Mamamia upfronts earlier this week in Sydney was a surprisingly big hit with media buyers thanks to a slick, snappy show in a great location with a string of important announcements.
Chief among the new announcements was KNOW — a standalone brand for gen Z, created by them and for them. KNOW plans to launch in March 2025. At launch, twice daily content will be uploaded to bespoke TikTok and YouTube channels, with a second phase to feature a podcast and a newsletter before expanding into a Discord channel to bring its “community to life and together”.
All of KNOW’s social content will be created “in collaboration with a suite of micro-influencers” who are experts in niche content. All the content will be presented vertically and promises to be easily shoppable.
“KNOW isn’t brought to you by Mamamia. It’s a new brand with its own, separate ecosystem and it speaks to all Gen Zs — not just women. Designed for digital natives and created exclusively for and by this generation. We build it because candour has been at the beating heart of Mamamia since its inception. For Gen Z, candour means giving the platform to varying, sometimes conflicting opinions to make sure our voice is truly inclusive,” said Madison Lawler, strategy lead at SQUAD by Mamamia, the firm’s content agency.
Lawler, along with Jessica Anderson, Mamamia’s group agency sales manager, both of whom are proud zoomers, explained that their generation was “not loyal” to the media and that they required different kinds of channels and content from traditional offerings.
“This might sound a little ironic if you’re older than 28 but it’s only through our digital selves that we feel we can truly be authentic,” continued Lawler.
“Please don’t take this personally as a room full of media professionals, but our generation is not loyal to the media”.
For Jacquie Alley, chief operating officer of The Media Store — and not a Gen Z but a mother to four of them — KNOW was an interesting idea.
“The only thing I was concerned about was why they pigeonholed it as just Gen Z because there’s still a real opportunity with the Y/Millennial who are making up a huge proportion of the workforce and spending capabilities, so I’m just hoping [Mamamia] isn’t going to miss them,” she told B&T after the show.
“It was quite bold. This is for us, by us — basically keep out. There’s something nice about an environment that is just for them. However, how are we going to bridge those generational gaps unless we’re invited into their worlds? I’d love to know more about KNOW. I’d love to know more about how to connect with my kids who are that generation, let alone brands wanting to target them. We don’t want to be separate — we’re all curious people, that’s why we’re in media!”
Top of the agenda for KNOW’s content, according to Anderson is everything from elections to Chappell Roan and upside-down pineapples — “if you know, you know” on that last one, apparently.
It will certainly be interesting to see how KNOW turns out. We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for those pineapples too. Once we find out what a Chappell Roan is, of course.
The Daily Dial
The other major announcement to a very senior crowd of media agency folk was the Daily Dial. A new proprietary content planning tool, Mamamia’s head of strategy Danni Wright explained that it distilled the company’s “secret sauce” into an actionable format.
“The Daily Dial is the result of many months spent having one-on-one conversations with women of all ages, commissioning day-in-the-life diary studies and validating all of this with extensive data,” she said.
“It has enabled us to codify these content motivations and consumption behaviours across and a week. These insights sit at the heart of how we respond to your briefs so that every single solution that we put forward is grounded in the sharpest audience intentions. It’s our game-changer and we’re offering it to you, helping you win a greater share of hearts, minds and wallets.”
Also included within Mamamia DNA is the annual State Of Women report that provides advertisers with a heads-up on what Australian women are thinking and their new content consumption habits in 2025.
“As media practitioners, we love all that data and anything that can support a recommendation to a client, particularly if it’s something new to show here’s who it’s going to reach, here’s how specific, here’s that personalisation at scale that they’re all after,” said Alley.
“They did skim over it. I’m assuming they’re going to do a roadshow with agencies. We need to understand it. For me, though, the watch out with all these new tools that each of the media is starting to create is whether they integrate into our normal planning tools. Are there going to be APIs? Otherwise, this is going to be a planning tool for one particular target or one particular part of your schedule. If I’ve got planners going into MOVE for outdoor, this for Mamamia… all the tools aren’t connected. It’s one of my beefs with the industry, it all needs to connect. How do we bring it into one ecosystem? That’s really where the value is and it would take it to another level.”
Regardless, Alley said that the Mamamia upfront was “incredibly exciting” for the brand and the industry and its other initiatives, such as the Hot Pod Summer podcast offensive targeting audiences when radio listenership is traditionally low, show how smart co-founder Mia Freedman and CEO Nat Harvey’s operation is.
