News Analysis

The $14bn Australian advertising sector is in unprecedented territory as huge volumes of new online video and streaming supply hits the market, just as advertiser demand declines and the tech platforms continue their marketshare romp – despite double-digit cost increases in search and social this year. Concerns about ‘unprecedented’ pressure on local media ad pricing, the surge in supply and the distorting effects of intermediaries repackaging media inventory – often at double the cost an advertiser can get direct from a publisher – has some senior industry executives drawing parallels to New Zealand’s collapsing local media market. The past year has seen New Zealand broadcast operations shuttered, newsrooms gutted and local content economics speared by Meta and Google’s march. In Australia, retailer media networks are also taking ad share – estimated this year to be as high as $1.7bn. Few would talk publicly to Mi3 about the current state of play in Australia – the underworld of tech, agency and media influence and fallout is considered too high in the current environment. But concerns are escalating, not just for the current advertising cycle but the longer term viability of Australian content businesses.       

Strange things are happening in magazine land – key titles in print are on the rise, SMI data has magazines as one of the few growing in ad revenue this year and magazines, along with podcasts and news, were the only channels to avoid ‘peak media fatigue’, in which consumer time spent across all media – including video streamers – contracted 10 per cent this year, a first in 13 years of Deloitte’s annual Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights report. Perhaps most unexpected is the ecom powerhouse, Amazon, turning to print magazine advertising for the first time – and 500,000 catalogue-wrapped Are Media magazine mastheads – to drive Amazon Prime Day. There’s not too many stranger things...

In perhaps the first trend break in decades, Australians appear to have finally maxed out on how much content they can consume across scores of different channel options, cutting the time they spent with all forms of media in the past 12 months – hardest hit were subscription streaming services with nearly 2 hours less of viewing each week than 2023. In the 13 years Deloitte has conducted its annual Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights report, this is the first where consumers say they have cut the overall time they spend on media – by 10 per cent. “I thought it might have come back but not 10 per cent,” says Deloitte Media & Entertainment Lead Partner Peter Corbett. More surprising is that Gen Z – 16-24 year-olds – is pacesetting with a 25 per cent cut in total media time in the past 12 months and is the only group to have cut back materially on social media. But there will be some tension elsewhere in the report between Meta and news publishers – Gen Z and millennials (25-38) say social media is their primary source of news per Deloitte – contradicting Meta’s line to government in dumping involvement with the Media Bargaining Code that news is of marginal interest to Meta’s users. 

After some hard lessons in building customer and audience data infrastructure with Adobe four years ago, Nine’s new customer data platform (CDP) now has the media group pitching itself as a ‘clean’ alternative to the notoriously inaccurate ‘junk’ user data being traded in digital ad markets. Nine’s data and digital ad leads, Suzie Cardwell and Nick Young, predict a new ‘integrated audience platform’ will shift how ad campaigns will be planned and bought. Single channel briefs chasing broader audience segments will be replaced by advertisers opting for consumer ‘tribes’ that span across its portfolio of TV, video, publishing and audio. Already the new CDP capabilities have seen a 200 per cent surge in data matching between advertiser customer databases and Nine’s 22 million logged in users for ad campaigns. “We will target in a single campaign across all our platforms from a single view of our customer,” said Chief Data Officer Suzie Cardwell. “And we do it in the right context.  Marketers think about the customer journey and customer lifecyle."

Market rumblings have the heat on Nine’s Chief Sales Officer Michael Stephenson and although media markets tend to mutter, Stephenson last Thursday at Nine’s annual upfronts presentation all but put his job on the line. In a high-stakes game to snap market perceptions that “total TV” is bleeding audiences – and prevent a three-year near billion dollar broadcast rout by 2025, Stephenson made his job breaker or maker move. Nine laid $30m down on five rival econometrics models and 20 or so blue chip brands who, in return for Nine’s funding, will test up to 30 hypotheses and open-source their commercial results from “total TV” versus the rest of the media world – Meta, Google, TikTok and the armada of advertiser-fancied subscription streaming services included. For some, 2025 might be about to get curly as Nine takes on the “performance measurement monopolists” at Meta and Google in a bid to slow the revenue bleed. Here’s what’s next as Nine punts on provoking the $14bn ad market and big corporates into making media investments based on business impact over audience and market reach.    

Publishers of all creeds and scale are close to consensus on the Federal government winding back its earlier aggressive rhetoric to “designate” Meta under the News Bargaining Code, forcing it and publishers into arbitration to land news funding deals. Meta stared down the Federal Government earlier this year, announcing it would not continue payments to publishers and would pull news from its platforms in Australia if it had to. Now the Feds have tasted big tech defiance, a broader levy, tax or licensing fee on Google, Meta and TikTok, possibly around a digital advertising revenue threshold, is what most publishers Mi3 canvassed now broadly expect from the Albanese government – along with a transition fund for news publishers until a mechanism for a tech tax is legislated. But calling it a tax could be a dirty enough word for the powerful tech giants to turn recalcitrant again. So let’s stick with tax. 

Foxtel’s Upfronts last week masked a muted industry mutiny. It was all but unprecedented for a broadcaster to invite its rivals to attend – and then feature – in its annual market showcase for the year ahead. Former Mediacom boss and now head of Amazon Ads, Willie Pang,  is one individual more involved than most in the rise of the united Australian front of streamers who will understand the potential magnitude of what was signalled last week. He was there and on the big screen talking streaming industry collaboration and kumbaya, after a long career deep inside the broadcast camp. The irony, more broadly, is dripping because this was the blueprint partly designed by Foxtel Media’s Mark Frain six years ago for the broadcast industry. Decades of fierce, old-school broadcaster battles and a go-it-alone domination mindset, however, killed meaningful collaboration. We’re now about to see if a posse of global streaming services hungry for TV network advertising budgets – and led by a turncoat Australian broadcaster – can behave better and do what broadcasters should have but couldn’t. Something even more radical and unlikely is probably needed. 

The debate about whether the emerging generation of digital entrepreneurs is building a superintelligence misses a key point, according to the CEO of Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch. He told attendees at SXSW Sydney yesterday that human intelligence is fundamentally different to machine intelligence because it is based on a desire to connect with other humans and belong. It's not about analytical reasoning. And while not a doomsayer on AI – he believes it will yield both good and bad results – he doesn't think we have the capacity to avoid bad results any more than business leaders during the industrial revolution could have avoided climate change. "We can't fix it now, why would we think they could fix it then."

Six years after a wave of warnings from former top Silicon Valley social media executives and venture capital investors about the damaging effects dopamine-tuned algorithms were having on civics, screen addiction, anxiety and mental health, the Australian government is taking action with new age bans for teen use of social media set to be legislated before the next Federal election in 2025. Led in part by a proposed bill to limit social media access for children under 14 in South Australia by Premier Peter Malinauskas, the Albanese government plans to impose nationwide restrictions on access to social media by teens – the age band is still to be decided but the Prime Minister’s “personal view” is that it should be 16. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook and one-time mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, was part of a long and vocal line-up of big tech identities from Google and Facebook around 2018 who started turning on the companies that made many of them impossibly wealthy. McNamee blamed advertising’s race for consumer attention and the newly discovered tech-psychology tricks that trigger the addictive dopamine neurotransmitter in the brain as a core problem. “The ad models essentially encourage this exploitation of people’s emotions,” he told CNBC at the time. “Science has figured it out – the way you keep people’s attention is you either scare them or you make them angry.” The Federal and South Australian governments are among the first to propose intervention.