🤔Summer Media Marketing Advertising Drama
Summer slow season? Not for media news! Context Collapse #144
Hey there internet friends. It’s been a while.
Our last newsletter was way back in July,and things have been busy since then. On the work side, I’ve been rushing a couple of marketing content-y projects through the holy gates of review by my client, my client’s client and my client’s client’s client. Progress! On the personal side, I’ve been dealing with aging parent stuff and taking care of a toddler stuff. That is to say things have been busy and LOLOL I miss my twenties when responsibilities meant paying for a cheap room share and making sure the monthly Metrocard hadn’t expired. Times change!
Speaking of time, we’re in what’s traditionally been called the “silly season.” Per Wikipedia:
In the United Kingdom and in some other places, the silly season is the period lasting for a few summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. It is known in many languages as the cucumber time. […] In North America the period is often referred to prosaically as the slow news season.”
Sidebarring cucumber time for a bit, it’s traditionally the time of year when the advertising industry has summer Fridays and media executives go to “work from their vacation homes.” (Editor’s note: make air quotes as you say “networking” and “building synergies” in tandem.)
Obviously meaning that this is the best time of year for this media-, advertising- and PR-centric newsletter to return to life.
But you know what? The 2020s have been utter crap for traditions and precedents. Which means that the industry news is pretty busy right now. So let’s get started.
HBO Max Implosion
So if you haven’t heard already, HBO Max and Discovery+ are merging into a single streaming service that’s expected to launch in summer 2023. The announcement, which was widely expected, also comes with the news that HBO Max is shelving Batgirl, Scoob! and several other movies it spend a ton of money developing. The movie shelvings heavily imply that the new HBOMaxDiscovery+ will downplay developing original big budget content in favor of cheaper unscripted reality programming and licensed content.
Annoying! Disappointing! HBO Max is awesome, customers love it and it’s been the most successful streaming service launch since Disney+!
Except… HBO Max is the loser in a massive backstage Game of Thrones (bad pun, sorry, go at me but had to do it) at the newly merged Warner Bros Discovery which had $55 billion in debt as of April 2022. That’s a lot of debt to pay off.
As painful as it is for viewers who just want to catch up on Westworld or dig deep on Studio Ghibli archives or have a Guy Fieri backdrop to a day of cleaning, the media business is a business—which means that beancounting often wins the day, along with internal competitions for funding and resources.
I don’t know the specifics, but it’s obvious that HBO Max lost the internal Warner Bros Discovery omniplex Game of Thrones. Will it be replaced with something even better, or with Quibi 2.0? We’ll see.
Further reading: Ernie Smith - Minimizing HBO Max
Axios Sells For $525 Million
Finally,some good media news! Media/newsletter firm Axios is selling to Cox Enterprises for $525 million. Cable giant Cox previously invested in Axios.
From the press release:
Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz will continue to hold substantial stakes in the company and will lead editorial and day-to-day business decisions.
“We have found our kindred spirit for creating a great, trusted, consequential media company that can outlast us all,” said Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. “Our shared ambitions should be clear: to spread clinical, nonpartisan, trusted journalism to as many cities and as many topics as fast as possible.”
Translation out of PRese for that: All three co-founders are presumably going to become pretty wealthy now (good for them!) and Axios is going to use a lot of that acqusition money to grow and scale their local newsletter business and, presumably, beat/topic-centric newsletters.
This makes sense. Email is a good mechanism for receiving and consuming news, as you well know.
There’s also a large audience who will happily pay for newsletters and specialty news products that are directly relevant to their jobs. Politico knows this on a national/state house scale and plenty of trade publications charge beaucoup bucks so subscribers will know about what’s happening in metallurgy, snack food distribution, commercial real estate… you name it. It’s a smart, viable business model.
Challenge now: Making sure the new owners are as hands off with the new acquisition as possible so Axios’ co-founders and their team can scale the company over time without the corporate overlord interference that happens all too often in the industry.
Further reading: Brian Morrissey - The Triumph of DC Media, Simon Owens - 4 Things Axios Did Right
Clubhouse’s Pivot
In a Twitter thread, Clubhouse cofounder Paul Davison announced what sure sounds like a pivot for the voice group chat app.
Basically, Clubhouse—which traditionally has been based around public group voice chats anyone can join—is restructuring around private groups. The move follows Twitter Spaces imitating a good portion of Clubhouse’s functionality and UI on their much larger platform.
Jacob Kastrenakes at Hot Pod has some good context:
Clubhouse, it almost goes without saying, has experienced a major drop-off in interest since its heights during the coronavirus-induced lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Downloads of the app have fallen 86 percent this year, the analytics firm Sensor Tower tells Hot Pod. The firm says Clubhouse was downloaded 4.2 million times between January and July of 2022, down from 29.4 million downloads during the same period in 2021. At the same time, Twitter Spaces — anecdotally, at least — has been eating Clubhouse’s lunch. I won’t argue that Twitter’s recommendations are that much better (they’re not!), but the company was able to swiftly rebuild Clubhouse’s core features inside its existing social network, siphoning off a lot of the app’s momentum.
Ow! The fire! It burns!
But Clubhouse has a good tech stack and had a genius idea when they launched in the middle of a pandemic where IRL meetings were incredibly difficult. I wouldn’t count them out.
I think the big challenge for both Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces is that they lack killer use cases. There’s plenty of terrible how-to-make-money-online drek and people yelling at each other about politics and weird goony stuff. But there’s very little appointment listening on either—and that’s the problem.
But there’s plenty of, err, appointment viewing on YouTube and Twitch. Might be some cues to take from there…
Some work links I enjoyed: Gmail and political campaign emails. Luxury poverty and mainstream journalism. Pocket CEO Matt Koidin on the Art of a Good Recommendation. Non-Drinkers Are Struggling in an Agency World That Relies on Alcohol. Inside T-Mobile’s ad business. Experiments I conducted with DALL-E 2 replicating styles of well known portrait photographers using photo-realistic AI. Negotiation tips for writers and creatives. 2022 creator economy benchmark research. A “Chinese Borges” wrote millions of words of fake Russian history on Wikipedia for a decade. “My company wants me to sign a loyalty oath.”
Some non-work links I enjoyed: Every video that ever aired on 120 Minutes. The ACLU’s post-Trump reckoning. Are the Great Lakes really inland seas? Is there a long-term plan for COVID? A history of tacos (video). Understanding the #jankening. Walking across England: From Wakefield to Hull.
And, last but not least, this terrifying video from Kyrgyzstan of things going very, very wrong when filming a glacier.
See you wonderful people soon.