Arvind Hickman is the features and analysis editor of B&T, a marketing trade media title. He is a journalist and editor with experience in sports, HR, construction, and, most recently, media and marketing.
The advertising model is broken in news media. The major tech platforms, particularly Google and Facebook (AKA Alphabet and Meta), are accused of undermining news media publishers, although some governments are intervening to support them.
But the shift in advertising revenue to the major platforms has impacted more than just news media. Even the marketing and advertising trade media has suffered. Some publishers have transformed their business models away from advertising to events, subscriptions, awards, membership fees, and other paid models with mixed success.
Arvind provides an industry insider perspective on the challenges and opportunities for the trade news media industry.
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Listener’s note: Since the publication of this podcast, Michael Lynch, Publisher of Campaign Brief, has reached out to inform us that the outlet has now ended its “pay to play” policies, which saw the publisher require agencies/media owners seeking to have their media release published on the site to sign up for advertising packages of between $750-$2000 (or $550 if you wanted a one-off news story that would lead that day’s CB Daily Bulletin). The change (which, to our knowledge, was not publicly announced at the time) coincided with Campaign Brief switching off its anonymous comment thread, following massive pressure from the creative agencies who made the difficult decision to boycott the publication. TrinityP3’s position on play-to-play remains that all trade publishers should disclose their commercial arrangements in line with AANA regulations.
I think the genie’s out of the bottle with this one really. I think trying to squeeze it back is going to be very difficult for anyone to do.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing. A weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
The advertising model is broken when it comes to news media, the major tech platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, also known as Alphabet and Meta stand accused of undermining the news media publishers with some governments intervening to support news media.
But it’s not just news media that’s been impacted nationally, even the marketing and advertising trade media has suffered from the shift in advertising revenue to the major platforms. Some publishers have transformed their business models away from advertising to events, subscriptions, membership fees, and other paid models with mixed success.
To discuss this issue and possible solutions, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, journalist and editor with experience across news, sport, HR, and most recently media and marketing as the features and analysis editor at B&T, Arvind Hickman. Welcome, Arvind.
Arvind:
Nice to be here, Darren.
Darren:
Look there’s something that we share and that is a passionate belief in the importance of having news media acting independently and substantially balancing any society or industry body or industry is really important, isn’t it?
Arvind:
Yeah. Well, I think it’s never been more important and yeah, what we’ve seen most recently, I guess the U.S. elections is a classic example of that. You need a really strong media to hold power to account and unfortunately what’s been happening over a long period of time is that the media has been challenged. It’s been challenged financially and commercially for various reasons that I’m sure will go into.
It’s been forced to cut staff and resources; its newsrooms are depleted and its ability to hold power to account more broadly is being questioned and social media exacerbates that. As you are probably aware, if you look at the most recent election, yeah, you could probably argue that social media had as much influence as the mainstream media.
Darren:
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because the traditional model was advertising would pay for news media, but that there was a definite separation between editorial and advertising that would exist.
Arvind:
Yeah. There’s always been a church and state and I imagine that this still is for a lot of the mainstream publishers and even a lot of the smallest publishers that you know you don’t want to be seen to be sort of kowtowing to commercial interests. In reality, there might be some gray areas around that but I think that is still the case.
But where some of the problem is, is that what you are finding, especially when we talk about things like politics, is that previously they used to go to the mainstream media to get their message out. They don’t need to do that anymore, they’ve got all these megaphones called social media, they can completely bypass the media and as a result of that, the media’s influence in many realms is diminishing.
And when you add to that, the challenges that a lot of publishers have been facing, especially those that rely a lot on advertising revenue, they’ve been in structural decline for many years now as advertising money shifts to towards some of these tech platforms like Google and Facebook and other new ones like TikTok.
Darren:
Well, there is also the counter argument that we hear championed by many, which is that social media is a good thing because it’s democratized the ability for many voices to be heard out there. And that the traditional media model gave a handful of what were often rich or entitled proprietors, a voice that is now balanced by social media and by that democratization.
Arvind:
I think in theory you are right. I think social media, if it’s being operated in a transparent and open way can democratize the spread of information. It gives everybody an opportunity to have a voice. The problem with social media though, is it doesn’t want to take any accountability for the voices that are on its platform and for the voices that it’s distributing.
Now, that is different to the media. You may agree or disagree with the political agendas of certain publications, you may agree or disagree that they also have influenced things in the past, but they are held to very different standards and to rules and regulations that social media companies simply aren’t and that’s where the problem lies.
Darren:
Yeah, it is quite a slight of hand that the big tech companies pulled, wasn’t it? And I’ve forgotten the particular act in America, but to be classified as a channel-
Arvind:
Section 230, yeah.
Darren:
Section 230, that’s it. That classified them as a channel rather than a publisher, which then meant like a telco who are purely providing pipes, they’re no longer responsible for the content that flows in that unlike a publisher who takes the legal responsibility.
And in fact, there’s been court cases which say the publisher even takes the responsibility for what’s put onto the social media platforms and the comments that people put against that content are also legally back to the publisher in the first place. I mean, it’s ironic considering how much of the revenue comes from them advertising the content on those channels.
Arvind:
And I think if we go back to the whole Section 230 argument that Big Tech has been using for years, their argument has been, “Look, we are just here to distribute content. It’s used generated content, we aren’t curating it, we aren’t editing it, it’s purely content that’s being published by individuals and they therefore bear legal liability.”
Now, if you look at what’s happened for a long period of time, and I guess more particularly in the most recent election, you’ve got algorithms who curate content. They arguably play a similar role to editors. They serve up content that they think people will want to read, which is what an editor does.
And exacerbating that, if you look at X in particular, I mean Elon Musk and X, they’ve actually been physically, or I don’t know if they’ve been physically doing, but they’ve been tweaking their algorithm to surface, sorry, let me say, they’ve been tweaking their algorithm to surface certain content that supports a political agenda that the owner supports, which is obviously supporting Donald Trump and they’ve been suppressing Kamala Harris posts. Now, that is clearly, in my opinion playing the role of an editor of any editor, so I think the-
Darren:
Or a publisher. Because that’s where we’ve seen in the past criticism of traditional news structures where the publisher then brings pressure for the masthead or the publication to take a particular perspective and support one side against the other.
Arvind:
And look, I read a recent article about this in B&T and spoke to a couple of experts, academics who sort of look into this all the time. And they’re also of the opinion that the way that Elon has behaved at this most recent election really cast a shadow over Section 230.
And it’s much more difficult now for some of these platforms to sort of hide behind that and wash their hands of any level of accountability. So, I think what hopefully will happen, but maybe not in the Trump years because Elon has a lot of power now in that admission, but what might happen in the future is they do revise Section 230, or they change the rules that that publishers play by.
Darren:
Well, that’s an interesting point Arvind, because with the change of government there’s been a lot going on with antitrust actions against particularly Alphabet and Google and their control over not just search, but the advertising ecosystem.
It’ll be interesting to see if the political machinations of Washington will actually slow down some of those processes that are happening there as well because a big part of the support for the Republicans and Donald Trump specifically came from or is reported to have come from Silicon Valley.
Arvind:
That is an interesting point and it’s really hard to know what’s going to happen, especially in terms of the Trump administration. If we wind back four years when Trump was most recently in power, he was very much of the view that yes, these big tech companies wield way too much power, and he would’ve been happy to see them broken up, so I don’t know if his position has now changed.
I said, it’ll be interesting to see what Elon says to him and whether his view has shifted. He’s a man who’s been known to shift his views quite suddenly. But yeah, I think there is definitely a lot going on with the DOJ in the U.S., a lot of talk around whether Alphabet will be broken up into various different parts.
There’s going to be lawsuits coming left, right, and center about how Google’s ad tech has kind of, I guess, rigged the system against publishers that’s probably one way of describing it, they might argue different. So, I think it’s a really interesting space and it’s something that we as an industry really need to be watching, because what happens overseas might then spread elsewhere.
I read today, actually, it was an Mi3 article where there is a law firm that is trying to raise a class action against Google for publishers, trying to get as many of them involved as possible and basically suing Google for compensation, for money that publishers should have earned from them but were essentially swindled.
Darren:
And that was off the back of something that happened in Canada, isn’t it?
Arvind:
That’s correct. So, it’s a really interesting space. I think this is the first time I can recall where Big Tech is really being challenged in a legal sense, in a sense where they fundamentally could be broken up which hasn’t really happened before.
You know they get fines, yeah, it’s a bit of pocket money, we’ll pay the fine cost of doing business. This could radically change their businesses, but it’s a big but we don’t know what’s going to pan out. We don’t know how the Trump administration is going to sort of relate to it, what he’s thinking but it’s definitely a very interesting space.
Darren:
It’s also evidence of how the media world has changed because before these big global tech platforms, what we saw was media was largely granted to players on a market-by-market basis, television broadcast licenses were given in Australia, radio was given in Australia, it was given out on the basis of some very strict guidelines around behaviors and what was the expectations.
And you had governments that clearly had authority, but we’ve seen in dealing with big global tech platforms, many of them incorporated in the U.S., many registered in other countries for tax purposes, that the Australian government doesn’t have a lot of control over what actually happens in this day and age with what has to be considered largely a media competitor.
Arvind:
Yeah, that’s right. It’s a really interesting point. It sort of really challenges the jurisdiction that the Australian government has in terms of policing how these platforms behave even in this market. For example, they might be able to stop certain content from being published in Australia, but they can’t stop it from being published elsewhere. That was challenged in court recently, you might recall. Some violent conducts, that tragic stabbing that happened in western Sydney that X was ordered to take that down.
In Australia, initially refused to, then eventually took it down, but it then transpired in, I think it was in the Supreme Court or the high court, one of the high courts in Australia, that they couldn’t force X to do that anywhere else because it was a jurisdiction issue. So, this is a real challenge, and I don’t really know the way out of it. It might be a matter of jurisdictions coming together to regulate big tech effectively.
Darren:
Well, most of the conversations I’ve had with lawyers in this space, they’ve said largely the Australian government is at the behest of whatever happens in the U.S. because almost all of these platforms are under the jurisdiction of U.S. government, and therefore, there is very little that can be done other than political pressure brought to bear to expedite some of these changes that we’ve speculated about.
Arvind:
I also think though, if you get, for example, the EU, you get Canada, you get Australia, you get a few of these major economies banding together and sort of harmonizing some strict regulations around how these platforms behave, it’s almost in the platform’s best interest to start changing their behavior to align with how these massive markets operate because if they don’t, it’s going to be very tough for them to operate in these markets.
Darren:
Now, earlier this year, I can’t remember if it was at the press club in Canberra or it was a senate inquiry, the News Corporation Executive Chairman in Australia, Michael Miller said that the tech platform should have to earn, I guess, in many ways their social license to operate, or should at least adhere to a social license that he believes that the media owners in this country adhere to. How do you take that as a call to action?
Arvind:
Look, I think some people might disagree with Michael Miller when he says that all the media owners in this country are operating to the same social license. I think that’s a matter of opinion rather than fact.
Darren:
But the concept of a social license, because in many ways it does hark back to the whole purpose of allowing people to be publishers before it was democratized by the social media platforms.
Arvind:
I think it’s something that sounds nice in theory, I don’t know how you put that into practice, that would be my … I think the genie’s out of the bottle with this one really. I think trying to squeeze it back into a social license bottle is going to be very difficult for anyone to do, especially at small government on the fringe of the Pacific Ocean.
So, I’m not sure how that would work. It sounds like a nice idea in theory, in concept, I’d like to understand a bit more about how Michael reckons that, that could be rolled out more effectively.
Darren:
So, let’s just scale this back a little bit because we both work in marketing, media and advertising, and you’ve had numerous roles not just in Australia, but in the UK as well.
Arvind:
That’s right. So, before B&T, I was working for Mi3, and before that I worked in the UK for Campaign, which is a big advertising magazine in that market and I’ve also worked for PRWeek and for AdNews.
Darren:
So, you’ve got quite a long and distinguished experience in dealing with marketing and media in various markets and a lot of your focus has been on the media side, hasn’t it?
Arvind:
It has, yeah. So, in the UK I was the media editor over there, at AdNews, my beat was media. In fact, almost every publication I’ve worked at, there’s been a media element except for PR Week, which is covering PR and comms, mostly the media side of things, media agencies, media owners and that intersection.
Darren:
But have you seen the same pressure brought to bear on the business model for those industry media publishers that we’ve seen for news media generally?
Arvind:
Yes. And I think that there’s many reasons for that. If you have an unhealthy, broader media industry that trickles down very much the trades. If they’re having bad years, there’s less budget for them to spend with the trade titles.
And it’s not just them, it’s also the vendors, it’s also all the other folks that sort of support the industry ecosystem. So, when the industry more broadly is in a down phase, that’s not good news for any trade title.
Darren:
And we’ve seen most of them have had to move away from an advertising-based revenue model or business model to finding other ways of doing that. We’ve seen events become really popular, award shows, almost every trade media is running some type of award show or some sort of ranking or recognition. You know, these have become alternative ways of being able to fund the editorial, aren’t they?
Arvind:
Yeah, and this has been happening for a long time now. So, even when I was at AdNews around what, 10 years ago now, around that time yeah, you obviously had advertising revenue, we had a magazine back in those days.
So, you had two sources of advertising. You had digital, you had print but actually a lot of the money we used to make back then was from things like awards events, it was from conferences, it was from some of these sort of non-traditional revenue streams that now are very much bread and butter stuff for any trade title worth itself.
So, this has been an ongoing thing. Now, I think what’s happened is the healthier trade publications are diversifying more and into more areas and into bigger ways and relying less on advertising revenue.
Darren:
And apart from that, we’ve also seen a sort of pay to play model either signing up as you know, paying a not subscription, but membership fee or in some cases paying for content to run, which then becomes pretty much moves away from being news to simply PR, doesn’t it?
Arvind:
Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure if you want to name any titles in particular but-
Darren:
Well, there’s been some controversy around and campaign brief and the approach they take. I mean, personally, I don’t have a problem with anyone having a business model as long as there’s transparency to it and accountability. If someone wants to run a business that’s purely running press releases at a fee, as long as everyone’s aware, and it’s clearly articulated that that’s your business model then that should be fine.
Arvind:
Well, you are right and then there’s two things I would say about that. The first thing is that newspapers for the whole existence have always accepted pay to play, for example, advertorials. They almost look like an article, but they’re clearly signpost saying this is an advertorial. So, there’s always been that element to it.
Even at B&T we have partner content, which were clearly signpost. Sometimes it’s just a straight avatar, sometimes, we’ll work in, it may and do some native content, which is a bit more in depth, a bit a bit nicer. So, that exists everywhere, it’s not just campaign brief.
I think the difference is campaign brief does pay to play, but it’s not very clearly signposted. So, the average reader who isn’t a part of that specific sector of the industry and doesn’t understand the business model, they might not immediately pick up that the content that they’re reading is being paid for, so is essentially just paid PR.
Darren:
And yet there were also elements of the campaign brief editorial that was definitely editorial, particularly where they were ranking agencies and creative people on there which looked like editorial decisions without necessarily highlighting that perhaps the people considered were only those that were paying to be part of that business model.
Arvind:
Well, that’s right and that’s yet again-
Darren:
And if that’s wrong, that’s exactly the issue. And my interpretation’s wrong, that’s exactly the issue with what’s wrong with that model. Because it’s not clear whether those people were the best in the market or the best amongst the group that had paid for it.
Arvind:
And I guess that’s one of the problems that they need to work out, is just being completely transparent with the market. And when I say the market, I mean the readership in general, not just the creatives who pay to put stuff in your website.
It’s not clear, I’ve heard various different versions of it and I think one thing that they should consider doing is making it clear, explaining their business model. And yeah, I think once you explain it, you signpost it, then that’s fine. Any publisher can choose, have whatever business model they want.
Darren:
Well, you were at you mentioned Mi3, they very clearly say partner content to say that this is a paid advertorial or paid commentary that appears there very clear and so the reader is in no way mistaken as to the source and the reason that it appears.
Arvind:
Yeah, that’s right and we do that as well at B&T. We clearly label it partner content. I think it’s really important that you do that. I think blurring the line between paid for content and genuine editorial is a really dangerous, tight rope to walk. Once you lose the trust of your reader and the second guessing, whether it’s paid for or it’s legitimate or it’s authentic, then I think you start losing respect and credibility in the market, and it’s very hard to win that back.
Darren:
But you’ve worked in news and sport, I think there’s even a stint there in construction and HR, are all industry or trade media the same in that my observation is that the advertising media and marketing industry seems to have the impression that the trade media should never be critical of the industry. That it almost exists to be the cheer squad of the industry that they find criticism particularly distasteful and bordering odd abhorrent.
Arvind:
Well, I would actually challenge that. I don’t think that is the case. That’s certainly not the case at B&T. We don’t go out there.
Darren:
No. I’m talking about the industry, the industry action, the number of times we’ve heard about a journalist or a title reporting on something that should be reported on, and there being negative impacts, people threatening to withhold their advertising or financial support, withdrawing from award shows and other punitive and I don’t want to get into naming names but as a philosophy, the industry doesn’t seem to want to have a trade media that is willing to hold them accountable.
Arvind:
I don’t think that happens everywhere, but it is known to happen. I’m not going to call anyone out here, but yeah, guys grow with thick skin. If you want quality journalism, then you have to let us be journalists, and you have to let us be independent and I think it’s really incumbent on any trade title to make that very clear with their commercial partners and we do that.
We let them know, “Hey, we’re writing an article, you might not like it, but it’s fair and balanced. It’s our job.” We don’t find that many of our partners do threaten us or threaten to pull funding or what have you.
On the rare occasion that might happen, but normally we have very good relations with our commercial partners, and they sort of get it. But I do think that there is an element of that that does exist in this industry. I think that’s been consistent in almost every industry that I’ve covered.
Darren:
So, it’s an industry issue rather than a media and marketing issue. That the smaller you make it, the more focused you exist as a journalist, the more likely it is that someone’s going to be upset if you report something completely relevant, but not necessarily to their best interests.
Arvind:
Look, there’s definitely that. I’m thinking of some of the other various sectors I’ve covered, there’s-
Darren:
Outraged HR-
Arvind:
Well, to be honest with you, I’ve never really got that much with HR, but it was covering very different issues and there wasn’t that much controversy about it, to be honest.
Darren:
Well, PRWeek, be interesting because PR people, what they call them, flacks and hacks but they must operate on the basis that they want to have the best possible coverage of either their client or themselves in editorial, wouldn’t they?
Arvind:
Well, the people who supported PRWeek and even Campaign, they wouldn’t challenge anything that we wrote to be honest. And quite often when you’re writing about stuff, especially with PRWeek, with PRWeek, you’re often writing about companies where they might have had a comms crisis or something along those lines.
And of course, you cover your industry stuff, what the different agencies are doing and that sort of stuff. But we never really had a problem commercially with some of the things. Editorially, some people wouldn’t be happy about it. Some certain individuals but commercially we never had that issue at all.
There was never that sort of pressure from commercial to say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have written that or can we tone that down or anything like that.” In fact, to be honest with you, I’ve never worked at a title before where I’ve been tapped on the shoulder and said, “We can’t run that for this reason because advertiser X is-
Darren:
I don’t think anyone would actually call you it. I’m talking more about the reaction that often happens afterwards. I don’t think you’d be a journalist if you didn’t have people in the industry holding a grudge perhaps.
Arvind:
Look, you definitely do get people who aren’t happy with your coverage or the way you might frame things sometimes and that’s fine, we’re not here to be people’s friends. But in saying that, I try to have really positive relationships with everybody. I don’t sort of have favorites or discriminate or what have you. And I’ll have a chat, a conversation with someone if they’re not happy with what I wrote and explain myself.
And I think, we can’t sort of be struck by fear and that sort of dictates how we treat something. Because if we did that, then what use are we really, we we’re not there to sort of write PR pieces, but we’re there to sort of challenge things, hold up a mirror to the industry sometimes that reflection isn’t as pretty as people might like.
Darren:
Because yeah as an industry we’re facing a lot of challenges and there’s a lot of big issues that are often not being addressed or they’re being addressed, but not publicly. There are things around at the moment, media transparency for instance, is a big issue and we’re seeing some articles. It’s interesting how there’s a lot more articles being shared in places like LinkedIn than there are necessarily in the trade media.
Arvind:
It is interesting. I think one of the challenges that we face at the moment I mean, there is a lot going on on the surface. There are, if you look at for example, what’s happening in TV, there’s been a lot of major issues going on there. A lot of redundancies, cultural issues that have surfaced, there’s quite a bit going on in terms of what’s happening with social media, with age gating, that sort of stuff, there’s just quite a lot going on at the moment.
Sometimes it’s not easy for stretched teams of trade journals to cover everything and to get into the weeds of things. I think that’s probably one of the things that I’ve noticed over my career is just how much more stretched we are and how much less time we have to cover certain issues.
Like you’ll recall, when I was at AdNews, we used to go into the weeds of those things all the time, had a lot more time to do that back then. These days, we don’t have as much time and we kind of have to prioritize in certain ways and it’s a challenge, it’s a perennial challenge.
Darren:
So, what is the solution then for publishers, whether it’s in trade media or in a broader sense of being able to get back? Because we’ve seen governments trying to set up the news media bargaining code, which sort of has fallen to bits and now there’s talk about leveraging a fee onto social media that will then be distributed to publishers to ensure we have a healthy news media code.
But all of those things are operating on a national or state basis, often the trade media’s going to be outside of that remit. What can trade media, particularly because of my self-interest in marketing, media and advertising, how can they address this?
Arvind:
Well, I think we should probably take a step back to answer that question and provide a bit of context to our listeners. And what I mean by that is just looking at the trade media landscape at the moment, you see, I kind of have a fear, and I’ve had this fear for a while, is that I just don’t think this market is large enough to support the number of trade titles that we have.
So, let me explain that. In Australia, we have AdNews, B&T, Mumbrella Mediaweek, Mi3, Unmade, Campaign Brief, and Little Black Book, they’re the prominent ones that I can name. Now we have that in a market of around 150,000 advertising and marketing execs, that’s our audience, our primary audience.
In the UK they have five, Campaign, the Drum, Media Leader, Digiday, and Marketing Week for an audience of around 250,000, maybe even more. So, if you want to compare those things that in the UK it’s one per around 50,000 industry execs, one trade title, in Australia, it’s one per round, 18,750.
So, there is so much repetition and competition in this market and for a dwindling amount of revenue. My concern is that I don’t think it’s sustainable to have this many titles in the medium to long term. Now, I would love for there to be this many titles, and I’ve got friends at pretty much all of them, but I think that’s the first challenge that this sector needs to face.
Now what does that mean? It could mean a bit of consolidation down the track, it might be a couple of titles merge, it might be some of the titles, the weaker titles in the market, those that have less revenue streams, they might struggle to survive for many years longer. Of course, we hope that they do but that might be a realistic outcome because I think we’ve got too many at the moment, that’s the first point.
The second thing I would say if we’re looking at ways that the trade sector, the trade publication sector can sort of better insulate itself or future proof itself, I think one of the things, there has to be more of a focus of quality over quantity. And what I mean by that, too many titles are basically rehashing the same releases and then not focusing enough on original content that people can’t get anywhere else.
If you look at what Mi3 and Unmade, Tim Burrowes publication do, a lot of that is completely bespoke, it’s completely unique, fine, it’s long form, that’s probably not everybody’s cup of tea, but they’re providing a service and information that people can’t get anywhere else. If you look at what we’re trying to do at B&T, we’re trying to balance that, we’re trying to balance the news, the run of the mill stuff but we’re also doing a lot more exclusive stuff ourselves.
So, an example would be the B&T agency scorecard. That’s something we introduced this year, which nobody else is doing in the market, where we basically go and we analyze each of the agencies each year, give them a mark. We also have things like our CMO power list, we have our best of the best and we have a lot of other features and set pieces that we’re trying to do that sort of sets us apart.
So, if you go to our newsletter, it’s very different to what you might get if you look at another newsletter, because we’re focusing more on that unique stuff. So, that’s one thing.
I think there needs to be a move more towards quality and not quantity, and the quantity game, it’s basically trying to get as much traffic as you can to your website, that long tail of traffic because you think then that allows you to sell advertising against it.
Well, actually, I would argue, traffic is not the same as audience, what you really want is an audience, and you want it a loyal audience, high quality audience that advertisers actually want to buy against. So, that’s the first thing I’d say.
Darren:
Before you go on Arvind, the first thing is that whether a market can sustain so many trade journals, trade media really comes down to economics and the fact that it is a fixed size market, it’s interesting how many people are sprinkling their large ifs across all of them. I mean, we’re seeing the same ads appear in the same, we’re getting people, the same agencies entering the awards for each of the award shows.
I mean, at the moment, at last count, if you include the MFA awards and the award awards at ACA and even the Effie Awards have the agency of the year. You can have, I think it’s seven different agencies of the year, depending on which award show it is and what it’s for, which in many ways diminishes the actual meaning of agency of the year.
Arvind:
I’ll come to awards in a second, but I think your point-
Darren:
But they’re revenue generators, I mean, the reason they exist is not necessarily to recognize the best, it’s entry fees, tickets to award shows and that are an important part of the business model that’s supporting, to your point, there’s too many, but they’re being supported by the industry across things less by advertising and more by entering these awards and being on these lists.
Arvind:
Yeah. And look, as much, don’t get me wrong, love the B&T awards and I love the Cairns Crocodiles don’t want them to go anywhere, but I kind of agree. But then again, when I was working in Campaign, we used to have so many awards, just at Campaign, so many different awards, and I was like-
Darren:
Yeah. It’s a business model.
Arvind:
It’s a business model, so it helps sustain different titles, but-
Darren:
And there are some behaviors associated with it that are a counterintuitive to the best interest of the industry. One is everyone can win one. It’s almost like the achievement awards at school, every child gets one because there’s enough of them to go around.
But even worse, the finalist list gets longer and longer and longer as a way of filling venues with people buying tickets to see if they won. These are the behaviors that are being driven by the commercial necessity to survive than it is being driven by necessarily making the best of what the industry needs.
Arvind:
Look, I think every title, if they want to have an awards program that’s entirely up to them, as long as there’s a robust judging process which there always has been at the ones that I’ve worked in. Absolutely, that they’re not pay to play. Of course, you have to pay to enter them, but they agencies do and we get a lot of entries. But we don’t decide who wins, it’s independent marketers who do that through dodging panels.
But I agree. I think there are too many in a market this size in Australia and I think the audience thing that you mentioned before, I think it’s a really important point. If you have a limited amount of revenue and you want to spread that theme but then by doing that you’re actually hitting crossovers of audiences because certain titles are covering the same stuff and attracting the same eyeballs, is that really sustainable or is that really a great use?
Darren:
Well, that’s the other point about the number of players we’ve got both here in Australia and in the UK. Bigger market but you’ve also got LBB in the UK as well. Except that it’s about etching out a particular part of the market.
You’d have to say that LBB is largely about creativity and the way that’s applied, whereas some of the others, Mediaweek is more about media with some marketing attached to it, most of their focus is about the broader media marketplace.
Mi3, as you said, very much a deep dive, Unmade, deep dive into particular topics of the week and then there’s other players that are making their own itching out their own part in what is a relatively small market.
Arvind:
That’s right and I think you have to do things slightly differently. People know what B&T is, but it has a very distinctive personality. Under Tom Fogden, our current editor, we are looking to do a lot more sort of features, we’re looking to some more serious news and news analysis type stuff as well but we don’t want to lose our personality.
We want people to come to us because they enjoy reading our stuff and they get information that they can’t get any roles, but also, they get entertained, that’s kind of our positioning. And I’m sure Mumbrella and AdNews and others will tell you they’ve got their own unique positioning. But I think you really do need to focus on that quality stuff I was talking about before.
That should really be the main focus, the quantity stuff, the sugar on top that really shouldn’t be occupying much of your bandwidth and if it does, then I think you’ve got the wrong business model and it can come back to bite you.
The other thing that I think is really important and it’s one thing actually that I think B&T probably does better than anyone else, is diversifying your revenue streams. So, our biggest thing each year, it’s not necessarily our awards program, it’s actually our Cannes in Cairns, which is now called Cairns Crocodile.
it’s that big three-day conference that we have up in far north Queensland, we get a huge number of delegates that go up there. It’s a wonderful event, really good content, really good networking, it’s also fun. Conference is allowed to be fun, Darren.
Darren:
No one would want to go to a boring conference.
Arvind:
Oh, that’s right.
Darren:
Except that maybe and one of the things we have seen creep into it, not the crocodiles but into conferences, and this is globally is the number of presenters that are pay to play. We are seeing the first day you get a keynote that hopefully most people want to see, you might see two or three others that have got some either original or interesting perspectives and then the program gets filled up with pay to play, with a whole lot of presenters, they’re largely doing a sales pitch.
And so, this is what I’m saying is that it seems that everyone’s finding a way to survive or to thrive in some cases financially, but is it necessarily in the best interest of the industry? I mean, does Australia need another award show and B&T with what was Cannes in Cairns and now the crocodiles is proof that obviously the entries are showing that yes, there is room for another award show but how many award shows does the advertising industry need?
Arvind:
Well, the Cairns Crocodiles are an APAC awards program, and we got quite a number of-
Darren:
Last time I looked Australia was part of APAC, but you get my point.
Arvind:
Yeah. No, I know what you mean. The point of difference with the Cannes Crocodiles, it’s very much APAC and we get a good number of entries from the Asia Pacific region, we actually want to bring people to Cairns from Asia. That is a huge focus of what we’re doing and the Cannes Crocodiles awards program is, is one way of doing that.
But I do take your broader point. I think we’ve definitely hit peak awards in this market. I can’t see any more coming into play. That said, I hope all of them that, all the different titles that that produce and get success out of them because they can be very healthy for the business, they can also be a bit of fun for the industry.
But yeah, I certainly think there is a saturation point. I think if we haven’t passed it, we are very close to. I think the final thing that I would say about what might happen in the future, and it’s something that actually was the case when I was working at Campaign.
I think eventually what’s going to need to happen is having this whole advertised run content model, advertising-based content model rather, I just don’t think it’s got legs in the long term. I really think you’re going to need to have some form of subscription or membership or whatever you want to call it. I think that is the future.
I think the sooner that the trade titles get their audiences in order, build up that loyalty without that unique proposition and start getting behind the paywall, or at least a tiered system, which is what Campaign had then the better, frankly.
We need to wean ourself off this drug, which is advertising because the writing is on the wall. It’s been on the wall for a long period of time, and it’s only going to get worse, we’re not going to win the battle, unfortunately.
The advertising money that’s been leaked behind these wall gardens, it’s not coming out. It’s not coming back to us. So, I think it’s incumbent on all the different titles to explore ways how they can find a paywall type model or subscription type model that works-
Darren:
Or a membership model or whatever it is.
Arvind:
Whatever you want to call it, but it kind of doesn’t matter but I think that’s the future really.
Darren:
And the key will be to be completely transparent in what that means from an editorial perspective. It’s either, because the Campaign model is to pay to get access to varying tiers of information and knowledge, which they hold behind there, but they’ve also got awards and other things that they’re running as well.
And there needs to be transparency about does that membership model or tiered access to content impact the awards? I think the same level of transparency that we keep talking about for advertising media and marketing needs to also be applied to the journalists or the publishers that are operating in this marketplace.
Arvind:
Yeah, I totally agree. And this isn’t just trade publications that have this issue, this is a broader issue. I was having a chat to Pippa Leary from News Corp the other day, and she talks about shifting. She wants to shift News Corp and the industry away from reach, away from social media relying on these sort of big tech distribution pipes to build their audiences. Because she basically said to me, “Zero search, zero social, that’s on the horizon.”
They’ve already started switching the taps off on news content or so they tell us on places like Facebook, Google search at the moment, if you go to Google search news content is definitely being deprioritized, we’ve also got gen AI coming down the … well, it’s not even on the horizon, if you can-
Darren:
It’s here’s. I was going to say, we can’t have a marketing podcast without talking about AI, thank you for introducing it. Before you go on, I do want to acknowledge Paul McIntyre and Mi3 taking on the role of AI in their fast news.
I think and it was a year ago at South by Southwest that he announced that it’s been an interesting experiment. It’s still not to the point that it totally removes the need for a journalist to oversee it, but it won’t be long before a lot of content will be coming via AI, generative AI. In fact, I saw just before we started talking, there’s now a publishing company that’s planning to publish 8,000 books next year.
Arvind:
Yeah, I saw that.
Darren:
All generated by AI. It’s like what role the author?
Arvind:
Those guys have used ChatGPT. That’s the first thing I’m going to say. Have a read of that and then let-
Darren:
But anyway, yes, AI is going to have an impact.
Arvind:
It’s going to have an impact in several ways. So, one of the ways which you mentioned which Mi3 has been using now for about a year, is it’s going to help newsrooms write things, very basic things. It’s already been used for things like research, as research tools enablers to cut down time, to interrogate long documents. There are many really good applications actually for AI and gen AI technology in the media but there’s also some negativity.
And the negativity isn’t so much how the media can embrace it or use it, it’s basically how the platforms are using it. So, if you do a Google search at the moment and I don’t know if this happens with everybody, it happens with me. You get this AI assistant at the top, which basically goes and scrolls the internet, takes content from various different sources and gives you the summary at the top.
And you know what happens after that? Nobody goes below it because they get the little snippet they need and they say, “Oh, okay, that’s the fact that I’m looking up.” It is an existential threat to the media. The further down the news articles are being pushed in search, it’s a huge problem.
Darren:
Well, does it have? Because the version I saw of that does not have then links to the sources.
Arvind:
No. Well, even if it did, I’ve noticed them. So, this is my point.
Darren:
And that’s a danger because suddenly you’re going to be given a summary of what’s available on the internet with no accountability to the source. So, if it’s going into Reddit feeds, we could be in serious trouble or accessing what they, the dark web, we could be in serious trouble.
Arvind:
Well, no, you’re totally right and now I’m sure you’re aware of this but Google signed a deal with Reddit where they, Reddit would open up basically open up its backend and allow Google to scrape all its content to train its language, it’s LLM models.
So, they’ve signed this deal with Reddit and what happened as soon as they sign that deal, every single time you do a search, even if you search for your own article, Reddit is on top, core, same deal on top. So, news is being pushed further and further down that whole search page ecosystem, that is a huge threat for publishers because people can’t then go on the internet and discover the news that we professionally curate and prepare.
And gen AI even takes that a step further, so it summarizes these various sources without linking them to anywhere. So, what people is basically saying is on the horizon, we can’t rely on these different distribution pipes, if you like, the Googles and the Metas of the world for people to discover our content, we need to attract readers into our own ecosystems, and we need to make sure they stay there.
And she basically said, “We need to create our own walled gardens,” and I very much agree with her. I think this is a serious inflection point for the media; it can’t afford to stand still.
Darren:
No, I saw her saying that we need to focus on engagement and not reach.
Arvind:
Yes, engaged reach, she says.
Darren:
Yeah. So, that we build the community of people and engage them in the conversation or in the subject rather than just worrying about how many people actually eyeball see it.
Hey Arvind, you’re a passionate believer, it’s clear from the conversation, unfortunately we’ve run out of time. It’s gone so quickly. I really appreciate you coming and having this chat.
There is a question I have, and you brought it up, which was the agency scorecards. Do you think there’ll ever be an agency that gets less than a seven?
