Unmade: media and marketing analysis

Welcome to the first Unmade podcast post sent via Substack since last week’s migration of our written content into the Mumbrella publishing stack. Fingers crossed the tech still works from our new domain, and this finds your feed.Today’s conversation features the first podcast interview with ARN Media’s new CEO Michael Stephenson, along with chief audience and content officer Lauren Joyce.Supercharging the ARN transformation strategyThe largest audience of Upfronts season gathered at Sydney’s Star Entertainment Centre last night to hear about ARN Media’s ambitious plans for 2026.Ahead of the series of announcements (see Mumbrella’s coverage of the details via this link), new CEO Michael Stephenson and content boss Lauren Joyce talked to Tim Burrowes.The wide-ranging conversation covered:* The national rollout of Gold, spearheaded by the Christian O’Connell Show live into Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and on delay into Perth and Adelaide;* August’s rushed announcement of the switch of The Jonesy & Amanda Show, featuring Amanda Keller and Brendan Jones, from Sydney breakfast to national drive;* Whether this is finally the moment when the industry starts properly marketing its DAB+ stations;* Why there’s still been no move to expand The Kyle & Jackie O Show, from Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson, beyond Sydney and Melbourne. Are ongoing enforcement actions from Australian Communications and Media Authority a factor despite “continued confidence”?;* The inheritance left by outgoing CEO Ciaran Davis* An explanation for CADA’s controversial Thy AI voice experiment* Reaching the inflection point where the audio industry returns to growth* Where ARN fits into the media consolidation cycle - could it get back into the outdoor advertising business? And why we shouldn’t read too much into the Are Media tie-in* Opportunities for the industry to come together to rethink how it does Upfronts season* Domain expertise - does it matter that neither Stephenson or Joyce are radio natives? According to Joyce: “I may not have the hard programming skills of a radio programmer, but what I do know is how to motivate people and how to engage people, and I also understand audiences.”Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.You’ll find lots more coverage of the ARN Upfronts on Mumbrella. And I’ll be offering my own analysis in our Best of the Week email on Saturday.Have a great day.Toodlepip…Tim [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade, focused on yesterday’s Nine Upfronts. And further down, the investment market seems to like Vinyl Group’s plan to use AI to create ten times as much editorial content.It’s your last chance to sign up to a paid membership of Unmade and lock in all of the current benefits. Next week, we’re going to stop accepting new paying members of Unmade. Instead we’ll be offering membership of an expanded Mumbrella Pro as we bring the two brands closer together.All Unmade membership perks will be carried across, including complimentary tickets to Unlock and Compass for our annual paying members. These won’t be available to anyone else as part of the new Mumbrella Pro membership.Your paid membership also includes exclusive analysis and access to our content archive, which goes behind the paywall six weeks after publication.Upgrade today.Nine’s low risk Upfronts: ‘Fundamentally we are still a premium content long-form business’It’s already been a long Upfronts season. Yet until yesterday afternoon’s Nine Upfront, none of the free to air TV players had set out their wares. In the podcast accompanying this post, I talk to Nine’s new chief sales officer Matt James.It was also Matt Stanton’s first Upfronts as CEO. And although he didn’t come on stage, it was the first for Peter Tonagh not just as a Nine board director but incoming chair.So the event, ultimately, was a vibe check. After the sale of Domain, this was the first look at how Nine is facing the future in what has been a depressed advertising market.On the new content side, this was the least ambitious Nine Upfront I’ve been to since 2008 (the year the best content they had to talk about was Gordon Ramsay and Two and a Half Men). Not that this worried the audience - marketers and media agency people who prefer certainty when they book campaigns. The reliable shows are on the slate - The Block, Married At First Sight, Lego Masters et al. And sport - NRL, tennis and now the English Premier League - were prominent. Plus the winter Olympics.But with the exception of Shark!, featuring Nine-aligned celebs like The Block’s Scot Cam meeting a shark. There was not a single big drama commission from Nine. That was a first, I think.There were some interesting choices around the preso, which was all business. There was no on-air talent on stage. And no lighter moments - imagine a whole Nine Upfronts without Today presenter Karl Stefanovic poking fun at himself. In what must have been a deliberate tone, there wasn’t a single joke in the script. All the men wore suits (of course); all the women wore pantsuits.In our conversation, Matt James reveals that Nine’s management have been working on their purpose for the business - and it’s as a content company: “Fundamentally we are still a premium content long-form business.” But not, it would seem, one that plans to take big risks with that content. Not in this market, anyway.Most of the announcements were iterative - an upgraded self service Nine Ad Managers platform; lots of data and tech partnerships. (What would an Upfront be without a data partnership?)Instead this was an interim Upfront before Nine’s future direction is settled. How to invest the money from the sale of Domain remains an open question. So too is the business-defining decision of what Nine does in the next NRL rights negotiation.Stanton gave a couple of interviews this week to coincide with the Upfronts. He said remarkably little. Giving the benefit of the doubt, it could be that revealing the plan would drive up the price of whatever asset(s) Nine wants to purchase. But it leaves a gap where the vision belongs. After these Upfronts, I’m none the wiser on the vision.The conversation with James does offer a couple of glimpses. As you’ll hear, he is fond of business jargon, but there was a little more than that.Tellingly, was the fact that James was bullish on his ability to monetise NRL across free to air and streaming if Nine chases all rights in the next deal. “To have that control and flow of audience between your BVOD subscribers and your SVOD consumers… would be a phenomenal opportunity. So we already have an incredibly powerful and growing asset base, both in the BVOD and SVOD environment. I think we’d be very successful at it and would absolutely back myself 110%. If not, I’m shortly out of a job in six months.”In other words, as well as free to air, Nine may chase the pay rights currently held by Foxtel.Speaking of Foxtel, James also sent the strongest signal yet that Nine is going to become part of the Video Futures Collective. The VFC was created by Foxtel Media when Foxtel resigned from industry marketing body Think TV and later OzTAM.Despite the fact that Nine unveiled new research designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of television - the sort of thing that might previously have been industry funded via the moribund Think TV - James says that there will be collaboration with competitors.For more than a year, there have been ongoing promises from the TV players to imminently come back together to market their medium. Yet they never quite seem to happen. In our interview, James puts a timeline on it “I would like to think that certainly within the next two months, we can at least start to give clarity on how we would like to move forward as an industry. You know, it’s critical.”More than once, James talked about the virtues of a private exchange. It sounds like the concept - effectively one place where premium video ads can be traded - is a few steps further than just being a concept.In the conversation, we also explore the virtues of Nine buying an outdoor company. And then there’s the question of radio. With Nine Radio’s talk network on the block, it must have been a dilemma on how to present it.The signal on the night was not entirely subtle - while publishing and TV presented side by side, Nine radio’s commercial boss Brian Gallagher did his bit solo. It was a pretty good shop window, and he made Nine Radio seem like an asset worth buying.In our interview James accepted the premise that Nine might be better off owning an FM radio network that does better in the 25-54 demographic. “Obviously, in the FM environment, it does obviously attract to younger audiences. And there are actually strategically some interesting dynamics there that can work when you think about the sort of drive time integration and what those younger audiences represent.”By the time the next Nine Upfronts come around, things should be much clearer. The next NRL deal should be done. If Nine is going to buy into FM radio or outdoor, it will have happened. We’ll see.Vinyl’s AI bet gets early voteThe investment market appeared to like yesterday’s announcement from Vinyl Group that it intends to use AI to create ten times the amount of content it currently produces, while reducing staff costs. Vinyl shares rose by 4.6%.Meanwhile, of the bigger stocks, Seven West Media had the best day, improving by 2.2% while its merger partner Southern Cross Austereo lost 0.6%The Unmade Index closed almost flat for the day, on 472.1 points.More from Mumbrella* Vinyl sticks to break-even deadline, aims to use AI to increase content 10x* ABC admission reignites decades-old ABC paedophile interview furore* Opinion: Instagram’s new PG-13 content rules will hit adults harder than kids* Opinion: Why smart marketers should keep measurement simpleToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.Time to leave you to your day. We’ll be back with more soon.If you happen to be at SXSW Sydney this afternoon, the Mumbrellacast is a late addition to the podcast stage. Our guest will be agency bad boy turned big brand builder Mat Baxter. Hopefully we’ll see you there.Have a great day.Toodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to a midweek update from Unmade, dropping a little later than usual to accommodate the reporting embargo around this afternoon’s Amazon’s Upfronts.Further down, Vinyl Group shares sink to a 12 month low.To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.Your annual membership gets you tickets to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.You also get access to our paywalled archive.Upgrade today.‘We are ready now’: Willie Pang on Amazon’s entry into the Australian advertising environment What was most notable about this afternoon’s Upfront with Amazon Australia was not so much the content, but the fact that they decided now is the time to hold such an event.This week was something of a coming out moment for Amazon’s local operation. It seems like longer ago, but Amazon only launched its Australian website in late 2017, with a local Amazon Ads team starting a couple of years later.This week was the most industry-facing Willie Pang has been since becoming Amazon’s country manager two years ago. On Monday we recorded the podcast interview published alongside this post. Yesterday he presented the keynote at REmade, our retail media conference. And tonight he was on stage at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion, talking to the biggest industry audience Amazon has yet addressed in Australia.As Pang put it in our interview: “It took us a couple of years there to build, to scale, and we feel like we are ready now.”The increased profile is a function of the inexorable progress being made by Amazon. Back in 2023 it passed the threshold as Australia’s most visited online retail destination. And last year, came the big move - the arrival of an ad tier on Amazon’s Prime Video.Unlike other streaming services, the default for users is that advertising tier. That instantly made Amazon one of the biggest players in Australia’s connected TV ecosystem.In our interview, Pang claims a five million total audience, although I think I detected a reticence to expand on where that number comes from. That was answered in this afternoon’s presentation, with the asterisk “Amazon internal”.Pang said there have been talks with ratings body OzTam. Good. I suspect the market will want independent audience verification.Amazon’s challenge now is to get that audience actually watching more Prime Video content.That was a shortcoming revealed at tonight’s event. It was an upfront with very few local upfront content announcements. We already knew that Amazon has the ICC cricket and NBA basketball rights. The only new local announcements were a second season of comedy drama Deadloch and an as-yet-untitled AFL documentary from the production team behind Netflix’s F1 series Drive to Survive.Prime’s content strategy is global rather than local.Not returning, by the looks of it is the Australian edition of workplace comedy The Office. The reviews for the first season were rotten.Instead, the focus was on Amazon’s claim to all parts of the marketing funnel, backed with some tech updates. “Full funnel” was the most frequently used phrase of the afternoon. Pang also appears to be coming to the market with more humility than some of the players Amazon is seeking to displace (Cartology in the retail media space, and Google in the online space spring to mind). Says Pang in our interview: “We would love for brands, marketers, agencies to perceive us as firstly, humble and hardworking. And second, that we’re here to deliver incredible results and value.”He repeated the words “humble and hard working” on stage this afternoon too. That’s a smart position. The message: ‘We can do the same stuff as Google and Meta but we’re nicer’ might well resonate locally.I suspect that the market will soon be talking about Amazon’s demand side platform Performance+ campaign optimisation tool and its audience discovery tool Brand+, in the same breath as Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max. The naming convention certainly suggests that’s the aim.Amazon’s DSP now extends across premium partners including Netflix along with Prime, the Amazon retail platform and the company’s live streaming platform Twitch.A decade ago, the conversation was what Amazon would do to the market when it finally arrived. Without a shadow of a doubt, Amazon is now here.Vinyl Group hits one-year lowMusic publishing and platforms company Vinyl Group took the biggest tumble on the ASX today as its share price fell to the lowest point in more than a year. Vinyl lost 4.4% to land on a market capitalisation of $119m.Meanwhile Southern Cross Austereo lost 1.7% and Ooh Media lost 1.6%.Among the broadcasters, Seven West Media had the best day, gaining 3.7%.The Unmade Index lost 0.21%, closing on 477.6 points.More from Mumbrella:* How Commonwealth Bank slowly became a national media network* ‘This is hate, pure and simple’: Muslim pork ad pulled from awards* Opinion: Why trust actors but not AI?* ASX-listed Lifestyle Communities launches new brand platformToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. Time to leave you to your evening. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.Have a great nightToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led update from Unmade. Today we hear a fly-on-the-wall interview with marketing strategist Mat Baxter in which he unloads on premium brands seeking cheap media, and lays out the marketing strategy for his new luxury tattoo skincare brand.It’s your last chance to sign up for a paid membership of Unmade and lock in all of the current benefits. Next month, we’re going to stop accepting new paying members of Unmade. Instead we’ll be offering membership of an expanded Mumbrella Pro as we bring the two brands closer together.All Unmade membership perks will be carried across, including complimentary tickets to REmade, Unlock, and Compass for our annual paying members. These won’t be available to anyone else as part of the new Mumbrella Pro membership.Your paid membership also includes exclusive analysis and access to our content archive which goes behind the paywall six weeks after publication.Upgrade now or miss out.Baxter the iconoclastHal Crawford writes:Mat Baxter has launched a luxury tattoo skincare brand. After spending a career in agencies persuading others to do things, the brakes are off and “it’s time to put up or shut up.”“We are going to be the client that I always wanted. I wanted a client that didn’t want to go to pitch … I wanted a client who cut us in on the success we contributed to without caps or exception … and I wanted a client who, when I was in a meeting and gave a recommendation, they actually took that recommendation.”Baxter says that the Skingraphica brand he is launching (on October 1) is a new category. I spoke with him — for the news story I wrote in Mumbrella — right after his morning gym workout, and he was pumped. The words and numbers flow: tattoos globally are a $6 billion industry, a billion people around the world and one in four Australians sport a tattoo. Baxter discovered there are no scientifically formulated high-end products aimed at the market while he was preparing to receive his first tattoo in the Sydney studio of Swedish maestro Mikael Rämgård. The interesting thing about the venture is Baxter’s marketing strategy: 100% out-of-home in terms of brand spend, with a healthy whack of influencer in the form of the world’s top tattoo artists. “We recognize we have to engage with the best artists in the world … [of the world’s top 10 artists] we're working directly with two of them, and we know the balance.”“There will be no performance marketing … no low-end buys at all. Build a great brand, have great products. Customers will come and find you and buy you. We're not interested in cheap. We want quality.“Above the line, we're going a 100 percent out-of-home. Out-of-home is the last superpower brand channel, in my view, outside of digital.”Baxter, who led strategy for IPG Mediabrands in New York before becoming CEO of Initiative and then Huge, is caustic about the influence of finance on marketing.“ I purposely kept the company private because in my experience, bankers f**k brands. I'm not prepared at this point trying — as a frustrated marketer for years, not being client side, being agency side — I'm not prepared to make brand compromises because of money at this stage.“I want the brand to be looked after and executed and launched in the most pure and uncompromised form possible.”More from Mumbrella…* Clemenger BBDO wins MFA Grand Prix for Samsung campaign* Medibank appoints new chief marketing officer* IAB Australia unites the MMM world for how-to guide* Mumbrella Publish adds Nine’s Tory Maguire to lineup* Channel Seven sanctioned for on-air domestic violence jokes* Opinion: Bigger doesn’t mean better: How moving to a contractor-led model boosted my bottom lineToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. Tim will be back with Best of the Week iun the morning.Have a great dayHal CrawfordEditorial Director, [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we explore last night’s Foxtel announcements and a record breaking crash in Nine’s share price.To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.Your annual membership gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.You also get access to our paywalled archive.Upgrade today.Foxtel Upfront: More sport, better techSo now we have the first proper look at what the new Foxtel will be like. Five months on from the sale to DAZN, last night’s Foxtel Upfront ‘26 event signalled that for the most part, it will be business as usual. Those of us who trooped across Anzac Bridge to Sydney’s old White Bay Power Station saw a show that (not surprisingly given the new owner) swung the emphasis towards the sport portfolio, with less focus on the Binge side of the entertainment portfolio.So far, more has stayed the same than has changed. Kayo, not DAZN, will remain the sports streaming brand, for now at least.Despite losing its HBO content when Warner Brother Discovery launched Max, Binge remains - now leaning on NBC Universal for content. The Paper, the spinoff from The Office, started streaming last week. Ahead of the event, CEO Patrick Delany told me: “It’s held its own and it’s far more profitable without the extraordinary cost of Warner Brothers in it.”Delany wasn’t at last night’s event, instead flying to London for a DAZN board meeting; he sent a video message. His absence wasn’t particularly jarring. The Foxtel Upfronts have always been more the domain of the boss of the Foxtel Media sales house, Mark Frain.As well as Delany, we also spoke to Frain ahead of the event. Highlights from both those conversations accompany this post as a podcast.Although the emphasis was on sport - with perhaps two-thirds of the presentation dedicated to that side of the business - there were entertainment recommissions announced too, including Colin from Accounts, High Country, The Great Australian Bakeoff and Selling Homes. And new content included Run, The Postcard Bandit, and Tough Love.But the direction is towards sport. According to Delany, they’ve never let a rights deal go that they wanted to keep. “We’ve never lost a sports rights content that we didn’t want to lose.” Apart from the English Premier League back in 2015, perhaps.Soon the platforms will slide across to DAZN’s platform technology. And, says Delany, subscribers to the original Foxtel broadcast service will eventually see their streaming service Foxtel Go move across too. (As a grumpy subscriber, that can’t come too soon for me.)Not that the company will be investing any more in the Foxtel hardware. IQ4 and IQ5 boxes will be refurbished or retired. There will be no IQ6.The other piece of hardware that will quickly fade from view is Hubbl. Delany confirmed in the interview that the push is over 18 months after it began. Hubbl is, as he puts it, “in maintenance mode”. That’s not quite send to the farm, but close. Given that the company sold more than 100,000 units (Delany revealed it’s “not tens of thousands” - they can’t just turn off the tap. So technical support for Hubbl will presumably remain for some time.And Frain’s push to create a new centre of gravity for the screen industry away from free to air continues to edge forward with the Video Futures Collection becoming an organisation in its own right.Director of customer engagement Toby Dewar told the room:  “All of this has brought us to a key milestone for the VFC. We are becoming an independent industry backed body. What started two years ago as an informal think tank led by Foxtel Media, it's now becoming something bigger.“With structure, governance and a simple mandate to go faster, to go broader, and to ensure we keep the customer at the center of how we push forward with the streaming revolution.”There was no announcement last night of one of the free to air players joining the VFC, which Foxtel has been pushing for. But Dewar did announce, slightly vaguely: “I'm excited to say that along with Seven, Nine and Paramount, we are exploring ways to collaborate and focus on shared research projects to better understand the outcomes across screens.”Other announcements included a move into gaming via a tie-up with Livewire; a push into retail media and a new brand-funded content arm with (I thought rather clever) name of Narratv. Is branded entertainment back?* Declaration of interest: Foxtel provided me with accommodation and covered some of my travel to the eventNine share price drops by a third after Domain exitNine’s share price went through a record 35.9% wipeout on Thursday, taking almost $1bn off its market capitalisation.However the change was expected, as the market revalued the stock after the sale of Domain to US real estate giant Costar. Yesterday was the date for Nine’s shares to go ex-dividend, which means that anybody who buys Nine shares from now on are not entitled to the special dividend from the Domain sale when it is paid out at the end of the month.Nine’s new market cap is $1.7bn.It was also a generally down day elsewhere on the Unmade Index, which monitors the performance of Australia’s listed media and marketing companies.Seven West Media lost 3.5%, Ooh Media lost 2.6% and Ive group lost 2.2%.In the lower reaches of the index, Sports Entertainment Group - owner of SEN Radio - lost 7.3% while research house Pureprofile lost 6.7%. Vinyl Group gained 15%.Thanks to Nine’s big drop, the Unmade Index also saw the biggest one-day fall in its history, losing 20.3% to land on 464.2 points.Time to leave you to your Friday.I’ll be back tomorrow with Best of the Week. I’ve been thinking about the Lachlan succession, and last night’s news of a potential Paramount takeover of WBD.Have a great dayToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led update from Unmade. Today, Upfronts season gets under way, with SBS first out of the door.It’s your last chance to sign up for a paid membership of Unmade and lock in all of the current benefits. Next month, we’re going to stop accepting new paying members of Unmade. Instead we’ll be offering membership of an expanded Mumbrella Pro as we bring the two brands closer together.All Unmade membership perks will be carried across, including complimentary tickets to REmade, Unlock and Compass for our annual paying members. These won’t be available to anyone else as part of the new Mumbrella Pro membership.Your paid membership also includes exclusive analysis and access to our content archive which goes behind the paywall six weeks after publication.Upgrade now or miss out.An SBS winning streak? And so it begins.It’s spring and we’re straight back into Upfronts season.The Digital Publishers Alliance soft launched the season with the Independents’ Day Long Lunch on Tuesday, but SBS kicked things off properly last night with what will be for the media industry the first of a number of trips to the Hordern Pavilion in the coming weeks.Outgoing managing director James Taylor was in the room albeit not on the stage. It was a small example of how SBS may be commercial, but not that commercial. Imagine one of the networks allowing a departing executive to spend the night schmoozing advertisers, days before crossing the bridge to take the hot seat at Ooh Media.But the star of the show was chief marketing and commercial officer Jane Palfreyman, now acting MD. She opened and closed the presentation. She’s also the guest in the podcast interview that accompanies this post.As you might expect for a year when SBS is in transition (there’s also an acting chair in Christine Zeitz) the announcements were mainly about evolutions: The countdown to an expanded soccer World Cup; an extension to the Tour de France rights; an expansion of the ability for viewers to opt out of betting and booze ads; a fourth season of Alone Australia; better functionality for SBS On Demand.The presentation itself was tight, and strong. One buyer, who wasn’t throwing shade, described it as “substance over style”. The prominent signs at the door warning full frontal nudity preceded a cameo appearance from the streaker who formed the basis of the new “We go there” brand position.And the sizzle reel for the World Cup was among the best editing I’ve seen at any Upfronts. I predict it will win some kind of award.Afterwards, the feedback was that Palfreyman had done a good job; a strong pass mark was the consensus at the drinks afterwards. I’d agree with that, but add that in our podcast interview she was not as strong on the detail of the content as I would have anticipated. A wobbly pass mark there, I’d say - but you can form your own view when you listen.In the short term, I’m fascinated to see how The People vs Robodebt performs on SBS later this month. The trajectory of the Robodebt scandal reminds me of the one involving the Post Office in the UK. This scandal - in which a defective IT system led to hundreds of subpostmasters being wrongly accused of stealing - bubbled along for years on the edge of British national consciousness. But it was only when an ITV drama - titled Mr Bates vs the Post Office - aired, that it exploded to the front of people’s minds. We may (hopefully) yet see senior people go to prison.Similarly with Robodebt, even after a public inquiry, it’s not at the forefront of Australian consciousness in the way it should be.The People vs Robodebt launches on September 24. It’s a three part docu-drama made by CJZ. The choice of title suggests to me they see the same parallels.But will enough people see the show via SBS channels for it to create the sort of cultural consciousness Mr Bates vs The Post Office did in the UK?Listening to Palfreyman’s bloodless answers when I asked about The People vs Robodebt in the interview, I didn’t get the impression the top levels of SBS see the potential. If it’s any good SBS should be preparing to unleash a PR blitzkrieg to get the public to see it, and to get angry about it.In the interview, I asked whether Palfreyman will be a formal candidate for the job. She gives a well workshopped no comment: “It’s an excellent job; I’ll think about it in the coming months. I’ve really had Upfronts on my mind.”Elsewhere in next year’s slate comes 2.6 Seconds, which tells the story of another scandal: the death of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot three times in close range by police officer Zachary Rolfe. The main point of the Upfronts is to persuade advertisers that SBS is the place to spend their money. Hopefully they’ll come for the football and stay for the cultural relevance.Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.Time to leave you to your Thursday. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.Have a great dayToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.Today, we talk to both buyer and seller in Hardie Grant’s deal to buy PR agency Keep Left, and find out what boss Nick Hardie-Grant thinks of the AI tech lobby’s push to weaken Australian copyright law.We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:* November 3 – Compass Sydney* November 5 – Compass Brisbane* November 10 – Compass Adelaide* November 11 – Compass Perth* November 17 – Compass Melbourne* November 18 – Compass HobartUnmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.Upgrade today.‘Complete b******t and a blatant attack on the industry’ - Publisher Nick Hardie-Grant on the AI industry’s push to loosen local copyright protectionThe M&A pipeline in the independent sector has been flowing fast in recent weeks.Last month Private Media revealed its purchase of Pinstripe Media in what was a major piece of consolidation in the publishing sector for small and medium sized businesses. Then Solstice Media bought Australian Traveller Media, adding to other purchases including The New Daily and The 7am Podcast.This week came news that Hardie Grant Media has added PR agency Keep Left, which has 25 staff, to its portfolio. Hardie Grant’s roster of agencies already includes digital media agency Reload, content agency Heads and Tales, production house Sherpa, and PR and influencer agency Tide Communications. It’s rapidly becoming a local holdco, and is still on the acquisition trail.The wider Hardie Grant group is best known as a book publisher although more than half of the 220 staff work for the communications agency arm.Today’s podcast interview features Hardie Grant Group CEO Nick Hardie-Grant and Keep Left founder Caroline Catterall. Nick Hardie-Grant’s mother Fiona Hardie started the communications arm while his father Sandy Grant started the publishing business. Catterall launched Keep Left 24 years ago. The deal was chased by Hardie-Grant after he got to know Keep Left through common clients.According to Catterall: “We got a feel for that cultural alignment, which from both sides of the fence was really, really important. And one of the other things that was really important to us is that Hardie Grant Media is an independent agency. We've been proudly indie for a long time.”During the interview with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Nick Hardie-Grant also discusses the book publishing side of the business, and the call from the Productivity Commission to consider changing local laws to make it easier for AI companies to mine content to train their large language models. Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, chair of the Australian Tech Council, has been arguing that Australia should make it permissible for AI companies to use published content without paying for it.According to Hardie-Grant:“It's a pretty obvious answer for someone in the publishing industry that it's complete b******t and that it's a blatant attack on the industry.“It's extremely one-sided transparent, laughable approach has no real upside for the industry apart from the potential short-term benefits for the tech companies to gain a whole lot of copyrighted, a whole lot of information for free.”More from Mumbrella…* Mumbrellacast: Inside Hardie Grant’s Keep Left acquisition, OOH’s big week, and ex-Paramount owner talks Skydance and Trump* Hardie Grant acquires Keep Left in a deal a year in the making* Out-of-home industry rises across all categories* ‘I was blown away’: Former Paramount owner believes settlement with Trump was a good deal* This just in: News bulletins are the latest podcast trendToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. Time to leave you to your Thursday. We’ll be back with more tomorrow, with a four year anniversary update on Unmade.Have a great dayToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today, we talk to the architect of AI-led ad agency Cuttable. And Nine’s shares sink as the market awaits a plan for life after Domain.To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.Your annual membership gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy; and to Unmade’s Compass end-of-year roadshow.You also get access to our paywalled archive.Upgrade today.Betting on Meta - How Cuttable is targeting SMEsIn today’s audio-led edition of Unmade we talk to the co-founder of AI-powered ad agency, Cuttable.Cuttable, founded by creative agency exec Jack White, former Swisse marketer Ed Ring, and tech entrepreneur Sam Kroonenburg, was initially serving some of the biggest brands in the country – Medibank, Wesfarmers, and Nando’s, to name a few.But over the past 12 months, the Melbourne-based startup has pivoted to the smaller end of town. Now focused on the “97%” of brands that have grown up entirely in the social media era, it has turned its attention to those relying on Meta for growth.The shift wasn’t just a tactical decision, it was a bet on where the future of brand building is heading. White believes the next decade will belong to businesses born and scaled on social media, and he wants Cuttable to be the engine that powers them.“It was a hard decision, we had good revenue. We nearly hit one million [dollars] in ARR (annual recurring revenue), but we made that choice to hand back some of the money to the bigger brands.”He says smaller businesses, founder-led businesses, benefit most from Cuttable’s capabilities. The entrenched processes of larger brands – strict brand guidelines, layers of approval, disjointed agency villages – slow down testing and learning too much. In comparison, the nimble nature of smaller brands means they are able to iterate at speed, and they are far hungrier for the immediate impact Cuttable can deliver.That hunger, White says, is driven by necessity: “They’re doing their best to keep up with the volume and pace [of advertising] but they’re struggling, because they’re not advertisers. They care about their brands, they’re literally spending their nights and weekends making ads.”Across Cuttable’s client base, 80–90% of ad budgets are funnelled into Facebook, Instagram, and Marketplace. White notes that these channels demand constant “creative variation” – a steady stream of fresh ads that keep the algorithm engaged. It’s a requirement that overwhelms small marketing teams but plays to Cuttable’s strength: generating high-quality, high-volume creative without human bottlenecks.While some might see a risk in focusing so heavily on one platform – especially as Meta invests in its own AI ad tools – White is confident Cuttable’s edge lies in combining tech expertise and automation with advertising know-how. The team includes talent from TBWA, Ogilvy, Medibank, and Meta itself, all working alongside top engineers to blend industry craft with cutting-edge tech.“Anyone can spit out content,” he says, “but making something people actually want to click on still takes a good idea.”That blend is also what’s attracting investors. Cuttable has raised $10m on a valuation of $44.5m, with backers including Square Peg and The Brand Fund. The capital is fuelling not just product development but an ambitious expansion into the US, where White sees an even larger market of small and medium brands battling the same challenges.Nine fades as market awaits annual updateNine’s share price continued to sag today, losing another 0.6%. The company has now lost more than 5% in recent days as its most keenly anticipated full year results announcement in some years approaches.On August 27 - just under a fortnight from now - the company will receive the $1.4bn proceeds from the sale of Domain on the same day it releases its FY25 financial update. Shareholders expect to receive a share of the cash, along with some of the company’s debt being paid down. However, just as keenly anticipated is for Nine CEO Matt Stanton to share a new vision for the TV-led business, including any potential new acquisition strategy.On Tuesday Seven West Media set the tone for results season with a downbeat set of numbers, albeit with a slight improvement in the second half of the year. SWM shares improved by 7.1% today, after losing 6.7% on Tuesday.The two major audio players both had down days, with Southern Cross Austereo losing 2.5% to land on a market capitalisation of $140.3m, just ahead of the $139.3m of ARN Media, which lost 3.2%.Ooh Media lost 0.6% to land on a market cap of $924m.The Unmade Index closed on 571.4 points, down 0.68% for the day.More from Mumbrella…* McDonald’s split: Longest client-agency partnership in Australian advertising comes to an end* 'We're renowned as a difficult partner for the production sector, but that's going to change': ABC boss Hugh Marks* Droga5 chief strategist departs for new gig at the ABC* Australian Olympic Committee communications chief departs* Government ‘considering AI training disclosure laws’* Opinion: We must fix the fan experience for football broadcasting* Paramount stocks soar after UFC deal and ‘meme stock’ commentToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.Have a great nightToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. Today we talk to Christian O’Connell about his plans to (sort of) take his radio show national. Plus a big fall for Seven West Media on the Unmade index.We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:* November 3 – Compass Sydney* November 5 – Compass Brisbane* November 10 – Compass Adelaide* November 11 – Compass Perth* November 17 – Compass Melbourne* November 18 – Compass HobartUnmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.And you also get access to our paywalled archive.Upgrade today.When is a radio show not really national? When it’s on DABI have something of a confession.When I recorded this week’s podcast with Christian O’Connell on Monday morning, I didn’t have all the facts. When you listen, you’ll hear me miss what is now an obvious question.ARN Media had just announced O’Connell’s Melbourne-based Gold FM breakfast show was going live nationally. After last week’s announcement that Brendan Jones and Amanda Keller were vacating their Gold FM Sydney breakfast show for a shift to drive, it was clear that O’Connell would be networking into both cities, but the national move was a surprise.I took the announcement at face value. The technical problem I focused on was that of the time difference.Depending on time of year, when the show kicks off in Melbourne at 6am, that would be 3am in Perth. Or 5am in Queensland. Or 5.30am in Adelaide. But the announcement was unequivocal (and, as I’ll explain further down, misleading): “This is the first time a commercial radio breakfast show will go live across the country.”For a show that thrives on the conversation with callers, that would, I assumed, have to mean a longer show. Stay on air longer, until at least 11am Melbourne time perhaps, in order to be genuinely live. There’s precedent for running long. Over on Kiis FM, stablemates Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson usually stay well beyond their official finish time.Alternatively, as a half way house (and admittedly not properly live), shortly after 9am in Melbourne, record a bunch of talk breaks to cover the next two hours.The practicality of time zones is already a reality for broadcasters. The likes of ABC Radio National, and the TV networks, broadcast their shows as live, on a time delay. But when something big enough is breaking, they go fully live for their west coast audiences.But the assumption that I - and the rest of the industry - made was that ARN Media was planning to put The Christian O’Connell Show to air in each market on one of their existing stations. That had been the plan when ARN was looking to capture Triple M in its failed Southern Cross Austereo takeover bid.The new national plan was most intriguing in Perth where ARN’s 96FM leads the market with a 14.8% audience share. However, 96FM is more closely aligned with ARN Media’s Kiis network branding than Gold. ARN shares a second licence in the city with Nova Entertainment.And the existing 96FM breakfast show, featuring Dean Clairs and Lisa Shaw, underperforms compared to the rest of the station, sitting third in its time slot. Dropping in The Christian O’Connell Show would be a bold move but plausible.At the very least, with one licence in the market, ARN Media appeared to have selected O’Connell over the Kyle & Jackie O Show to lead its national networking strategy. To use the Formula One analogy, where each team has two drivers, ARN had chosen O’Connell as its number one driver.But the plan appeared anything but fully formed.As you’ll hear O’Connell concede during the interview: “The Perth side, we’re still working out the best way to do that. It might sound like ‘If you’ve been talking about this for seven years, why haven’t you sorted that out?’”In truth, it’s not going to be a national show. Or at least not on radios nationally. Outside of Sydney and Melbourne the show will be DAB only. Disingenuously, the word DAB did not appear in the announcement.Almost nobody listens to DAB. And for fans of O’Connell in other cities, they can already stream the show anyway.DAB ratings are so low that Commercial Radio Australia doesn’t even publish the average listening numbers, only cumulative audience - the number of people who merely tune in at some point across the week. On DAB, the station 96FM 80s has a cume of just 61,000. That’s compared to a cume for the main 96FM of 506,000. So why pretend the show is national when it is not?That’s where ARN has made a hash of its communications.They were bounced into it after Jones and Keller decided to tell their listeners they were being moved to drive time. Reading between the lines, it’s clear the duo would rather have stayed in breakfast.As O’Connell says in the interview: “Things have been jump started a bit. We were meant to be announcing this in a couple of weeks time.”ARN should have waited until it got its story straight.The mere fact of Christian O’Connell broadcasting live into Sydney was interesting enough, and a credible first step to a national audience.But that’s not what this move represents.Instead, it potentially sets him up for failure.If ARN had presented it to the market as a two-city show, then Sydney and Melbourne would have been seen as the battleground - and, incidentally, one where O’Connell has the craft, talent and work ethic to win.It could even have been accompanied by the supplemental message that the show will additionally be available on DAB in those other markets. But it can’t pretend that the show is fully in each of those markets - advertisers won’t accept it anyway.Now, unless ARN rapidly changes its messaging, each survey will be accompanied by terrible comparisons in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane.Presented as a national sell, it will cause confusion about what should be a simple buy. Marketers and media agencies won’t buy the national story until it’s a genuine national story.What a waste of what should have been good news from ARN.Seven share price decimatedSeven West Media and Vinyl Group both took big hits on the ASX today, losing 10% and 7.6% respectively.SWM’s price of 14c is close to its low point of 12c it briefly hit in April. Vinyl Group is at its lowest point since May.Meanwhile Nine, which is currently the biggest locally based media and marketing stock, rose by 1.2% to a market capitalisation of $2.7bn.The Unmade Index rose slightly by 0.15% to 586.2 points.More from Mumbrella…* Call for AI compensation fund in copyright fight* Sports marketer Marissa Pace switches lanes, joins Guide Dogs NSW/ACT as CMO* Opinion: The loneliest place on earth (for a creative)* New York Post goes west with daily California Post newspaperToday’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. Time to leave you to your evening. We’ll be back with more tomorrow.Have a great dayToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade. After this week’s news that Solstice Media is buying Australian Traveller Media, we talk to founder Paul Hamra about the 20-year run up to the company’s growth spurt.We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:* 3rd November – Compass Sydney* 5th November – Compass Brisbane* 10th November – Compass Adelaide* 11th November – Compass Perth* 17th November – Compass Melbourne* 18th November – Compass HobartAnd Unmade members get a free ticket. To get maximum value from a paid membership of Unmade, sign up today.Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.You also get access to our paywalled archive.Upgrade today.‘If they were as concerned about the media as they say they are something would have happened by now’ To the outsider, Solstice Media’s national expansion may look like a sudden development. Last year, Solstice took ownership of The New Daily. This month it took control of Schwartz Media’s 7am podcast. And this week Solstice took a majority stake in Australian Traveller Media.In truth, the expansion of Solstice - which now has 87 staff - has been more organic. Solstice started life as the publisher of South Australian newspaper The Independent Weekly, before taking on News Corp in Adelaide with InDaily.Solstice’s national footprint grew when it was hired by some of Australia’s industry super funds to launch the New Daily more than a decade ago, and recently bought the masthead from the funds.In the wide ranging conversation, Hamra discusses his shareholder base of impact investors, and tries to avoid answering how much he paid for Australian Traveller. He explains: “The reason why we liked Australian Traveller is because of the cultural fit, that we were like-minded in terms of our attitude towards publishing, our attitudes towards independence and quality.”The intention for the company’s lifestyle publications is to help fund its journalism: “If you look over history, you'll see that in any media outlet, it's not the news that funds the business. It's actually other verticals that have funded the business.“Hamra is also refreshingly honest about the post-rationalisation many publishers go through when they build their businesses. “We end up growing a little bit like Topsy until we fall into a strategy. And that's kind of what's happened to us. We actually had an audience and we bolted things onto that audience over time. And then 15, 16 years down the track, you go, oh, hang on… all of a sudden we've got this fabulous audience and we've actually got a strategy.”Solstice had been a beneficiary of Facebook funding, and had to make redundancies when it dried up. Like all publishers, Hamra also has a view on the unavoidable need to do business with platforms like Google, and a more sceptical view on whether the government really wants to help Australia’s media owners:“They sound desperate to help, but the reality is we know they're not because they would have done something by now. If they were as concerned about the media as they say they are, something would have happened by now.More from Mumbrella…* Clock ticking for loss-making Aspermont* Union boss slams News Corp’s use of AI in newsrooms* On the road again: Compass event series dates announced* Opinion: Marketing measurement is having a moment, but can it deliver?* ‘Callous and punitive’: Rosie Waterland launches own podcast network after battle with SCA* Dr Mumbo: Is Youtube social media? Just Google it* Google cancels Parliament House party after Youtube ban* Christian O’Connell’s national move ‘to begin in Sydney’Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio. We’ll be back with more soon.Have a great dayToodlepip…Tim BurrowesPublisher - Unmade + [email protected] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unmade.substack.com