Australian brands, media agencies and media owners need to stand together and prioritise their premium content in the face of uncertainty with the major US-owned platforms according to ARN’s CEO Ciaran Davis.
“I don’t think there are any of us on this panel who’ll be huge fans of the big tech platforms,” said Davis.
Davis was speaking on a panel at the Independent Media Agencies of Australia’s Indie-Pendence Day conference, celebrating its fifth birthday. Alongside him on the panel were News Corp’s Michael Miller, Mamamia CEO Nat Harvey and Nine’s acting CEO Matt Stanton.
“The protection of local media, sustainability of local media, all [of us] working together is really important as we take on the platforms – and that means from a regulatory perspective, from an ease of trading perspective, whatever we can.”
Australian media’s relationships with the big tech platforms have been tumultuous over the last few years. Last year, Meta announced the shock, though perhaps not surprising, decision to step away from the News Media Bargaining Code deals. Google, the other largest player in the deals, has taken a different tack. It has signed new deals, though will be able to cancel them after July this year.
While these deals might make headlines in the national press, the relationship between Australian publishers and the big tech and social players is also changing in more incremental ways.
“The impact of search and social referrals is dropping, not just for media, but for all businesses,” said News Corp’s Miller.
“I think that some of the changes that Meta has made around political content is definitely helping media companies… Another macro trend is the walled gardens. We are going to end up in a search-zero position, so that the Meta, Alphabet [Google’s parent company], Amazon, Apple walled gardens, you’ll be stuck in those ecosystems. Breaking into them and therefore audiences breaking out becomes far more challenging with their data and product suites, making it far more attractive to be part of one, maybe two, but not all four for the majority of the population.”
Davis offered a moving example of local media’s power and how it stands apart and above from the AI-dominated platforms.
“In 10 minutes, I could give you a radio station that’s fully AI automated, it would have music picked, whatever news you want inserted, scheduled the ads… But we’ve got to be careful that we don’t lose sight of what makes each of our mediums really good and that’s the element of human interaction,” he said.
“About 12 months ago, in Ballarat, our station manager had a call from the local IGA manager who said there was a car in their car park with a grandmother, a mother and a four-year-old daughter in the car. They were sleeping in there, wearing shorts and T-shirts in the middle of winter. We cut the programming straight away and within 30 minutes, we had food, accommodation, shelter and toys for the kids. That’s what local media can do. We can jump on things straight away. I’d hate for us in all the excitement of AI, what we can do, where we can go and we lose sight of the localism and connection that we have as businesses.”
Mamamia’s Harvey, meanwhile, was more direct still. Rounding out the panel, she exclaimed:
“You should spend more money with local media!” said Harvey.
While the four panellists are, ostensibly, all competitors (if you exclude all the traffic that Nine’s Married At First Sight sends to Mamamia and News Corp’s publications) their united front against the large tech platforms was interesting to see. How the Australian government will react to changes to the changes in the US and the platform’s growing alignment (again, ostensibly at least) remains to be seen.
