Clive Dickens' Meliora Creative’s first bets span AI, wagering and a mini-Sphere

An AI agent listening to 14,000 radio stations, a touring mini-Sphere and technology that could keep wagering ads off the family television.

They’re the first three bets from Meliora Creative.

The Meliora Company has unveiled Spotwise, OM Sound & Vision and allt.tv as the first partners for its creative IP arm, with the deals spanning AI-powered broadcast operations, immersive entertainment and audience technology.

“This is effectively what I call the creative arm,” Clive Dickens, international managing partner at The Meliora Company, told Mediaweek.

“These partnerships are not investments. They are partnerships. These aren't businesses we've invested in. They're also not businesses that are paying us corporate fees.”

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The third piece of Meliora

Meliora Creative completes the company’s three-part structure, following the launch of its advisory business and venture fund.

“The company has three components, and this is the third component,” Dickens said.

“Over a year ago, we launched [Meliora], and the first thing we launched was the advisory business, which has had a fantastic first 12 months. We're now working with eight big enterprise clients worldwide in an advisory capacity.”

“Then, about six months later, we launched the Ventures Fund and did our first close,” he said. “We're now just about to deploy our first capital in the VC part of the business. This is the third component of the company.”

For Dickens, businesses coming into the creative arm need something practical to offer an industry wrestling with new technology and new commercial pressures.

“These are interesting small businesses that are looking for new ways to help the media industry commercialise and build their experiences,” he said.

From radio to streaming and AI

Dickens began his career in regional radio at Chiltern Radio in the UK before co-founding and serving as COO of Absolute Radio and joining the launch team at Shazam.

He arrived in Australia around 2013 and spent more than a decade in senior media roles, including director of digital and innovation at Southern Cross Austereo and chief digital officer at Seven West Media.

At Seven, Dickens helped build the 7plus streaming platform across two Olympics, three Australian Opens and four Melbourne Cups. He later joined Optus as VP of television content and product development.

Dickens founded The Meliora Company in 2025, building its advisory operation before launching Meliora Ventures Fund One.

Now comes Creative.

An AI agent listening to 14,000 radio stations

First up is Spotwise, which operates an agentic operating system for broadcast media and monitors advertising across radio, television and podcasts in more than 14 countries.

Its AI agents handle jobs including market research, competitive analytics, share-of-voice analysis, campaign planning and pricing, delivery verification, pitch preparation and prospecting.

“It's a subscription product,” Dickens said. “It covers 14,000 radio stations.”

Meliora Creative will work with Spotwise as the business looks to push into further markets.

Taking wagering ads off the family TV

Then there’s allt.tv.

Its technology connects television content with viewers’ mobile devices in real time, opening up a particularly timely use case as Australia tightens the rules around wagering advertising.

“As wagering advertising comes under more and more restrictions with the new legislation, they allow wagering companies to target people who want to wager, without necessarily being on the big screen,” Dickens said.

“So what they do is the technology: if you've got a gambling app in your hand and you're watching the sport on the TV, rather than the advertising being on the TV, which the whole family has to see, the targeted advertising is on your mobile only because your mobile knows what you're streaming.”

The technology synchronises devices to determine what content is being watched, allowing advertising to be directed to an individual device rather than the shared television screen.

“So it syncs across your cellular and Wi-Fi to know that you're watching the footy, the cricket, or the tennis,” Dickens said.

“So it serves you ads on your mobile to the adult rather than on the screen to the family. So its other benefit is that it can also counter-target - if a young person is watching, it can use that to avoid displaying wagering ads to vulnerable households or young adults. So there's a thing called BetStop that the government announced.”

Dickens said Australia’s regulatory environment made the technology particularly relevant.

“It's a really fascinating piece of technology, very timely, because the regulation in Australia leads the world, and there's now regulation happening all over the world.”

Meliora Creative will work with allt.tv on commercial strategy, market development and industry relationships as the company expands in Australia and looks at opportunities overseas. Dickens will also join the allt board.

A little bit of Vegas, minus the Vegas-sized bill

OM Sound & Vision comes from members of the team behind the design and engineering of the Las Vegas Sphere.

The pitch is fairly simple: take some of that spectacle on the road without having to build a multibillion-dollar venue first.

“It's an experience business that wants to create sphere-like experiences worldwide without massive capital expenditures,” Dickens said.

“They're creating fully immersive experiences for intellectual property without the big Vegas build. It's basically touring miniaturised technology that can bring that experience to hopefully millions of people over the coming years.”

OM combines digital-double artist avatars, 3D audio, and immersive visual technology, aiming to create venues that can be deployed more quickly and cheaply than traditional large-scale immersive builds.

What makes the cut?

With Creative now open for business, Dickens said potential partners face a fairly tight filter.

“Has that team really identified a problem?” he said.

“If they've successfully identified the problem, will their solution be helpful to solving the problem, i.e., is the technology innovative enough? And then the third thing is: do they have the execution capability as a team to do it?”

The AI mood is changing

Partnerships are emerging as the media industry’s relationship with AI moves beyond the first wave of anxiety over what the technology might replace.

Dickens believes attitudes have already shifted.

“Absolutely,” he said when asked whether people were becoming more open to AI.

“I think, like anything, there is a lot of fear and a lack of understanding, especially around the opportunity for growth around AI. People thought about work displacement. They think about water consumption. They think about energy consumption. They're catastrophised - but it's just human nature to catastrophise.”

“What’s happening now is that people are starting to realise nothing replaces human creativity,” he said.

“In fact, AI enhances human creativity. And if you look at the three problems that these companies solved around Spotwise, [allt] and [OM], these things wouldn't have been possible before AI.”

For Dickens, that’s the thread connecting the three rather different businesses.

“So AI now enables us to build products faster and cheaper,” he said. “And in the backdrop of our first-ever communication, it was about AI as an enabler of creativity. That's why we founded our company.”

The partnerships complete The Meliora Company’s three-pronged model spanning Advisory, Ventures and Creative. The company operates hubs in Los Angeles, London, Sydney and Auckland, with more than 30 associates working internationally.

And despite all the talk of agents, algorithms and immersive tech, Dickens ultimately brings it back to something rather more old-fashioned.

“Machines do what machines do,” he said, “allowing humans to do what they do best: tell stories and build relationships. We are ultimately storytelling, beasts, mammals, and humans.”