Welcome to a Best of the Day wrap from Unmade.

Today: We share the highlights from Compass Auckland, Ooh Media finally discovers some momentum, and big moves on the Unmade Index.

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‘Embrace AI, or face an extinction-level event’

The final episode of the 2024-25 series of Compass rolled into Auckland last week.

The audience at the iHeart Lounge heard from Matt Martel, managing editor for audience and platforms at the New Zealand Herald, Jo Mitchell, CMO of The Warehouse Group; Paul Pritchard, group CEO of Overdose, and Angela Watson, CEO of Colenso BBDO on some of the key topics getting adland out of bed and keeping it awake at night.

The topics ranged from the impact of last year’s closure of Newshub to the disruption being wrought by AI, to whether it’s time for marketers to dial back on their platform spend.

Pritchard told the audience that the biggest challenge he saw the industry face last year was “lack of control”. He added: “I felt like things happened to us, not because of us.”

According to Martel, the closure of Newshub should be taken as a signal for action. “It was a strong and important part of New Zealand media. It's now gone.

“We need to act. Because if we don't act, we can see the train that's coming down the tracks at us.

“The problem is not the quality of what we do, it's the monetisation of what we do. If we don't change what we do now, if we don't embrace AI, if we don't embrace different ways of doing what we've always done, then there will be an extinction-level event for everyone in this room in ten years, if not sooner.”

And Pritchard urged a rethink for where the industry spends its marketing budgets: “We spent a lot of time letting international technology players come to every market and sell, sell, sell at really low costs. And that disrupted the media. It challenged the content and the quality of that content. And then when they disrupted it, they decided to put the prices up.

“And it's a pretty simple economic environment that we're all facing. The thing we can do to counter it is we can own our own content. We can own our own customer.

“We decided that it was just better to throw money at something that continually worked, right? Those metrics of return on ad spend and cost of customer acquisition -they were really attractive for a long time.

“Now they're less attractive, but everyone's hooked on it. So maybe we need to go cold turkey for a little bit.”

The event was organised by Unmade with the support of NZME, Lumo and Scentre Group’s BrandSpace.

Ooh Media’s turnaround begins

Ooh Media will likely soon make it official with its acting chief revenue officer Mark Fairhurst after his first two months in the chair sparked a turnaround in the company’s sales trajectory.

The emergency appointment of Fairhurst, previously executive general manager of QMS, came in December following the exit of chief revenue officer Paul Sigaloff after just 19 months.

In its full-year results released this morning, Ooh Media’s revenue and profits were virtually flat for the year, up by 0.3% to $635.6m and 3% to $287m respectively

Ooh Media’s 2023 and 2024 results were almost identical. However the company’s momentum entering the first quarter has radically improved

Ooh Media is on track to bring in 14% more revenue in the current quarter compared to the same time last year.

CEO Cathy O’Connor again acknowledged that Ooh Media’s sales operation has been slow and hard to deal with. She told today’s analysts’ call: “We heard from the market that we were slow to respond.”

Ooh Media’s said its new offering Reo - which assists mid-tier retailers enter the retail media space by outsourcing sales operations and assisting with the digital side - is also picking up momentum. Newly announced clients include Officeworks, Petbarn, and Australia Post, with others in the pipeline.

Unmade Index buoyed by Ooh Media and IVE Group results

Ooh Media’s improved performance saw it lock in a hefty 15.6% jump in market capitalisation during an action-packed day on the Unmade Index.

IVE Group, which also reported solid results today, rose by 6.4% while Seven West Media gained 2.9%.

Meanwhile, Nine lost 5.8% as the market continued to digest news of CoStar’s bid to buy its majority-owned real estate platform Domain.

As a result of the decline of Nine - the biggest weighted stock - the Unmade Index sank by 0.3% to 560.6 points.

Best of the Day: News winners; Clems loser; Slater & Gordon’s struggles

ABC back at the top

ABC News moved back past News Corp’s news.com.au as the site with the biggest audience. According to Ipsos Iris, the ABC’s monthly audience grew to 12.5m in January, ahead of news.com.au which lost 3.4% to land on 11.8m.

Another Omnicom ad restructure

Dani Bassil became the latest Clemenger Group CEO to be ousted after failing to recapture the creative brand’s glories of previous decades. Omnicom announced that Clemenger, Traffik and CHEP Network will all be folded into the Clems brand. Under chief creative officer Ant Keogh, who departed in 2017, and CEO Peter Biggs, who left in 2014, Clemenger Melbourne was regularly the world’s most awarded agency.

Too little, too Slater

Law firm Slater & Gordon was criticised for failing to adequately handle a PR crisis after a critical all-staff email leaked the salary details of employees along with criticism of management.

Meanwhile IVF clinic Genea was tonight dealing with an even bigger PR crisis after revealing that a data leak has seen hackers seize highly personal patient details.

Today’s podcast was edited by Abe’s Audio.

Time to leave you to your evening.

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. Have a great night.

Toodlepip…

Tim Burrowes

Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella

[email protected]

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