Business of Media
Netflix shareholders sue over subscription slump disclosures
Netflix Inc has been hit with a shareholder lawsuit in a U.S. court in California accusing the streaming entertainment company of misleading the market about its ability to keep adding subscribers in recent months, reports Reuters’ Jody Godoy.
The lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Tuesday seeks damages for declines in Netflix’s share price this year after the company missed its subscriber growth estimates.
Filed by a Texas-based investment trust, the lawsuit accused Los Gatos, California-based Netflix and its top executives of failing to disclose that its growth was slowing amid increased competition and that it was losing subscribers on a net basis.
SAS soldier denies colluding with Ben Roberts-Smith on evidence, defamation trial hears
A serving SAS soldier has denied in court that emails between him and Ben Roberts-Smith – including marked-up pictures of a compound in Afghanistan – demonstrated they had colluded on their evidence about a mission, during which the newspaper defendants allege two civilians were murdered, reports Guardian Australia’s Ben Doherty.
The soldier, anonymised in the federal court as Person 29, is a former comrade of Roberts-Smith and the godfather to one of his children.
Under cross-examination by lawyers for the newspapers on Thursday, Person 29 rejected assertions the pair had collaborated to ensure their stories about the mission aligned.
Elon Musk secures $7.14B in new financing for Twitter deal
Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk has received letters from investors committing nearly $7.14 billion in new financing for his takeover of social media giant Twitter, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. Musk is also in talks to bring Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and others on board as investors, reports The Hollywood Reporter’s Georg Szalai.
The filing listed 19 investors, including existing Twitter shareholder Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, who is committing around 35 million shares of the company to retain an investment in it after Musk takes it private, as well as sovereign wealth fund Qatar Holding, a trust of Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Musk received “equity commitment letters … providing for an aggregate of approximately $7.139 billion in new financing commitments” in connection with the deal for Twitter, the regulatory filing said.
That means that the $12.5 billion margin loan he had received to acquire the social media giant has been reduced to $6.25 billion, with the takeover now to be financed by $27.25 billion in equity and cash, it explained.
Agencies
Yakkazoo collaboration with Aboriginal artist Wayne Quilliam set to open Vivid Sydney
Yakkazoo has collaborated with Aboriginal artist Wayne Quilliam to develop the Sharing the Life Essence campaign, which will appear on the opening night of the Vivid Sydney festival.
The visual installation will appear on the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge as part of the Vivid Sydney’s First Light ceremony.
Vivid Sydney’s First Light ceremony is a celebration of First Nations culture shaped by creative advisor Rhoda Roberts AO.
Vivid Sydney will utilise the stunning backdrop of the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons to open the festival for 2022 and celebrate the Gadigal people and Country through Quilliam’s projections.
Qulliam’s Sharing the Life Essence campaign celebrates the Gadigal people and their land through photography and animated graphics. His towering projection looks at the balance of our world and reveals how everything is connected.
The integrated advertising agency worked in collaboration with the artist, animating his images and bringing to life his story through animation.
Qulliam’s work has also been exhibited at Yakkazoo Melbourne HQ in 2021 as part of the VMG Art Series.
Sharing the Same Life Essence will be shown on all four pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from 5:40pm until Lights On at 6pm nightly from opening night on 27 May until the end of the festival on 18 June as part of Vivid Sydney’s First Light ceremony and performance that acknowledges our First Nations culture.
Impact.com announces more clients to its expanding ANZ customer list
Impact.com has announced its continued momentum in the first quarter of 2022 and added a number of Australian brands to its rapidly scaling ANZ business.
Among the 200 new customers added to the global client list during the first quarter of 2022 are Myer, Crocs, Compare The Market, Waggly, and VistaPrint.
The Australian team also more than doubled in size from 13 to 27 employees year on year.
Other notable achievements during the first quarter include:
• The promotion of Ayaan Mohamud as the partnership management platform’s first regional vice president of marketing APAC role, the appointment of Laurence Nelmes to new ANZ marketing executive role, and the promotion of Tanya Suna to the newly created position of director of people and culture, APAC.
• The also recently acquired Pressboard, the premier analytics and reporting platform for branded content, which now offers Australian publishers the opportunity to jumpstart and scale their content partnership opportunities.
• impact.com released key research report: How Commerce Content Drives the Consumer’s Purchase Journey, which shows more than 80 percent of consumers perform online research for high-consideration products, and most are more likely to do so now than they were two years ago.
• The platform also relaunched Partnerships Experience Academy (PXA), providing product and Industry certifications that help build, measure and grow partnerships. The relaunch features new certification levels: Fundamentals, Associate and Expert, which all represent different skill levels and are more tailored to learners’ unique knowledge needs.
• The publication of The Partnership Economy, a book authored by impact.com’s CEO, David A. Yovanno, which is an insightful, actionable guide to how modern businesses can use partnerships to increase customer acquisition, foster revenue growth, and establish brand awareness and loyalty.
• The release of Link Scanner, a new feature which automatically detects and replaces broken links to ensure no clicks go to waste, and publishers and their brand’s partners save valuable dollars.
The company’s Search Compliance feature was also released, which reduces the incidence of partners bidding on branded or trademarked paid search terms by monitoring partners’ paid search activities for compliance, enforcing policies, detecting violations, and resolving issues through a resolution workflow.
News Brands
Channel 4 offers to sell London HQ under alternative plan to privatisation
Channel 4 has said it could sell its £100m London headquarters and almost double the number of staff working outside the capital under plans to become “northern-based” that it hopes offer an attractive alternative to the government’s privatisation push, reports The Guardian’s Mark Sweney.
Describing itself in the proposals as the “levelling up broadcaster”, it said it intended to increase spending on TV shows commissioned by production companies outside of London by hundreds of millions of pounds annually by 2030, in a move it estimated would create at least 3,000 jobs.
The broadcaster, which is state-owned but commercially funded, said the changes would mean the majority of its 900 staff would be based in locations including its “national headquarters” in Leeds, and hubs such as Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham, with the number of staff working outside London nearly doubling to 600 by 2025.
CNN’s new chairman says he wants to ‘try some things’ in Chris Cuomo’s old slot
Chris Licht, the new chairman of CNN, told employees in a town hall meeting on Thursday that he hoped to have a new show in the 9 p.m. hour this fall after experimenting with the time-slot over the summer, reports The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin.
The 9 p.m. hour is a crucial time for the network, historically generating some of CNN’s highest ratings and delivering valuable advertising revenue. The previous anchor, Chris Cuomo, was fired by CNN last year after an inquiry into his efforts to help his brother, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, respond to allegations of sexual misconduct.
“Let’s try some things at 9 o’clock,” Licht said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. “Let’s have some fun with it. Let’s just try some things. But my intention is to have a show ready to launch in the fall at 9 o’clock.”
Television
TV’s big movers in Total TV
Killing Eve, The Rookie, and La Brea were some of TV’s biggest risers in Total TV viewing in April, according to OzTAM, reports TV Tonight.
The Killing Eve finale grew by more than 97% between its Overnight numbers to 7 day Total TV numbers for ABC.
On 10 the biggest riser was MasterChef Australia, lifting by a further 40%.
Total TV numbers differ from Overnights (5 city metro) by including Regional and BVOD (both Live + catch up) for 7 days.
Urzila Carlson out of The Masked Singer
Urzila Carlson is not returning to The Masked Singer this year on 10 because she is on a comedy tour, reports TV Tonight.
“I’m not actually doing it this year,” she confirmed to fellow judge Jackie O. and Kyle Sandilands on KISS FM yesterday.
“The first year I was just filling in for Lindsay (Lohan). And the second year we thought ‘Alright, Lindsay will be back, surely.’
“We don’t know who’s going to be in the seat.”