Media

An Australian publisher class action against Google’s alleged nefarious and anti-competitive practices to squash the publishing industry is being led by one of Australia’s top silks in competition and commercial law, John Sheahan. The widely regarded barrister is also representing Coles in its case defending ACCC allegations that the two big supermarket chains engaged in deceptive pricing conduct, including Coles “Down Down” marketing. Sheahan is also a member of the Takeovers Panel which is under the remit of the Federal Treasurer.

Last year, Apple made an iOS update that podcast businesses hadn't seem coming – and as a result downloads globally plummeted 15 per cent. For some, the impact was massive, with The Kyle & Jackie O Show losing 48 per cent. Cue commercial scrambling. With the dust now settled, industry execs reckon the new numbers are more transparent and have downweighted downloads – which can be misleading – as a core commercial metric. What's more, podcast revenue is strongly climbing locally. Acast's Henrik Isaksson, LiSTNR's Grant Tothill, and Nova's Nicole Bence unpack what happened when the numbers dropped, how things have panned out – and what's next.

Three weeks before Google is due to pay publishers $100m via a deal struck to avoid Canada's equivalent of a news media bargaining code, the Canadian competition bureau has just ordered Google to sell its ad server DFP and ad exchange AdX, the backbone of its $238bn-a-year ad machine. Plus, it says Google must pay multibillion dollar damages for forcing publishers to use its anticompetitive ad products. If the search giant blocks access to its data, the bureau says it will fine Google “three per cent of its global revenue”, or US$9.2bn.

Wheelchair Rugby Australia has come a long way since it split away from a multi-sport governance system five years ago, and CEO Chris Nay counts a commercial broadcast partnership with Foxtel Group as the key lever in that trajectory. Foxtel Media's Mark Frain and Martin Medcraf have pulled strings behind the scenes to put Nay and his team in front of big name clients, with the countdown on to WRA's biggest milestone yet – a major international competition hosted in Adelaide next year. With the sport's high costs and difficult logistics to contend with, securing a full slate of sponsors on board will be critical to fuelling future growth. Which is why Foxtel is spreading the play, and per Medcraf, the opportunities for brands to score some big wins are plentiful.  

Months after Google was ruled an illegal monopolist in its search business that paid handsomely for market dominance, crushed rivals and hiked prices at a whim, the proposed penalties and remedies are known, including more transparency in ad pricing and open data flows for advertisers – a long-held market frustration.

One of Australia’s top marketers has died in a tragic accident this weekend. Lisa Ronson, who joined Medibank as CMO in July, was on her country Victorian farm in Ullina near Daylesford when an accident involving an all terrain vehicle [ATV] occurred. A collection of early industry tributes follows from marketing, media and agency peers.

Virtual professor Mark Ritson reckons key strategic marketing planning functions face automation within five years or so. Marketing and its supply chain should prepare accordingly, though Ritson thinks creative agencies may survive a cull coming faster than many realise. With a hard swing to the right globally, he suggests sustainability and purpose are being rapidly downgraded – and only the "naive" now position the latter as a revenue driver. Big platforms have likewise pivoted to mass reach over pure personalisation – hoovering up what the virtual professor sees as an investment swing back to brand. Hence TV, especially locally, being overlooked despite continuing to deliver the goods, per Ritson: "I've never seen a bigger delta or disparity between how the tool [TV] continues to work very well for brands and how marketers look at it ... It's still a very strong medium."

More than 3,500 media agency professionals can’t be wrong: They all voted for the best media sales execs and teams in Australia – with the top guns awarded last night at a sold out Ivy Ballroom in Sydney. Here’s the full list of winners.

Seven's new leadership has had to align fast following a major clear out, though some agency chiefs suggest they’re not quite there – yet – as a cohesive unit. Meanwhile, a dialled-down upfront had the network promising to be a “better partner” instead of “obsessing” purely about winning overnight ratings; repositioning its streamed content as SVOD, not BVOD; and claiming its new tech can predict audience behaviour 28 days out with 95 per cent accuracy – and maybe even keep them from switching channel. Plus, it’s wooing smaller advertisers with $10m worth of inventory to prove total TV’s effectiveness.

Commbank’s push for high margin ad revenues from its owned media and data will likely see more banks, telcos, utilities, petrol-convenience stores and travel companies break cover – and could spur further acquisitions in the mould of Woolworths $150m swoop for screen network Shopper Media. Owned media specialist Sonder has just polled 50 global marketers across brands including Accor, BP, BT Group, Citibank, Emirates, Hertz, Hilton, ING, KFC, Marriott, Mastercard, NAB, Nokia, Shell, Tesco, Turkish Airlines, Verizon, Visa, Vodafone and Western Union – and their answers imply a doubling of owned media and first party data monetisation within two years. But the report also suggests some amateurish approaches could prove costly – especially if owned-retail-paid media converge.

Expect more structural upheaval in the $14bn ad market in the next 12-18 months as more corporates like Commonwealth Bank’s move this week to monetise owned media assets join retailers in carving out new touchpoints to customers, says Coles360 boss Paul Brooks. Broad consensus has retailer media growing 10-20 per cent at present and will exceed forecasts of a $1.6bn to $1.9bn pool by 2025.

In an Upfronts seasons that has centred around big plays on repositioning audiences and measurement, tech-led data pushes, and transformative programming decisions to better reflect a ‘total TV’ approach, SBS offered a very safe and familiar – albeit always distinctive – narrative at this year’s advertising sales pitch. The part-commercial, part-public broadcaster eschewed surprises, instead exuding confidence in the purpose-led path it has been walking for nearly 50 years. There was a doubling down on the multicultural and First Nations content slate, plus a progressive take on its unique audience reach and understanding of “contemporary Australians”. There was also the confidence of first-mover advantage when it comes to integrating video and audio in SBS On Demand as well as extending Scope 3 reporting to digital campaigns in a sustainability narrative that's future focused. But the push to get buyers to stop thinking 25-54? Not quite so easy.

Nine is touting younger audiences on its total TV services, claiming one in three signed in viewers are millennials. It's gunning for more, per Director of 9Now and programming Hamish Turner, transforming content formats and programming efforts to keep the advertiser catnip incoming. Among its bets: Vertical video, shorter, personalised news formats, a willingness to embrace the intersection of data, product and tech – and more off-platform partnerships.

Former GroupM stalwart and one-time Maxus Australia boss Dave Gaines has built a USD$400m-billing independent agency in New York that doesn’t make any money on media mark-ups. He thinks audience metrics may face redundancy – as do media buyers – and agrees with former UM privacy chief Arielle Garcia that the data underpinning the promise of personalisation at scale is woefully inaccurate. But marketers and their peak bodies are doing little to change the status quo. Act fast, warns Gaines, or get fleeced by machines as well.

Lee Stephens, the former boss of Australia’s first listed digital agency e-mitch – a spinoff by the late Harold Mitchell’s Mitchell & Partners – and onetime boss of Carat ANZ is back in the media agency game with a plan to do it differently. Meerkat is an unlisted public company to facilitate better equity management for execs and employees and the agency is moving to channel planning and buying based on the best “media moments” for a target audience or segment. Meerkat will also eschew sector specific targeting algorithms from the likes of The Trade Desk for custom-built versions for Meerkat clients. 

It is a mistake to pit the priorities of online safety against those of online privacy, and many of the people who do so represent the interests of giant digital platforms that promote the idea of a decentralised open web, despite having enclosed and centralised control of that same global infrastructure. That was a key message from Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, lawyer and human rights activist Lizzie O'Shea, and UNSW Criminology Professor Michael Salter at SXSW last week. The "data extractive business models" of digital giants came under heavy fire and limiting those models was described as the best way to limit privacy and safety harms by removing the economic incentives that underpin "surveillance capitalism."

Greenhushing versus greenwashing: How companies tout their sustainability progress is increasingly a binary argument as they balance the risk of saying nothing at all with regulatory and consumer retribution for ego marketing or making claims they can’t evidentially back up. Which is why the AANA’s CEO Josh Faulks says its newly updated Environmental Claims Code was so important to get into the advertising industry’s hands sooner rather than later.

Foxtel's aiming to beat OzTam to market with its own trading currency – with the two set to land days apart. That could prove bumpy for media agencies. Foxtel Media boss Mark Frain, while piling pressure onto the incumbent currency provider, hasn't ruled out bringing everything back together. But only under a "very different operating model". In the meantime the pay TV firm turned streamer is going all-out to align new partners: Measurement firm Beatgrid, IPG's Magna and Wesfarmers are running tests on reach, frequency, incrementality and brand lift, while Amplified Intelligence and OMG are building a major video streaming attention and context amplification study for the Video Futures Collective.