Pearman Pulse - May 2019
Likely media winners & losers from Saturday’s election?
Looking through all the political parties’ policies there are no mentions of any media reforms for traditional / offline media. Not surprising as the major reforms on the traditional media were passed in October 2017. They included; • Abolition of the ‘75% audience reach’ rule which allowed commercial TV stations to reach more than 75% of the Australian population. • Abolition of the ‘2 out of 3 cross-media control’ rule allowing companies to now control multiple media (Radio, TV, Press) in the same geographic market. (Nine could now buy Fairfax) • Abolition of the TV & Radio ‘licence fees’ that they used to pay to the Government. This saved TV stations around $130m and Radio around $18 million Labor’s policy will benefit the ABC as it will reverse the freeze on government funding as well as providing an additional $15 million to support regional news and restore shortwave radio in the NT. This will deliver an additional $100 million over 3 years to the ABC compared to a Liberal government. Liberal’s policy states they “will hold social media companies and other technology companies to account”. This is predominantly to ensure social media (aka Facebook) removes abhorrent violent material expeditiously. They also have a ‘Consumer Privacy’ policy that will have amendments to the Privacy Act 1988 to ensure social media companies and online platforms do not misuse personal information they collect, particularly about children. This may possibly put further restrictions on any company collecting Data. Another Liberal policy is to “conduct a Senate Committee Inquiry into digital platforms, their role as publishers and the need for further regulation”. The Greens have Media & Communications principles predominantly around freedom and diversity of the press and access to independent media. Their aim is to have ‘regulation of the internet to be transparent, accountable and protective of privacy, freedom of speech and access to information’. It’s a reasonable bet to assume no matter who gets in, Facebook and Google will have greater scrutiny or restrictions on them in terms of data they collect and content they share. This may not be that concerning to them as we think issues around transparency, brand safety and tax liabilities are more likely to financially affect them. We also expect all websites may need to ask for permission to collect consumer data the way European websites are required to. FYI, interestingly the fine for not voting is $55.
WHAT'S NEW IN THE MEDIA - CINEMA
Avengers: Endgame had a historic opening week with the movie in its first week with $50.13M – easily sailing past Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($38.5M)
Endgame is now number 3 on the all-time Australian box office list after just 2 weeks bringing its total to $65.8M at the end of the weekend.
DIGITAL UPDATE
Amazon, The
sleeping giant of digital advertising in Australia
In July 2018, Amazon opened up its e-commerce service to include
the Australian Market, 10 months later we now have advertising representation
in Australia from Amazon.
The Unique Browsers (UB’s) on Amazon in March 2019 according to
Nielsen MediaView was 7.4 million which is getting closer to eBay who have
10 million UB’s.
The advantages of advertising on Amazon or eBay is that we can
target in-market intenders (via its product search capability), its scale, the
ability to target post transactional audiences as well as being able to
record a real time ROI.
As advertisers we welcome new digital players in the Australian digital landscape especially players like Amazon who bring innovation (such as Alexa) and more choice for targeting at scale (alongside the known big players of Google and Facebook). According to eMarketer, in 2018 Amazon became the third largest digital ad seller in the United States behind Facebook and Google while beating Microsoft and Yahoo. We expect they will continue to grow in Australia.
SMI UPDATE
March results for Ad spend continue the downward trend sine Q4 2018. We are now experiencing first quarter results for the market back 4.2% to
$1.52 billion with only Outdoor (+$958k) delivering any meaningful growth in this period.
The Media market is still stuck in a rut after the record high in the period of the year prior and also a fair amount of uncertainty with the impending election.
Obviously with the upcoming election, the strongest growth category in March was Political Parties/Associations/Unions (increase of $7.8m year-on-year to $12 million). The ‘Political’ spend will increase astronomically once April & May are included. Particularly when the United Australia Party’s estimated $50m+ is added.
FAST FACTS
- The Voice starts on Sunday (May 19) with Deltra Goodrem, Kelly Rowland, Boy George & Guy Sebastian – last year it was the 6th highest rating regular program
- Nine and News Corp close TV Channel Your Money
- Production has started this week on a new real-life medical series called Emergency, based on the doctors & nurses at the Royal Melbourne Hospital
- Lego Masters grand final delivered a metropolitan audience of 1.5 million
- 3.7% of Australians purchased groceries online in the last 4 weeks
- 28.6% of Australians have been to the cinemas in the last 4 weeks
- 1.7 million Australians accessed the Netflix app in the last 4 weeks
