The less sexy but more cashed-up regional consumer and business economy is still a misnomer to many younger, metro media buyers and marketing teams but a new bit of tech for the Anthony Catalano-controlled Australian Community Media [ACM] publishing group might make some headway with the digital folk.

The biggest media player in regional Australia is landing a few light jabs on the global tech platforms, winning government contracts and ad money targeting specific rural and regional segments that would previously have gone to Meta or Google. The catalyst, said ACM Managing Director, Tony Kendall, was a Salesforce CDP (customer data platform) – or data cloud in the customer tech giant’s parlance – that the company turned on in November.

It combines ACM subscribers and audiences across its media portfolio and facilitates more precision segmentation and targeting for advertisers – including the federal government and its media buying agency, UM, which typically would have opted for Meta or Google’s user tracking and targeting prowess.

“People forget we have a very, very lucrative and successful agricultural business as well regional news titles,” Kendall said. “The best, most recent example of what our CDP is doing is probably a campaign from the federal government targeting sheep farmers with live export policy changes,” he added.

“We used data from all our agricultural assets, all our digital assets with a strong print campaign. Typically that money would have gone off to one of the digital platforms but that was kept within our ecosystem because we were able to specifically target the right age and demographics around woolgrowers, and sheep farmers more broadly.”    

Media Trumped

Kendall said ACM’s digital subscriptions for its regional and farming titles would top 200,000 next year, up from 157,000 currently – a rise of 11 per cent on the previous 12 months. ACM revenues were “north of $200m” but challenged, Kendall said, because of a tight ad market and a financial deal with Meta under the previous media bargaining code which won’t renew unless the federal government forces its hand. That was now unlikely because of concerns around trade retaliation from US President Donald Trump.

Part of ACM’s broader and ongoing reinvention adjusting to shifting media consumption trends is the imminent end of weekday publishing for 14 former Fairfax regional print papers – they move to weekend-only editions after early trials with three titles in Bathhurst, Orange and Dubbo increased circulations as much as 38 per cent and gave advertisers a “fatter” single weekend edition that was easier to buy, Kendall told Mi3.

Weekday editions era over 

“It’s also more profitable,” he added. “North of 90 per cent of our advertising was on a Friday and Saturday, so those early [week day] editions weren't carrying a lot of advertising. We’ve managed to retain all of that advertising into the Saturday books and actually grown new advertisers.

“We’re trying to make it easy for media buyers to access what we think is a lucrative audience, particularly in categories like travel, finance, automotive and superannuation. They can be bought in a single sweep across our entire regional footprint.”

The consolidation to weekend-only print editions and the ensuing “more profit” meant “journalism is more sustainable in those regions while we wait for the government to do something about Meta,” Kendall said.

The early upside from data investment and strategic model shifts has done little to soothe ACM’s ire at the failure of the federal government to act on it’s big rhetorical reaction last year to Meta’s blink-off around renewing payments to news publishers for using their content in feeds.

Meta’s refusal to comply with the legislation, Kendall said, will hole ACM’s revenues – and he was scathing of Meta’s arguments that news is largely irrelevant to its platforms.

Meta bad, Google good

“It'll be a travesty … this should have been sorted a long time ago. The machinations between communications ministers and assistant Treasurers and the existing Treasurer recusing himself… it’s been an overly bureaucratic approach which has led us to where we are today, where it's now become an election issue with Trump and the tariffs,” said Kendall.

“Both parties need to have some backbone around this and agree that the principles of the bargaining code are as strong now as they were when it was introduced. That is, that the platforms must pay for the news that they built their businesses on – and if they don't, they should be held to account.”

While Meta argues that news now makes up barely 3 per cent of traffic and it should not be made to prop-up an industry it no longer needs, Kendall thinks otherwise. One argument, which Kendall supports, is that Facebook made big early user growth and credibility gains pushing news to user feeds until its dopamine-triggering algorithms figured out alternative content to keep them coming back.

The problem for news media is that most of that happened a decade ago when publishers – and journalists – were unusually sanguine on promoting Facebook logo sharing widgets on their stories, naively unaware that those same widgets allowed Facebook, and Tiktok today, to identify and track newsmedia audiences and monetise them.

Despite Meta’s punchdown on the importance of news and journalism on its properties, some publishers and consumer research maintain news media content consumption remains material.      

“Meta, or at the time Facebook, had early wins [from news content] but there are all the other arguments about what the platforms are doing to the fabric of society,” Kendall told Mi3.

“If they’re not going to support credible news on their platforms, and they’re actually going to prioritise fake news and remove fact checking, then they should have an obligation to news and they should have an obligation to the publishers that are providing journalism that people in the communities need,” he added.

“It’s about what they should be doing now and into the future.”

Google’s approach, he said, has been “the polar opposite”.

Shorten and shrink

Despite warnings from some publishers that Google wants to shorten the terms and shrink the cash allocations in its second round of deals under the original Morrison-era media bargaining code deals, Kendall said ACM was happy with its renewed Google contract, signed-off “late last year”. Asked how much Google had paid this time around, Kendall would only say “the terms are similar ... They’ve continued to be a really good partner for the news business in terms of training and development.

“Google has funded digital projects for us to help grow our digital subscriptions, funded cadet journalists – and most of them have gone on to full time jobs and careers in journalism around the country. The news digital academy training has been very well regarded by all the journalists that we've put through it.”

Given the money and the training, Kendall said ACM had no intent of joining the $1bn-$2bn Australian publisher class action being led by Maurice Blackburn.

In the Australian class action, like the lawsuits against Google and Meta in the US from the Department of Justice and multiple State Attorneys General, Google, among an array of market power breaches, is accused of colluding with Meta to kill an open web market publishers and the broader ad sector had tried to build through header bidding technology that allowed multiple online bidders for ad inventory. The various lawsuits also tabled evidence in Google staff emails and communiqués that it surreptitiously increased prices for advertisers but gave a smaller share to publishers.

“We’re not involved,” said Kendall on the local publisher class action.

Although financially pragmatic, Kendall and ACM may not resist any windfall payout from the Australian lawsuits given they cover any publisher that has used Google products for some revenues in the past decade.

Old gold

A large swathe of metro marketers and media buyers were still to grasp the business upside of tapping regional markets in which the cost of living was having an impact but were not encumbered with large mortgages, Kendall said.

ACM’s audience does skew older, acknowledged Kendall, “not always the sexiest demographic for a young media buyer”, and the regions are feeling the same cost of living squeeze as the metros.

But “not lumbered with capital city mortgages” they’ve got more money and are willing to spend it, Kendall suggested, particularly within travel.

“The responses we're getting for $5,000, $10,000 $20,000 cruises out of our publications is extraordinary – because they're cashed up and they're wanting to live life. So yes, that's a valuable demographic for advertisers.”

“We're just trying to make it very easy for media buyers to access what we think is a lucrative audience, particularly across categories like travel, superannuation, finance and automotive,” said Kendall of the print shift.

And with the CDP-powered digital business, “we think we have very, very strong advertising growth opportunities across both the regionals and the agris using the data proposition that we've got.”

Print deadline?

Does he see ACM becoming an all-digital publisher? If he does, Kendall isn’t holding himself to a deadline.

“Our ambition is to have a sustainable journalism business across digital, subs and print where it makes sense,” he said.

“We see a world where we still have very strong Saturday products – and in all of our markets – in print editions.”

“It's a balance, though. Obviously, print advertising still makes up a large part of our profitability, but as we progress through the next three to five years, we're going to see more and more that digital subscription revenue be able to cover the cost of journalism and deliver profitability.”

In the meantime, despite the fact “revenue is challenged on advertising [softness] and Meta”, Kendall said the outlook from February through to April was improving, as is profitability on the business’ “north of $200m” revenues.

“We’re still a very healthy, profitable business. End of end of June, we'll see where we pull up. But at this stage, it's better looking.”