Business of Media
After the death of its famous founder, Mushroom music launches new spin-off
Matt Gudinski has done his first bit of M&A since the 2021 death of his father and Mushroom Group founder Michael, creating the first gig booking agency to be majority-owned by his famous family, reports Nine Publishing’s Michael Bailey.
Mushroom Booking Agency is the result of a merger between Vita Music Group, a booking agency started in 2015 by Guven Yilmaz, and three booking agents previously employed directly by Mushroom Group in Shelley Liu, Sam Rogers and Matt Thomson.
Booking agents are brokers between musical talent and the buyers of that talent, who might be tour promoters, the owners of live music venues or the organisers of music festivals. Agents seek the best deal for their acts, ensure the artists are paid (after taking their industry-standard 10 per cent commission), and often advise on the strategy for a tour so that half-empty halls are avoided.
In merging Vita into the Mushroom group, Gudinski has scored one of the biggest prizes in Australian live music – dance music duo Peking Duk. Yilmaz has worked with them for a decade, and masterminded a 16-date national tour in March that sold almost 20,000 tickets.
“That’s a big result given where people are at financially,” Yilmaz said.
Aussie advertising star buys back stake from ailing PwC
Australian ad agency Thinkerbell is buying back the minority stake held by embattled professional services firm PwC, bucking a global trend of professional services firms muscling into the marketing and advertising sector, reports Nine Publishing’s Calum Jaspan.
PwC picked up a 10 per cent stake, worth $300,000, in the agency in 2017 just a few months after Thinkerbell’s launch.
Thinkerbell, the brainchild of Adam Ferrier, Jim Ingram and Ben Couzens, has now bought back the stake for an undisclosed fee.
The agency lends its services to local and international clients including IAG, XXXX Gold, Furphy, Menulog, Mars, Dan Murphy’s and Vegemite.
Group chief executive and partner of Thinkerbell Margie Reid said the business has proven it can do things differently and find success doing so.
A blessing and a boogeyman: Advertisers warily embrace A.I.
The advertising industry is in a love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence, report The New York Times’ Tiffany Hsu and Yiwen Lu.
In the past few months, the technology has made ads easier to generate and track. It is writing marketing emails with subject lines and delivery times tailored to specific subscribers. It gave an optician the means to set a fashion shoot on an alien planet and helped Denmark’s tourism bureau animate famous tourist sites. Heinz turned to it to generate recognizable images of its ketchup bottle, then paired them with the symphonic theme that charts human evolution in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A.I., however, has also plunged the marketing world into a crisis. Much has been made about the technology’s potential to limit the need for human workers in fields such as law and financial services. Advertising, already racked by inflation and other economic pressures as well as a talent drain due to layoffs and increased automation, is especially at risk of an overhaul-by-A.I., marketing executives said.
The conflicting attitudes suffused a co-working space in downtown San Francisco where more than 200 people gathered last week for an “A.I. for marketers” event. Copywriters expressed worry and skepticism about chatbots capable of writing ad campaigns, while start-up founders pitched A.I. tools for automating the creative process.
Furious stars turn on Disney CEO amid Hollywood strike
With Hollywood at a standstill due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, some big stars are making their voices heard – and speaking out against one of the industry’s most powerful men, Disney CEO Bob Iger, reports News Corp’s Nick Bond.
The strike has seen some 160,000 film and television actors join members of the Writers Guild of America who are already on the picket lines, in what is the first joint walkout between the two unions since 1960.
Members of both unions are demanding increases in pay and residuals to reflect the streaming TV landscape, plus guarantees they will not be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI).
Disney CEO Iger said in an interview last week that the two unions are not being “realistic” with their demands.
Former The Nanny star and now SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher called Iger’s remarks “repugnant” over the weekend.
“I found [his comments] terribly repugnant and out of touch. Positively tone deaf. If I were that company, I would lock him behind doors and never let him talk to anybody about this, because it’s so obvious that he has no clue as to what is really happening on the ground with hardworking people who don’t make anywhere near the salary that he’s making. High seven figures, eight figures – this is crazy money that they’re making.”
Social Media
How Australian businesses are using Threads to connect with customers
Meta-owned social media platform Threads has become the fastest growing app, clocking 100m users within the first five days since it was launched, reports The Australian’s Kate Racovolis.
The platform will operate without advertising for the “foreseeable future”, however brands are chasing “organic” growth by establishing accounts on the channel to communicate with their audiences.
Among the growing user base in Australia is a wide range of businesses, from news organisations to major telcos, such as Telstra, as well as small local cafes and fashion brands.
Thread’s rapid uptake has surpassed other new social media apps launched in recent years, including BeReal, a photo-sharing app released in 2020 as the Instagram “antidote”, which took seven months to hit 20m users.
It has also overtaken usage of other major tech tools, the most influential of which recently included OpenAI’s content-generating platform ChatGPT. It took two months to reach the 100m user mark since it was made available for public use in November 2022.
Thread’s arrival comes at a time of greater maturity in the social media landscape in comparison to the likes of Twitter, which first launched in 2011, when social media channels were still emerging as commercially-led content platforms for brands.
Twitter investor writes down stake by 47% as analyst claims Threads user fall
An investor in Elon Musk’s Twitter has written down their stake in the business by 47% as advertisers rein in their spending on the social media platform, reports The Guardian’s Dan Milmo.
The move by ARK Investment Management came as an analysis firm claimed that usage of the “Twitter killer” Threads app has fallen by half since its launch by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
The ARK founder and chief executive, Cathie Wood, told the Wall Street Journal she was bullish about Twitter despite the writedown.
“We take fair valuation very seriously and absolutely have had to write that [Twitter] down,” Wood said. “The writedown is not representative of our fundamental outlook and belief in the long-term return on investment we believe that it will have for our shareholders.”
ARK’s writedown gives Twitter an implied value of $23bn and comes after Musk told staff in March the platform had lost more than half its value, while the asset manager Fidelity has written down the value of its stake to about $15bn. Musk paid $44bn for Twitter in October 2022.
Musk said at the weekend that advertising on Twitter – the platform’s main source of income – had fallen by nearly 50% and the business remained cashflow negative, a useful measure for gauging whether a heavily indebted business like Twitter can manage its interest payments.
News Brands
Huw Edwards faces months off air as BBC investigation could last to autumn
Huw Edwards faces being off air for months after the BBC’s director general said an internal investigation into the suspended News at Ten presenter was likely to stretch into the autumn, reports The Guardian’s Jim Waterson.
Tim Davie said the corporation would take its time with a fact-finding mission looking at claims against its best-known newsreader, after two police forces concluded Edwards had no criminal case to answer.
Edwards was taken off air earlier this month after the Sun published allegations he had paid £35,000 to a young person with a drug addiction “since they were 17 in return for sordid images”. The tabloid subsequently backtracked on its implication that Edwards may have committed a criminal offence by buying pictures when the individual was 17.
The young person issued a statement to the BBC claiming the key allegations were “rubbish”.
The presenter, one of the BBC’s highest earners, is believed to be receiving his full £435,000-a-year salary while suspended from the corporation. Even if Edwards is cleared of wrongdoing in the internal inquiry, many in the BBC newsroom doubt he will ever be able to return to his old job presenting the flagship evening news bulletin and election night coverage.
Radio
Kyle Sandilands ambushed by police outside KIIS FM studios in Sydney
There was quite the commotion outside KIIS FM’s Sydney headquarters early yesterday morning when the network’s star, Kyle Sandilands, was ambushed by police, reports News Corp’s Christine Estera.
The shock jock was given the heads up from his producers, Pete Deppeler and Pedro Vitola, that several police officers were waiting for him outside when he pulls up in his $250,000 Cadillac Escalade.
In a video shared to The Kyle & Jackie O Show’s Instagram Stories, cops could be seen waiting for the host outside the North Ryde studio at 5:30am.
Speaking later on air, Pete and Pedro revealed police initially pulled over when they spotted the duo standing around in the dark at that hour in the morning, waiting to greet Kyle.
And although the pair weren’t causing any drama, the officers still wanted to check in.
As it turned out, the cops simply wanted to talk to Kyle over comments he had made on air about police having a target on his head. So they waited with Pete and Pedro until the man of the hour arrived.
“The highway patrol dude[s], they’ve come out and they’ve said, ‘Listen, we’ve heard you on the air saying you think the coppers are after you.’ And they’ve come out to tell me they’re not after me,” Kyle later shared.