Best of the Week: (With a tiny update on the one of three hours ago); Why the share market is punishing Seven; The AdNews Awards boycott; How Triple M dealt with its Ozzest 100 mess

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week. You might have noticed that just a week after dedicating an entire email to the topic of the importance of building habits, and pinning Best of the Week on going out at 10.10am every Saturday, this, erm, first went out at 7.10am. As both a prologue and a postscript, allow me take you back approximately ten hours... Me (in email to helpdesk): Hello, I've set up the launch for tomorrow's "Best of the Week" email from Mumbrella at 10.10am tomorrow (Saturday). One thought occurs - I'd like it to go out at 10.10am, Sydney time. I am currently in Singapore. I've set it for 10.10am. But should I have set it for 7.10am, given that will be the local time when it's 10.10am in Sydney? Ta... Nice man on email help desk: Hi Tim, I hope you are well today. That should not be a problem at all, you should be able to change that launch still. I just wanted to confirm that this is relating to campaign 1821 here ? If you go to the launch page, then you should be able to click the 'reschedule launch' tab on the right hand side of the page and set that for whichever time you require. Could you please let me know if that is now OK and you are able to do that? I hope to hear from you soon. Many Thanks, Me: Hi xxxxx. Yes, that's the campaign I'm referring to. But you haven't really answered my question. Does my account default to Sydney time wherever I am, ie, I've correctly set it to go out at 10.10am, Sydney time. Or has it been set to go out at 10.10am Singapore time, which would be three hours too late, and I should change it? Me again after a reply is slow coming (in a draft email I this morning notice I failed to actually send): Hi Xxxxx, It's late in my part of the world, and I need to go to bed. In the absence of a reply to my previous note, I've taken a guess, and reset the scheduled time of sending to 7.10am, given that this will be the local time where I'm setting it from (Singapore). If I've guessed wrong, please could you reschedule it from your end so it goes out at 10.10am, Sydney time. Thank you NMOEHD (after I was asleep): Hi Tim, Sorry about that, I thought you were just checking to see if you could reschedule the launch. In answer to your question about time zones, I can see that your user is set up to Sydney timezone, as such it doesn't matter where you are, you will be working on Sydney time. An account for the account is able to amend this on the user settings page here , should you wish to. Looking at the launch, it is currently set for 20:10 my time, which i believe is 07:10 Sydney time. So you should be able to set it to 10.10 Sydney time no problems. I hope this helps? Well, it would have done. So anyway. Welcome (again) to Best of the Week. Not for me, an Australia Day beach trip. Instead a quick jaunt to our Singapore office. Still, with the Australian Open muted on the TV, The Guardian’s ball-by-ball coverage of the cricket open on one tab and Triple M’s Ozzest 100 streaming on another, Australia Day didn’t feel far away. This week: the AdNews boycott; Seven’s ASX woes; and the Ozzest 100 Triple M’s Ozzest 100 redemption So let’s start with the Ozzest 100. In the end, it passed with something of a whimper. You may recall that Triple M found itself in a mess just before Christmas when a badly thought-through email promo dragged the network into the politics of the Australia Day date debate. It came after the ABC’s youth station Triple J announced it would be pushing back the date of its iconic Hottest 100 countdown to today, to recognise the increasingly divisive nature of celebrating Australia Day on January 26, the anniversary of white settlement. The Triple M promo somewhat lazily riffed on the “hipsters and kids making music with Macs” nature of its rival network’s list, and championed itself as the alternative place to listen to a countdown. I rather suspect that the shitstorm that followed came as much as a surprise to the station bosses as it did to anybody else. It wasn’t a fight they were looking for. It got worse once the on air talent started distancing themselves from it. Their distaste for the situation was well summed up on the Triple M website. You wouldn’t have found a mention of the Ozzest 100. (Well, actually, precisely one - on an out-of-date contest terms and conditions they forgot to remove.) And you’d certainly not have found a sponsor who was foolish enough to take the reputational risk of going near it. In the end, what I heard of the broadcast made the best of the mess. It was a predictable list of Aussie rock classics, interspersed with phone-ins from drunk listeners. But they pulled it back with some explainers on the nature of the “Invasion Day” debate. In the end, the tone was respectful. You may not be shocked, by the way, to hear that Cold Chisel’s Khe Sanh was number one. AdNews Awards boycott Speaking of messes of their own making, AdNews made an announcement on Thursday afternoon which you may have missed, given its pre-Australia Day holiday timing. [They’ve had to drop their media agency categories](, after several chose not to enter. This came as a result of disquiet over their handling of Atomic 212’s being named media agency of the year in last year’s AdNews Awards, and their refusal to amend the outcome after details of the exaggerated claims made in the entry emerged. In case you haven’t been following, I should point out that Mumbrella has a dog in this race, or indeed two dogs. For starters, we’ve got the obvious conflict of interest that we also run awards. And more specifically, we were the ones who published the investigation into Atomic’s claims made in entries to several different awards. Which is a good point to say that the phrase that’s been foremost in my mind since AdNews’ announcement is “There but for the grace of God…” Which coming from an atheist, says a lot. We were lucky it wasn’t us that Atomic made fools of. Our final round of judging followed the AdNews Awards by a few weeks. By that time, there were enough questions being asked by Atomic’s rivals about the claims they had been making, that we were able to do an additional round of fact-checking in the hours before Atomic’s boss Jason Dooris appeared before our jurors. It meant that we were able to brief our jurors on some specific questions they could ask. When they did, Atomic went from a strong contender to a loser. For me, it also felt like vindication of a risky call I made a few years earlier. When we first moved to having a live round of judging the Mumbrella Awards, it met with opposition. The additional work in preparing for it was too much, one influential media agency boss told me during a nerve-wracking phone call. He suggested that he might talk to his fellow agency bosses about everybody staying away if we didn’t drop the idea. Arguing hard, I explained that the point of that round wasn’t to create the theatre (and work) of a pitch, but to give jurors the opportunity of asking follow-up questions about the shortlisted entries. The important thing was to be available to answer those questions. We agreed a compromise. Finalist teams would be invited to a “conversation” with the jury. It would be up to them if they made it a structured presentation, or chose simply to be available to answer questions. A year or two later when I saw his team arrive, with one of them - to my amusement - in a gorilla suit, it was clear they’d decided to embrace it. It’s now become a fundamental part of the Mumbrella Awards that we brief our jurors to treat any information they’ve taken at face value in the shortlisting round with scepticism in the final stage of judging. If you’re not convinced, don’t award, has been the mantra. But that does not mean we can’t get it wrong. You can build a structure that gives you the best possible chance of finding the most deserving winner. But, as AdNews editor Rosie Baker observed on Thursday, you still put faith in agency leaders that their entries can be trusted. When it does go wrong though, it’s how you deal with the situation to put it right that counts. In AdNews’ case, I suspect that competitive dynamics with Mumbrella may not have helped. When Atomic 212 tipped them off that we were about to publish the results of our investigation back on December 7, AdNews rushed to publish first, announcing to readers that they were satisfied that the results “met the submission criteria”. I suspect they’d have been better off waiting a few hours to hear what our investigation had actually uncovered first, before going public on that call. Even now, I’m not convinced they’ve got to grips with the issue. In part, AdNews justifies allowing Atomic to remain its winner as the bold claim to have won Telstra as a client was technically true because it said it did work for Telstra Health. Yet, Telstra says the agency didn’t even do that. Telstra’s on-the-record statement to Mumbrella was: “We can confirm that we have had no commercial dealings with Atomic 212... across our business, nor have they completed any work for us.” If Atomic did work for any part of Telstra during the year in question, you’d think it would be possible for the agency to produce invoices to prove it. I suspect, this issue still has some distance to run, as AdNews weren’t the only victims. Late last year, B&T awarded Atomic as its independent agency of the year. We obtained that entry, and saw that Atomic was wrongly claiming to have been named “agency of the year” in the AdNews Awards, the Mumbrella Awards and the New York Festivals. In fact those accolades were held by The Monkeys, Cummins & Partners and Y&R NZ respectively. While B&T is yet to publicly address this, the decision of media agencies not to enter the AdNews Awards will presumably focus minds a little if they want to avoid the same situation later this year. Meanwhile, Campaign Asia Pacific now says it is investigating Dooris’ victory in its agency head of the year category. And of course, the Mumbrella Awards isn’t immune from market forces. As it happens, a few hours before AdNews’ post this week, [we launched the call for entries for our own awards](, with a fairly big change. We’ve committed to publishing the winning entries afterwards. In terms of entry numbers, that’s not without risk. Some may feel they can share less information, knowing it may reach the public domain later. And others may simply not want the potential additional scrutiny and choose not to enter. But in my view, the Atomic situation demonstrates that sunlight is the best disinfectant. If award entries had been visible across the board, the bold claims being made would have been challenged much earlier. And I’d argue, there’s a strong potential positive to be had in giving greater prominence to the best of the best. The whole point of awards, after all, is to recognise and reward good practice. Seven West Media cuts A fascinating dynamic has opened up on the Australian share market in recent months that’s hard to explain based simply on the numbers. Over the last five months or so, ASX investors have taken against Seven West Media, while at the same time given their backing to rival Nine Entertainment Co. Given that both are, in the main, still TV-driven companies, it’s hard to explain why the sentiment is so different. Back in August last year, SWM’s share price sat at 85c. This week it hit a historic low of 55c. Meanwhile, NEC’s price has risen from $1.45 to $1.64 during the same period. That gives Seven a market capitalisation of $836m, which is not much more than half of Nine’s $1.43bn. Yet it feels like there’s more sentiment than logic to it. Looking at the full year figures for the 2017 financial year, which ran until June 30, SWM’s annual EBITDA profit was $306m - about 50% better than Nine’s $206m. And Seven’s revenues of $1.67bn were well above Nine’s $1.24bn. Both companies has broadly the same costs - spending about $1bn a year each. The TV advertising market as a whole has been ticking upwards, which will benefit both Seven and Nine. And despite being given a hell of a scare by Nine, Seven won the last calendar ratings year on the all-people metric, even if Nine did consolidate in the key 25-54 demographic. So far this financial year, Seven is comfortably ahead in all-people. And it has the Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games as big event TV draw cards in the coming months. (Even if Seven has conceded it overpaid for the rights.) So what’s not to like? The answer, I suspect, lies in the non-TV part of the equation. Nine’s non-TV assets would count as a plus for investors. Over the last couple of years, NEC has made significant progress in becoming a digital publisher, and to nail its data play. Arguably, the fact that it divested ACP Magazines (or Bauer Media as it is now), helped bring a digital focus that wouldn’t have occurred if Nine was still in the print business. And the print business is, I suspect, what is hurting wider perceptions of Seven West Media. This week’s announcement of [cuts to come at The West Australian]( is a recognition that the company is finding it tough, even having captured something close to a monopoly newspaper market in WA after buying News Corp’s Sunday Times relatively cheaply. In the last financial year, The West made up 13% of SWM’s revenues and 14% of the company’s profits. With cost control, it’s likely the WA news operation will be a profit centre for SWM for many years yet. The same can’t be said for its magazine arm. Pacific Magazines now makes up just 10% of the company’s revenues and just 2% of its profits. With the magazine advertising market tanking and circulation revenues dropping (albeit not quite as fast), I’d expect to see SWM exit the magazine market the moment it can find a buyer for PacMags. On the day they sell, if the share price doesn’t go up, I’ll eat my metaphorical hat. Which is a good place to leave it for today. I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to a Triple J Hottest 100 listening party here in Singapore (there are Aussies everywhere…). Should the 60% likelihood of a thunderstorm abate, there’ll be no better way of enjoying a guilt free countdown. Enjoy what remains of the long weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](