truth is, I don’t worship it in the same way. I really value creativity, I absolutely do, but the way it comes to life now is different to the way it once did.”

Culturally, that’s a good thing. Many of the internal problems the advertising industry suffered came from putting creative teams on some sort of pedestal. A dose of respect rather than worship is what the industry needs.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead. In today’s audio-led edition: The call is coming from inside the house as Nine’s papers highlight disquiet over the company’s share buyback and Domain’s leadership; we look at the first edition of the reincarnated Cosmopolitan Australia; and the latest in AI.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

* Member-only pricing for our HumAIn and REmade (October 1) conferences;

* A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);

* Member-only content and our paywalled archives;

* Your own copy of Media Unmade.

Nine’s Foxtel takeover talks revealed as Cosmo returns

Six years after Bauer Media killed it off, Cosmopolitan Australia is back on the newsstands. In today’s audio-led edition of the Unmade podcast, we take a look at that first edition of Cosmo.

Plus, a revelation that Nine talked to News Corp about buying Foxtel; what reads like a subtle hit on the management team at the Nine-aligned Domain in the Australian Financial Review, and suggestions that Nine’s share buyback program has been a fizzer.

And in the world of AI, have we hit the trough of disillusionment?

Further reading:

* Unmade: As good as it gets - Foxtel on the block

* Capital Brief: Nine and News Corp deal talks add to Foxtel intrigue

* Australian Financial Review: REA’s success exposes shrinking Domain

* Brisbane Times: The $220 million ‘double-edged sword’ that’s bothering Nine

* Cosmopolitan Australia: Tones And I Is Ready For Her Close Up

Today’s episode features Tim Burrowes, Abe Udy and Cat McGinn

Editing was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Time to leave you to start your week. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* A launch date for Warner Bros to stream in to Australia

* How Nine killed it in the first quarter

* Gambling rules set to blow a hole in Seven’s plans

* Claiming the field in AI

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* The Australian: Warner Bros Discovery’s new streaming platform coming to Asia-Pacific

* OzTam: 2023 ratings calendar

* Mumbrella: Survivor, Idol and MAFS: Who won the first tentpole clash of the year?

* Australian Financial Review: $300m in ads on the line as AFL, NRL, wagering bosses face grilling

* The Age: The one big loophole in the online gambling debate

* The Australian: AI companies crave credibility but it doesn’t come for free

* Marketing Week: Mark Ritson - Brands’ biggest AI opportunity is in making customers believe the b******t

Quotes of the day:

My message to all of these people is the same. ChatGPT is a toy. A f*****g toy. Put it down. Or, if you want to spend your professional time playing with it, don’t share your games with the rest of us. We have work to do.

Mark Ritson

“It’s a very interesting question for Seven specifically because they have a locked in their price for AFL for quite a long period of time. If the government came in now and said no more gambling, how could they possibly recoup their revenue?

Dr Hunter Fujak, author, Code Wars

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Could Rightful incubate the next big brand?

Today’s edition of The Unmakers features Simon Hakim, CEO of creative agency Hunter and co-founder of food and beverage innovation business Rightful, in conversation with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes.

Hunter, now in its 13th year, launched with what was at the time an unconventional business model, which has since become more common - a decentralised team.

The team behind Hunter are now working on their next project: taking on neglected brands, particularly from the consumer packaged goods space, and reinventing them. Rightful aims to work with with larger companies, and share in the spoils when those brands are brought back to commercial success

During the conversation Hakim explains the Rightful business model, and the type of investors he and co-founder Matt Gibbins are looking for to get the startup off the ground.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

We’ll be back tomorrow with another update

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Public opposition to betting ads on the rise

* Details emerge on Chris Janz’s Scire project

* Was Foxtel overcounting TV audience?

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* The Guardian: Majority of Australians support banning gambling advertising on TV, study finds

* Unmade: Time up for betting ads

* The Australian: Ex-Nine execs Chris Janz and David Eisman aim to fill news ‘void’ with business website

* Sydney Morning Herald: Foxtel’s television ratings data could be inflated by 40 per cent

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today’s edition features one of the big beasts of Australian media - a rare, full length interview with News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller.

It’s not quite fair to describe Michael Miller as a News Corp lifer. He joined the organisation as a junior marketer in April 1992, but briefly left during the tumultuous reign of Kim Williams. During that short period, he ran APN News & Media (these days known as HT&E) as its shifted its centre of gravity from newspapers to radio. Miller was the man signing the cheques when the company’s Australian Radio Network boldly poached Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson from Southern Cross Austereo, and remade the radio landscape.

Miller came back to News Corp as executive chairman at the end of 2015. By that point, the worst of the newspaper industry’s existential crisis was over, but the business model was far from certain.

Since then the company - which publishes The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Telegraph news mastheads among many others - has proved the sceptics wrong by succeeding with paid subscriptions. Even as the company cuts 5% of its global workforce to navigate an uncertain economy, news publishing seems in a safer place. In today’s conversation, Miller points out that last time Unmade’s Tim Burrowes interviewed him on stage, back in 2018, the company had 420,000 subscribers. It’s since passed 1m.

The business model for news publishing was also boosted by the politically-driven News Media Bargaining Code, which forced Google and Facebook to strike deals with local publishers. Miller offers a warning for the consequences for the industry (and Facebook) if, as seems likely, Facebook’s parent company Meta walks away from renewing its deals next year.

And Miller points to the next battleground for payment - AI. In the same way that Google and Facebook were asked to pay to deliver content originated from news publishing, Miller says the same argument about ChatGPT is “inevitable” and imminent.

The interview also tackles the polarising nature of News Corp’s content, how it addresses advertisers boycotts led by the likes of Sleeping Giants and Mad F*****g Witches (“Don’t give in to bullies”), and the evolution of its columnists.

Miller also puts forward an argument for optimism in the most challenged journalism space: local news.

Transcript of Michael Miller interview with Tim Burrowes:

Tim Burrowes:

My guest has arguably the biggest job in Australian media. Michael Miller is Executive Chairman of News Corp Australia, a role he's held since 2015. He's been with News Corp for most of his career, since joining the company's marketing team 30 years ago, next month. You'll know News Cook from its portfolio of metro news mastheads, including the Telegraph, the Courier Mail, and the Herald Sun for its national title, The Australian, for news website news.com.au, and for its TV news operation, Sky News Australia. The company also has majority stakes in Foxtel Group and in property platform REA Group. Michael Miller has had a front row as News Corp evolved from a newspaper company into something much more complicated.

On Monday News Corp held its D_Coded event for digital marketers, which is one reason for the timing of this conversation. Now, Michael, the last time I interviewed you on the record was on stage at Mumbrella360, five years ago believe it or not. Now the title of the keynote you gave that day was Persuading Audiences and Customers to Pay and Stay. Even then, I'm not sure that the whole publishing world was convinced that subscribers could be the main means of funding newspapers. When Rupert Murdoch started the company on that path more than a decade ago now, many, many people predicted that it would not work. Yet here you are. Is it still about getting people to pay and stay?

Michael Miller:

It is, and many in the industry now have moved to a subscription, an audience funded model, and that whether it be a streamer, whether it be your local out of industry, you've got supermarkets. But particularly for us, I think back of five years ago in July of, I think it was 2018, we last spoke, Tim, we had about 420,000 subscribers. And on October last year we announced we'd just passed a million. And that when I reflect on five years ago, it was a question of, do we actually have a sustainable model for journalism? And today I can say far more confidently that we do, and that's a good thing for not just for media companies, but also for those who rely so much on them.

Tim Burrowes:

And I suppose one of the things we have seen the pendulum swinging even more so than during that conversation, was that move towards subscriber pays as opposed to advertiser pays. Has that pendulum reached as far as it will, do you think? Because I guess you almost have two constituencies really, don't you, the advertisers and the subscribers/readers?

Michael Miller:

Yeah, I've always described us traditionally as a business of a dual-sided marketplace where we are connecting those audiences with our journalism, with clients who want to engage in entrusted contextual environments. The pendulum is to continue to swing from being client dominated, to being far more consumer balanced. And a good business is diversified revenues, but also diversified audiences too. So I don't think that pendulum has stopped yet. It has had a good three, four years. It's still growing, but the fatigue that I think particularly news and information has seen over the past few years has definitely some to settle in and that it's now I think a challenge for all media companies to look at bundling partnerships and a more compelling value offer, which goes beyond just traditional news.

Tim Burrowes:

Well, before we speak more widely, I'd like to maybe talk about a couple of the announcements from this week, from D_Coded. I'll invite you to put your marketer hat back on and explain the total commerce proposition if you could please.

Michael Miller:

Yeah, total commerce has been something which we've been working towards now for a number of years and that we're in McKinsey estimate, this will be a $500 billion market globally, in the coming years ahead. And so from a News Corp perspective, total commerce refers to a suite of client solutions that integrates our content and commercial content with the ability to purchase at the lower end of the purchase funnel. And that it does connect using our data that we share with both Foxtel and REA, to connect clients more accurately through contextual content in an actual purchase of our sites. And that's something which we've been working on for a number of years.

Tim Burrowes:

And this I suppose is the really interesting thing that we are talking increasingly about, offsite strategies. Is that a signal of where media is going, or where News Corp is going?

Michael Miller:

I think it's something which we all media are going to. You think of the origins, we have mastheads in our portfolio called the Advertiser. And that commercial messages in trusted news environments is nothing new, that's been well established now for centuries. And this is an evolution of that and it's the latest of that, whereby our clients are asking us to get closer to their customers who are our consumers, and that we know we don't want to interrupt that environment that they're consuming their news in.

And it's part of the reason we invested in companies like Medium Rare and the work they do with Australian Institute of Company Directors. It's Qantas, David Jones amongst many. It's the reason why we invested in Visual Domain, because a lot more of this content now is video and audio, and not just in print and pictorially. Well, it's why last year with D_Coded we announced shoppable video and vertical video and that the years we've been building up to this moment, whereby I think the market is now ready and accepting that it's total commerce that we can provide a solution from top end of funnel to the purchase at the bottom end.

Tim Burrowes:

And is this a conversation to mainly have with brands and marketers directly or via their agencies?

Michael Miller:

My observation is that sitting in many different parts of organizations and there's not a consistent location who owns this, because in some cases, a brand is still important in terms of that purchase decision and that sits in one part of a business. But then digital commerce sitting in another, social sometimes hits and that's your off platform audience, as we find in our business, is particularly important in terms of pushing people down into that purchase funnel. And I feel like there's some companies that don't have that end, that their cradle to grave processes are in place and they're still working through that, and to be fair, so have we. But I think that's what we now have got clarity on in terms of providing not just retailers, but insurance companies, in terms of FMCG goods directly, fashion, fast fashion, these are all areas and the Black Friday, Cyber Monday for us continues to double the past three years as a indicator of a consumer's propensity and willingness to pay.

Tim Burrowes:

One of the interesting things I took from the Total Commerce part of the announcement this week, and I accept this wasn't the central part at all, but you as an organization, you did talk a little bit about using AI as part of this process. Which I think is an interesting moment, because obviously since ChatGPT broke through and OpenAI broke through, it's the topic of the time. How are you thinking about AI's place within News Corp going forward?

Michael Miller:

We've been using AI for a number of years. It's not new to the category and not new to us as a company, in being able to be a newsroom assistant, in being able to quickly analyze audiences that are on our various sites. And so, Vidora is the brand we use. We use a reporting tool called Verity, which is world leading and publishers around the world are looking at what we've done in terms of understanding who is paying and who is staying and what they're reading prior, what they're reading post, demographically, geographically.

It gives us a great insight in how we've changed our company in terms of allocation of reporters and staff, but also the rounds that we choose and where we see growth opportunities. We use AI in News Connect, which is in our seven year long data product which we've worked with other leading data brands, the banks, the cards, the retailers, to be able to provide over well, nearly 3000 different segments for different clients that are custom-made for them. And AI is a big part of our News Connect product. ChatGPT is another layer and it's exciting. I think it's here to stay. I don't think it's a fad, but it's early days as well, we need to understand how best to use it and how not to use it.

Tim Burrowes:

And do you see that conversation around using generative AI to create editorial content? Is that a Rubicon that must not be crossed or is there a place for it for the low value commoditized content? How are you thinking about that part? Because that must be the most sensitive part of the conversation about AI.

Michael Miller:

There's probably three layers that are top of mind for me at the moment. And as I say, this is still evolving, but attribution is important in journalism, that you're quoting the source, the person. But equally now, I think it's important for trusted media to declare if ChatGPT and generative AI is your source. So that's how I think about that in terms of first layer of journalism. I see it as being a newsroom assistant rather than being a journalist replacement, and based on historical information and comments and a variety of sources, and that it doesn't though, give you context to the current and any predictive despite its term, around what others may behave differently tomorrow.

And so, that's the role of a journalist is to be inquisitive, is to be forward-thinking and is to be thinking around guidance too, how we should be thinking about events or issues socially in the future. And that I haven't seen yet, ChatGPT be able to meet that need. The third layer is how ChatGPT has been built and it's drawn in many different sources, primarily though trusted media brands and that again, we're in that situation where there's a business being built here, which is a user utilizing the content of others, not just trusted media brands, but without attribution and without payment. And I think that is a concern for the original creators who are not benefiting, but they're seeing their journalism or their hard work, they're cataloging benefited by others.

Tim Burrowes:

I first remember probably in something like 2008, 2009, Rupert Murdoch, your proprietor, talking fairly fiercely about the role that Google was playing in using news content to drive its search results and suggesting that it would be fair to receive a payment. And I, like many people at the time, thought that seemed a bit unrealistic, and yet it came to be. Have you yet got an evolved position on whether we've got the same principle at stake when it comes to generative AI? Is there a point when you would want the likes of Microsoft or other people who partner in OpenAI to be coming to the same sort of conversation that the News Media Bargaining Code conversation drove?

Michael Miller:

I think that those conversations are inevitable, if not going to be accelerated and that's not in dispute about where the content and advice is coming from and they're already asking for payment models from consumers and that's not right.

Tim Burrowes:

Now, in Scott Morrison as Treasurer and then Prime Minister, you had somebody who was very sympathetic to that argument. Do you yet have a sense of what the view of the current government is? I know it is very new and happening fast, so I don't know if you've got to that conversation yet.

Michael Miller:

The news bargaining code that was introduced 18 months ago, received bipartisan support and that I'd take that as being that they are supportive conceptually and of the principles behind the code. So it's not a conversation which we've had to have as we've had it probably two years plus prior, in that they've indicated their support. As now other countries around the world are following Australia's lead in looking at how they regulate in their own markets.

Tim Burrowes:

And do you think that will now extend to the conversation around AI as well, naturally, or is that a conversation that will need to be forced to make it happen?

Michael Miller:

I take partnership as approach. I would be wanting to have conversations with our potential users of our journalism as a first port. Going in with lawyers at a first meeting is never a great way to start any relationship. And so, I would prefer to be meeting with those and discussing what does a fair partnership look like. And I think that at the same time, a lot of the ChatGPT content that's generated isn't attributed either, and that would be a benefit I think to those organizations to hear that and see that as being part of the offer they make.

Tim Burrowes:

While we're talking about frenemies, you are getting into vertical video. That was another one of the announcements this week, which I guess gets one thinking about TikTok. Are they... It's unfair to call them the new kids now, but are they where the attention is beginning to swing towards now, as opposed to Facebook as the previous social media foe?

Michael Miller:

Their definitely video consumption is on the rise, that there is now, it's Reels for Facebook, it's Google Web Stories on that platform, and it's TikToks for TikTok. And so yes, as our content or journalism may be used on that platform, that's a conversation that as new platforms come to bear, I think the code need to consider those and that if we go back 10 years ago, back to the origins of even prior to Facebook in the 15 years ago, they've evolved greatly and that I think that the code needs to continue to evolve to counter for new entrants to the market, but also how their business models have changed in line with how consumers are changing. And the acceleration of video has been dramatic over the past few years and that's where TikTok has benefited to Facebook's expense. But as they are increasingly using the content of others, then that's a fair conversation to have.

Tim Burrowes:

Well, a couple of points of the last few years that I'd love to just get your perspective on, now that they're in the beginnings of the rear view mirror. Now the first one we have talked about already, which is the News Media Bargaining Code negotiations. How would the economics of news look now, if that process hadn't happened and Facebook and Google hadn't been nudged into making those deals in 2021 to pay the publishers, how would the landscape be now?

Michael Miller:

Oh, there'd be pressure on all media, not just news media who have not just got commercial agreements, but partnerships now in place. Arguably there's been an investment made, as I say, that could be both in kind or in cash, depending on the different arrangements that are there, which has enabled some of those companies that are now seeing some headwinds to create. For me, I feel how they reinvested in the arrangement they've come to, to accelerate the growth of their digital business. And that's probably the approach I've thought of at News Corp, is that this isn't about a bottom line return to shareholder moment, it's about an opportunity to reinvest in a digital future. And that is now when I think of the core, it's a digital core and that's been the opportunity of those arrangements, have now created. And so, how would it look? I think it would look a lot barer. I think I'd be concerned that we would have less players and that is not good for the consumer ultimately, but for Australian media more broadly.

Tim Burrowes:

There is some speculation that when Facebook's agreements start coming up for renewal next year, they seem to have far less appetite to renew perhaps than the Google News initiative does or Google and Alphabet more generally. How do the economics change for you if Facebook and their parent company, Meta, don't come back to the table next year?

Michael Miller:

Should that be a decision they make, it would impact the ability to reinvest and that's how I consider it. I can't talk for others, but that would be disappointment. I don't think it'd be good for their business either, to be frank. I think that we refer, for News Corp to combined Google and Facebook, we sent 2.9 billion referrals last year and that is value to them and a large proportion of their total referrals come from news media companies and that I see it particularly as they think through video and how they respond, and we produce 80 reels a week for them, which is the largest exercise of a type in the world. There is definitely value which those trusted brands give to their platforms. So I don't think it's good business for either, but it wouldn't be good business if they were to walk away and whether they're, I'm not sure how they detangle their relationship with their audience without the use of news. I don't know technically how they achieved that either.

Tim Burrowes:

Now I suppose another key moment over the last five years or so, we look back at 2020, when all publishers, including News Corp had to make some big decisions as the pandemic kicked in. You pretty much got out of the print business for local newspapers. That's nearly three years ago now, it's just flying by. When you look back on that period now, was this just an acceleration of something that was inevitable or was there anything that could have changed that story and changed that trajectory do you think?

Michael Miller:

I think it was an acceleration of the inevitable, that we had seen for the decade prior that local newspapers had predominantly, or had been funded wholly by client dollars, they were your car yard, they were your shopping malls, they were your local job markets. They were the swap meets, they were the tenders. Council stopped advertising, council notices they disappeared. A lot of the key major advertisers in communities that relied on local foot traffic moved to social platforms. They moved to the portals of CarsGuide, realestate.com.au, and that there wasn't a model to fund those.

The uncertainty of the pandemic meant that most of those businesses were unable to trade and that we didn't know how long that would last for. And so, we made the conclusion that those dollars that had already started to drain and they're accelerated at the start of the pandemic, were not going to come back. And that to transition them to still be digital models, not printed as well, was something which we had seen occur in other markets around the world. And it pains me because I'm a print lover and someone who's grown up on it, but it equally got accepted that our audiences had moved digitally, our clients had moved digitally, and that you weren't able to hold onto the old, you had to plan for the new.

Tim Burrowes:

I'm also a print lover, grew up in local newspapers, started delivering the local paper when I was 13 years old. So I'm very much from the campus of supportive of local news. I struggle to see models emerge that really help fund the local journalism that used to happen everywhere of a reporter in every courtroom, a reporter in every council meeting, a reporter arriving at the cop shop every day to see what was going on. I'd love to hear some reasons for optimism about that sort of journalism being funded at that granular, local level in the future. Are you seeing signs at all?

Michael Miller:

No, and that is the big revelation and that I think we were one the first companies in the world to see the value of hyper-local news. In the past three years we have launched 24 new mastheads in areas where we previously did not have a print publication. What people subscribe for, what's that moment where they say, "I'm going to start paying for...", is a local reason. It is court reports, it is tender applications, it's developments that are happening around the corner. It is local crime, it's the local football footy team. So as I said, we've invested in 24 new publications in high consumption areas.

We've also started a local sports streaming service. This year we will broadcast 2,300 local, national, and state sports games which become part of your masthead. And the benefit for those organizations is that we continue to report upon those as part of your local masthead, and that's what people initially pay for. What they stay for is quite different. What they stay for is network news. It's news about the latest diet, it's the post-COVID travel trends. It's the advice around superannuation. So the combination of hyper-local and network is, what is the beauty that we're seeing and we're not the only one seeing that around the world, but I think we were the first to see the benefit of the void that had been left for hyper-local news that people need, and they have particularly needed that the past three years.

Tim Burrowes:

Well, you mentioned a little bit earlier your view on partnerships, which it does strike me that News Corp is a less insular company than it was once seen. Few examples came to mind for me, last August you signed a deal withv Ooh Media to deliver news across their screen network, Seven West Media's Perth newspapers tap into News Corp resources, HT&E, which you ran for a while when it was APN News & Media. That's partly owned by News Corp, about 13% or something. How do you think about how, as one of the I suppose two big beasts, about how the company should act within that commercial media ecosystem?

Michael Miller:

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 compliment. We print and we distribute the Nine and the ACM publications. Increasingly our audience is off platform, 72% of our audience does not come directly to our mastheads. So the majority of it is coming to us from seeing a Ooh Media screen. It's seeing us on Insta, Facebook, on a search result and that increasingly we need to look at those off platform top of funnel, and that's part of the reason why we see audience growth coming from.

Because with those more greater eyeballs becomes greater familiarity of the brands and the content than journalism that we produce and they're more likely to become a news.com.au audience, which become part of our total commerce solution, or they hopefully become a subscriber over the longer term. And so, that's where partnerships become and every partnership is different. I wish there was just a simple cookie cutter model approach, but people have different ambitions and drivers to their own business and that you mentioned Seven West, I've mentioned a lot of media companies already in this conversation who we do work with, and that probably our growth will come from taking shares to those who are not based in this country rather than those traditional competitors that we all grew up with.

Tim Burrowes:

Now in your stint at APN, you got some exposure to the outdoor advertising sector. Let's talk the potential for mergers and acquisitions. Would it make sense for News Corp to own a QMS or an Ooh Media or somebody like that do you think?

Michael Miller:

It would be inconsistent with our, I suppose past mandate. We're a content company. My experience from out-of-home in Australia is that Australia is one of the leaders in the world in terms of out-of-home technology and those companies are predominantly landlord and they're leasing from landlords and selling their leased assets to clients. They're not curating content and that's why we see companies like media partnering with us for content. Now I don't see us as the potential out-of-home player, because it's not our core skillset set. Don't never say never, but I'd say that our skills are in content creation, curation and amplification, and that I'd much prefer to stay in those areas that we'd lead in and not necessarily venture into those that others do better at.

Tim Burrowes:

What do you expect to see happening in M&A and in the wider market this year or going forward? Are you expecting to see much occur?

Michael Miller:

I would expect that most companies will focus on their core. For us, that's a digital core. And I worry less about revenue lines, more about cost lines, and managing your cost base. I think we're still seeing, where does the post-COVID bounce settle on its recline and that there may be opportunities that emerge, particularly with some of the tech businesses that are looking now more stretched as the valuations and models are showing signs of strain and that we're not convinced yet that some of them are as sustainable as what they were looking 12 months ago. So our priority is definitely on that. We're seeing good growth in our core digital business and that we need to ensure that the great work that our print teams are doing maximized in terms of that digital transition.

Tim Burrowes:

I'm glad you mentioned that wider outlook now, it is matter of public record that News Corp is currently cutting 5% of jobs globally. Now you were running News Corp's New South Wales operation back in 2012 when the local newspaper industry had what felt at the time it's near death moment. How does this year feel compared to that?

Michael Miller:

I feel that this year is far more certain than 2012, a decade ago. I think the industry was uncertain about the paths that, and not just those in news media, but more broadly we had the multi-channels, we saw the start of Netflix globally, and we now have that it's disrupted linear TV viewing. We're starting to see the next wave of programmatic and couponing and digital advertising. That's when I'd say Google and Facebook, or now Meta, we're really starting to take solidified a position as a ad business. I was reminded earlier that there was the double-click purchase by Google, the impact that had on the ad tech market. And so, you were starting to see the digitalization back in 2012 of out-of-home and that we were all very uncertain about where the client dollars would go and where we would have a consumer base that were prepared to pay.

And that I'm going to get the year wrong, but it's around that time that the iPad launched and there was a sudden moment of, this is how people are going to consume print. It's all going to be digital, but it's going to look like... It takes time for consumers to change their habits and we see them early adopt in Australia, second fastest in the world after Norway here. But do we stay with that habit? Not always, but sometimes we do. So you got to be a fast follower, or sometimes, other times you got to lead. But yeah, this feels very different to 2012. I think we as an industry should be more confident about what our business models are.

Tim Burrowes:

I suppose at the same time, any media organization is expecting a tough few months. I wonder, how do you balance communicating honestly with your staff about the challenges ahead and the jobs that might need to go as a result of that, versus finding a way of offering a vision for an optimistic future for journalism?

Michael Miller:

We often hear the announcements in the people who are unfortunately leaving companies. We advertised on digital and in print on Monday for last week, of new cadets to join the company. We have skills in audio that we didn't have 10 years ago, skills in video, skills in data, and that there are new people who are bringing a great talent to our journalistic, it says proposition and offering to consumers, and that you got to balance that out and times and that a lot of our plans are already in place around the recent announcement. You've got to be honest with your teams and say that sadly there will be some people who will leave and some people who will be redeployed, and some people who may choose to leave additionally. And we've seen that happen as well. But I think the past few years has maybe masked what was going on below the surface and we're now having to deal with that in larger numbers, not just at News Corp, but at all media companies, not just in Australia.

Tim Burrowes:

Now I keep referring back to the conversation we had on stage at Mumbrella360, the getting audiences and customers to pay and stay presentation. Now during that News Corp's content can polarize and that has long been the criticism of News Corp, that your editors pursue agendas. We've seen the rise and I think maybe the fading of campaign groups like Stop Funding Hate or Sleeping Giants. Their method I suppose, is to try to persuade advertisers to stay off certain platforms. That's been a big challenge I think for Sky News Australia. Now you must have developed a playbook for advertisers by now. What is the approach when these moments arise?

Michael Miller:

I wish there was a playbook, Tim, and that we could just roll out the... Every issue has different layers, different perspectives, and you're dealing often with different people. In terms of, first of all, the activists and the sleeping giants, the mad Witches. And others, yes, we went through a period of time when they worried, a number of clients out there, not just about News Corp content, although we were primary, and Sky News. They were activists who were trying to impact change to their own agendas. The good clients, the good companies were the ones that wanted to have a conversation and to understand the concerns both of the activist groups, but also get to the facts around what they were hearing. And again, in many cases there was misinformation which ultimately undermined the position of those activist groups to achieve their outcome.

And that misinformation has been their downfall, and that we've worked through that in having honest conversations. There were a small number of clients that jumped, that they responded due to the fear of what they could be trending online. And I've seen that happen from time to time. But on mass, I'd say the majority of our clients who are targeted are still with us and that a key message that I would say is, don't give into bullies. In terms of then, other critic groups are former prime ministers and political polarization.

I think they've got their own views and not always defend their views to their ability to have a view. That's what free speech is about. I don't need to agree with them. But ultimately, as we saw through a parliamentary inquiry that the impact of that, their concerns were not found to be of the magnitudes of which they were expressing and didn't receive the support ultimately that they had wanted. I think it comes back to if we need to make changes, if we need to evolve as an organization based on the feedback we're receiving, we got to take that on board. But additionally, we're not the type of organization that are going to respond to those intimidations and the agendas of others and that we've seen that come from, let's say minority groups. But that hasn't been a concern that I currently and luckily dealing with, but no doubt it's just around the corner.

Tim Burrowes:

Do you think you have evolved as an organization though, when it comes to the polarizing type of content?

Michael Miller:

I think we're always evolving. I think that the market has moved a lot as well. We've been through a phase over the past five years that opinion-based journalism is really on the back of social media, where we could all express an opinion and we were driven to hear others' opinion, but then we got swamped by, what is opinion, what is fact. And that has being part of the news fatigue and the opinion fatigue, which we've been drowned out by. And if anything a part of that evolution is a return to trusted, fact-based reporting and presentation and that it's clearly sourced, clearly attributed and presented as, this is fact and this is opinion. And the separation of the two I think is now a benefit of those media companies that follow that approach. And so, you're always evolving. In terms of some of the areas that we've been criticized on.

We constantly reflect on the views of, not so much the views that may differ to particular columnists and I. We have a broad church of columnists and people within the organization and that it's important that we are always encouraging new voices to be... And not just our own, but opinion writers to be expressing views which are maybe contrary. And then I look at the voice today and we've got a Chris Kenny who is an avid advocate for it. We've got someone like a Paul Kelly who looks at this from a constitutional lens. We've got others who, indigenous writers who are writing it in, I suppose indigenous Australians who are writing this as a pro and it doesn't go far enough anti. And so, when I think through the history of time and the role of news media, it is to further the debate to help Australians understand the issue and our policy makers have a platform to express their views so that we can arrive at the right decision. So I'm giving you, every issue is different.

Tim Burrowes:

Now, Rupert Murdoch recently marked 70 years at the helm of the company, which just sounds remarkable when you say it out loud. Now he is in that leadership role alongside Locklan. You've seen that joint leadership evolve. I think you would've come back to the organization just after Locklan came back. How do you sum up that sort of joint leadership role now, from where you see it?

Michael Miller:

I suppose that's at a board level. I personally report through to Robert Thompson, who's the global CEO. The board look at many different broadcasting, business information, news media, real estate interests. Rupert and I deal far more with Lachlan now, as the co-chairs. And that obviously they would discuss many of those issues together as they would with other board members as well. I understand it's not always your traditional model of having co-chairs, but it's not unusual either and that it's a balance that appears to work. I don't know, I'm not on those board meetings to give a context of the dynamics at the time.

Tim Burrowes:

What else in media is intriguing you at the moment? I know you are interested in niche business models. I wonder what developing models you've been keeping an eye on, either here in Australia or overseas, which are capturing your attention at the moment.

Michael Miller:

Yeah, definitely deep niches. I came across a business, a publisher they call themselves who's specialized in watches. They claimed $100 million of revenue and that as there are wine collectors and car collectors, there's also watch collectors. I'm not one, but they want to know who the makers are, the history behind them, how to ensure them, and the swapping of them. There's expos and conferences, there's commerce, the total commerce solution to it as well. You look at the wine industry, you look at now just aspects of pets. There's passion points, there's music that I've learned a lot about when I was with now HT&E, in terms of people's passion points. Food is another one. It's not just travel generically, it's aspects of travel. It is arts travel, it is, I suppose adventure travel just on bikes.

And so, the great thing is that you can now develop deep niches that can attract an audience. What I'm partly interested in that is that, how does a bundle with your core business? And so, in recent years we've invested in stock head, being for those stocks that don't get a lot of coverage. Kids SPOT has been part of the portfolio and is having another resurgence in terms of a source and destination for B2B and young parents to congregate and have a community around their kids. I look at the race net and punters to investments we've made and the passionate community of people who love the track. CODE Sports now has been another revelation in terms of its long form storytelling around our passion for sport. It's not all sports. We don't claim to be a competitor to a Wide World or a Herald Sun, but it is the stories of sport and there's a group there who make the time and have that passion.

And so, how then do you include that as part of your broader subscription to a news corporate masthead? And that adds value. There's a proposition there. I see that many of the UK publications for five quid, you get to have puzzles and crossword for the year and it's a retention pace and it's a smart business model. And so, that's where I'm interested in what we've called in telco land triple or quad players of the past.

I can see that reemerging as being part of your value proposition. And in reality, we've always covered stocks and puzzles and done long form storytelling, but it's in specialist environments where you can buy them separately, you can buy a part of, and that's what excites me as, we're getting into the storytelling of new genres, in new ways, using audio, using video, using UCG. Taste is the biggest cooking club in the country by a long way, and that's a passion point. And they're the ears that I'm always looking for that is inspiration and thinking, how big can you get it here? And sadly, the reality is, we're a country of 25 million people. I wish we had another zero at the end of that, which then you'd get some scale.

Tim Burrowes:

Now a slightly unfair question, asking to pick one, but if you could point to one act of journalism from News Corp in recent months that sums up the company's direction of travel, what would you choose or what would you think of?

Michael Miller:

Oh, our news award winner last year was Hedley Thomas. He is a journalist who has evolved into a podcaster, his recent podcast, Shandee's Story, and not only reopened the case of 23 year old Shandee Blackburn in Queensland, around the systemic failures of the Queensland government's DNA laboratory that he has given hope to over 200 families who do have unanswered questions. This is far bigger story than the Teacher's Pet. According to Hedley, the Teacher's Pet downloaded 85 million times. And so, why has he been successful, I think is probably more, it's enduring, it is fearless, it is about fairness, it's about transparency, and it's about that accountability of those in who didn't ask the questions around Lynette Dawson. Now he did, he did the job that the law enforcement and politicians didn't do. And so, that is what good journalism is about and it's about making a difference. And so, that's probably the one that these people are aware of, that it's indicative of multi-platform storytelling using resources, but the commitment to finding the truth.

Tim Burrowes:

Now, last week we heard the news of the passing of Brian Walsh, who was the steward of Foxtel's TV making. A bit hard to ask you to sum it up, but how would you sum up the contribution that he made?

Michael Miller:

And his contribution was far broader than Foxtel. I remembered getting the news late on the Thursday night. I first came across Brian as a kid marketer in the mid '90s. We were launching the Sunday Magazine, which was a big deal at the time. There were over a million copies that a magazine would go into, the biggest magazine day one in the country.

And he was a mentor to me in the launch of that entertainment based publication. But Brian has managed sporting stars. He was a talent manager. When the movies would come to Australia, he was their publicist on the ground. He would put on the halftime events at NRL Grand Finals. Now his days of promotions manager at 2SM and in radio, then leading to marketing. He was generous in his sharing of experiences, he wasn't a competitive guy. He loved the story. He loved connecting with audiences and he's going to be missed. But his contribution, as I say, is far greater than his colleagues at News and Foxtel. It's his contribution is to many people and probably, but look, he probably made a difference to many who didn't even know his name.

Tim Burrowes:

Well, last question from me, and this is the last question I ask everybody. What would your critics say about you and what would your supporters say about you?

Michael Miller:

They're the critics. We've got a few. Journalism is not there to be popular. It's often standing up for the unpopular, for those without a voice, for those who are unable to represent themselves in the conversation. And while we are standing up for the unpopular, we're not always popular and therefore we do have our critics. And that is what they would say about us, is that we're their version of what the news is, is not necessarily what we publish every day. And yeah, that's a tough job for an editor to decide what has got to be led, but we are there to make a difference, it'd be how I would respond to those critics who would like to see something different. We'd like to see their view of the world played back at them, but we are there to make a difference. And that part of that is being fearless and saying principle.

Tim Burrowes:

And what would your supporters say about you?

Michael Miller:

A measure that I use is, how are we going, how are the Australian people responding? And they're both your critics and your supporters. And that ultimately, I look at, do we have a growing audience? That's got to be your measure. Is that more important than your share price? Is that more important than your net promoter score? I think it ultimately is. How are your customers responding to what you're doing? And in the past two years, we've grown from 16.8 to 18.1 million Australians. So we've got a growing audience. And so, we are doing something right for them and why do they come to us? They come to us because they trust us. And that we're there for free thinking, free markets and free speech, and we're going to protect that and stand up for that. That means standing up for Australians. And that while we've got a growing audience, I'd say we're doing our job. And that our supporters would say, we trust you.

Tim Burrowes:

Michael Miller, thank you very much for your time.

Michael Miller:

Thank you, Tim.

text

Time to leave you to your Thursday.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

I’ll be back tomorrow with another update tomorrow

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* The ABC wakes up to its radio ratings crisis

* Another anti-siphoning delay?

* We can reveal that Meta’s Dan Sinfield has joined the Premium Content Alliance

* News Corp links up with Samsung TV, and introduces Total Commerce

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* Sydney Morning Herald: ABC hires consultants amid nationwide radio ratings slump

* Unmade: ABC Radio National’s ratings oblivion

* The Australian: Labor to amend nation’s anti-siphoning laws

* Sydney Morning Herald: TV reform delay kicks a goal for free-to-air footy fans

* The Australian: News Corp Australia chief Michael Miller says content is still king

* The Australian: Sky’s unveils a new digital platform (yes, we know it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the headline they’ve gone with)

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade in which we share the final session of last week’s RE:Made - Retail Media Unmade conference.

Last week’s RE:Made closed with a landmark panel. For the first time, the bosses of the retail media networks for Australia’s biggest two supermarkets shared the same stage.

Mike Tyquin, managing director of Woolworths’ Cartology; Paul Brooks, general manager of Coles360; Pippa Leary, MD of client product for News Corp; and Melissa Wyness, chief media and operating officer of Mercato, joined a conversation moderated by Unmade’s Tim Burrowes.

The session marked the end of a day when Australia’s nascent retail media community came together for the first time.

The conversation focused on what the retail media industry needs to do to go on building from here, and also shared some favourable comparisons on the market’s progress locally, compared to other major markets.

During the conversation, Leary dropped some hints about how News Corp sees itself fitting into the retail media landscape (“the retail media network when you don’t have a retail media network”).

The panel also debated the changed retailer-supplier power dynamic created by retail media networks, and how media agencies fit into the conversation, addressing the question of who pays for the lunch?

A further question was whether media agencies have now left it too late to get involved. Notably some agency groups were heavily represented at the event, while others appeared to have missed the memo.

For those interested in carrying on the conversation, we’ve created a Retail Media ANZ Linkedin Group. Anyone is welcome to join.

Audio production of today’s podcast was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday morning scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Australia’s TV networks plot a BVOD exchange

* Introducing Australia’s new audience measurement service - Iris

* The continued rise of retail media

* New data suggests more people are consuming subscription video than free TV

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy.

Further reading:

* The Australian: The not so secret rise of retail media networks

* Australian Financial Review: TV industry asks tech to help build YouTube-killer ad network

* The Australian: Viewers flock to paid streaming services, new report shows

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

TV’s inflection point is coming. Any time now (or maybe it happened in the last few weeks), the proportion of the Australian population who watch television the traditional way will fall below half for the first time.

But as fast as traditional ways of watching are falling, new viewing habits are forming - or that’s what the data in Think TV’s regularly produced Fact Pack suggests.

Analysis of OzTam data for the second half of last year by Think TV suggests that commercial audiences are on the move - from television consumed via their aerials, to video streams.

In today’s Unmade podcast, Tim Burrowes talks to Think TV’s director of research, insights & education Steve Weaver and to the organisation’s CEO Kim Portrate about the meaning behind the numbers.

In the first half of 2022, just over 14.1m Australians - or 54.3% of the potential viewing population - were watching TV and only doing it the linear way, via their aerials or Foxtel dish.

By the second half of 2022, that number had fallen to 13.3m, or 51%.

A question Portrate and Waver address during the conversation is whether in the early months of 2023, we have since passed the inflection point, and less than 50% of Australians are now watching TV the old-fangled way.

Also revealed in the data is that in the first half of last year, 3.6m (or 13.7% of the population) were watching commercial TV on a combination of linear TV or via streaming. That rose to 4.1m, or 15.6% of the population, by the second half.

The number of people giving up on their aerial or dish to watch broadcast TV only via streaming also rose sharply - from 1.5m to 1.8m. With some smart TVs, the viewers may not even have realised that’s what they were doing.

Reassuringly for the TV industry, the jump in streaming viewing seems to be going up almost as fast as the linear switchoff is occurring. Total reach across linear and BVOD (broadcast video on demand) only dipped from 19.23m to 19.17m, a fall of just 0.3%.

It’s worth noting that all of the analysis is based on OzTam data which only covers Australia’s broadcasters, not streaming-only platforms like Netflix or Stan.

During the wide ranging conversation, we raise the issue of the TV industry’s slow implementation of a daily total viewing number to move away from the fast-fading overnight metro metric.

Portrate says that will happen this year. In the conversation she was also challenged to predict how long until the TV transmitters can be turned off altogether as streamign becomes the only means of viewing. It might be sooner than you think. And we canvassed both Weaver and Portrate on whether the likes of Netflix would be welcomed onto OzTam in the same way the streamer has been allowed onto the UK’s audience measurement service.

The full Fact Pack is available on the Think TV website

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday morning scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Australia’s podcasting spend revealed

* Another HBO extension for Foxtel

* A Logies mystery

* Will the government take on the networks on quotas?

* What we learned from results season

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy

Further reading:

* IAB Australia: Digital Audio Advertising Spend Surges To $221m In Australia

* The Australian: Foxtel poised to ink multi-year deal with US media giant Warner Bros Discovery

* The Australian: Media Diary: The Logies: no date, no location

* The Australian: Albanese government faces pushback on streaming content obligations

* Unmade: Nine's Sneesby gets better at navigating the awkward questions

* Unmade: Tuesdata: Profits begin to fall as Seven West Media prepares for a chilly 2023

* Unmade: Tuesdata: Unpacking Ooh Media's financial results; can the good old days of 2019 return?

* Unmade: The end game approaches for HT&E

* Unmade: Southern Cross Austereo has had its worst ever start to a financial year. Can Listnr change the trajectory?

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday morning scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* Meta launches paid verification (but that’s not the bit worth paying for);

* Adland prepares for the downturn;

* What to expect in the last big week of results season

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy

Further reading:

* Meta Newsroom: Testing Meta Verified to Help Creators Establish Their Presence

* The Australian: ABC’s triple apology to Kamahl over Phillip Adams tweet misses the mark

* Australian Financial Review: News Corp’s REA asks workers to go into ‘negative leave’ to cut costs

* Australian Financial Review: Why TV execs aren’t (too) worried about a 22pc plunge in ad spend

* Unmade: Southern Cross Austereo has had its worst ever start to a financial year. Can Listnr change the trajectory?

* Unmade: Profits begin to fall as Seven West Media prepares for a chilly 2023

* Australian Financial Review: HT&E’s biggest investor sees benefits to media consolidation

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we talk to author and Crikey proprietor Eric Beecher as he publishes a book condemning the power of media moguls. And further down, the Unmade Index bounces back a little after slumping on Monday and then losing some more on Tuesday.

If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:

* Member-only pricing for our HumAIn and REmade (October 1) conferences;

* A complimentary invitation to Unmade’s Compass event (November);

* Member-only content and our paywalled archives;

* Your own copy of Media Unmade.

‘They do it to make money and they do it to wield power’

In today’s audio-led conversation, we talk to one of the leaders of Australia’s independent media sector, Eric Beecher.

A former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald early in his career, Beecher has been involved in building and selling two big publishing businesses, and is currently proprietor of Private Media whose flagship is trouble-making daily newsletter Crikey.

Last week, Beecher’s new book, The Men Who Killed The News, was published by Simon & Schuster. In it, he takes aim at media moguls around the world who use their influence for their own ends. A major focus is the Murdoch family. Beecher has gone from working for Rupert Murdoch and selling a business to what was then News Ltd, to being an influential critic of the company and being unsuccessfully sued for defamation by Lachlan Murdoch.

The conversation also covers the imperfection of the industry-funded Australian Press Council (“the lesser of evils”) his views on the sort of public interest journalism that deserves to be publicly funded (“It’s about scrutinzing power and government. I do not believe it includes lifestyle journalism”) and what’s likely to happen in the Murdoch family’s new succession battle.

Beecher describes the unregulated influence of owning a media company as “the loophole in democracy”.

We talked to Private Media CEO Will Hayward last year:

Unmade Index slide ends

The Unmade Index recovered slightly yesterday after its drops of 3.6% and 1.2% to start the week. Yesterday the Unmade Index improved by 1.08% to 477.9 points.

Among the larger stocks, printing and marketing services group IVE did best, growing by 3.4%. Seven West Media was up by 3% after hitting a four year low on Tuesday.

Enero, owner of agencies including BMF, hit its own four year low yesterday, dropping to a market capitalisation of $106m

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.

We’ll be back with another newsletter tomorrow.

If you’re interested in retail media, don’t forget that discounted earlybird tickets are on sale for another 12 days for the next edition of REmade on October 1. And our call for entries for the REmade Awards is now live.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade

tim@unmade.media

Welcome to an interview-led edition of Unmade. Today’s primary focus is Melbourne media veteran Ben Willee

For a second week in a row, Unmade’s podcast features a Melbourne based media expert called Ben. This week’s guest is Ben Willee, GM and media director of the WPP-aligned Spinach Advertising. Willee has been with Spinach for the last 11 years. Earlier in his career he spent a decade with IPG’s Initiative, in London and Melbourne.

The interview, with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, focuses on the short term and long term media outlook (Without predicting a recession, Willee is considering for the eventuality); he offers his interpretation of the first results from reporting season; and he assesses the importance of The Olympics in Nine’s strategy.

Willee also suggests that some of those who’ve got used to flitting between jobs in a tight talent market might be about to get a painful surprise. And like all of us, he wishes there were more LinkedIn thought pieces on what ChatGPT means for marketing.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

letters@unmade.media

Welcome to Start the Week, our Monday morning scene-setter for the week ahead.

Today:

* M&A chat: a tie-up between Seven West Media and HT&E?;

* Results season - How News Corp fared and the outlook for SWM, Southern Cross Austereo, Enero and Domain this week;

* Breaking Bad pulls in the Super Bowl attention;

* How Married At First Sight is killing the opposition

Today’s episode feature Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy

Further reading:

* Australian Financial Review: Seven eyes plan to create Australia’s next $1 billion media company

* Unmade: Wind turns for News Corp

* CBS Sports: Super Bowl commercials - A sneak peak at the ads that will air during Super Bowl 57 between Eagles and Chiefs

* NFL Game Pass

* Nine: TV Ratings Week 6

* The Australian: Media Diary - The Project battles after Carrie and Lisa exits

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

Message us: letters@unmade.media

Welcome to an interview-led edition of Unmade. Today’s primary focus is Ben Shepherd’s first in depth interview since joining Dentsu as chief investment officer.

Talking Dentsu

In the first Unmade podcast interview of the year, Dentsu’s new chief investment officer Ben Shepherd joined Unmade’s Tim Burrowes.

In the wide-ranging interview, Shepherd explains why he sees retail media as one of the most elegant, “wealth creating” media developments since adwords; he argues that there’s nothing wrong with leaving a job after a couple of years if you feel you’re not making the impact you want to; and he explains the style he will bring to negotiations with media owners.

Audio production was courtesy of Abe’s Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers and sound design for corporate videos, digital content, commercials and podcasts.

letters@unmade.media