Welcome to the final issue of SWOT by Sound Story for 2024.
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We'll be back in January with your inside track on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats looming for the creative industries.
The Sound Story team wishes you a happy and safe silly season!
⚡ Trending: ‘Raygun: The Musical’ shut down hours before Sydney debut following legal action. Words by Jessica Lynch. Source: Variety Australia.
🎵 Music: ‘W.T. actual F is this hot mess’: Spotify Wrapped – CMO edition. Words by Lauren McNamara. Source: Mumbrella.
📰 Media: Listed music industry play Vinyl Group has secured a deal to acquire digital city guide Concrete Playground for $5 million, which the group says will accelerate its ambitions to be positive cashflow by six months. Words by Nick Nichols. Source: Business News Australia.
💰 Advertising: Australian children seeing gambling ads via Sportsbet filter on instant messaging app Snapchat. Words by Henry Belot & Josh Taylor. Source: The Guardian.
📲 Tech: Social media giant TikTok will be captured by the government’s new scheme to force tech giants to fund Australian journalism, which could raise more than $1 billion over four years for media companies battling declining revenue. Words by Paul Sakkal & Calum Jaspan. Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.
📜 Government: The Australian Greens plan to call News Corp executives to answer questions from a Senate committee investigation into greenwashing, after a gas-industry sponsored series of stories was presented as news on the front pages of its newspapers. Words by Adam Morton & Tony Shepherd. Source: The Guardian.
🌶️ Spicy: Rupert Murdoch’s bid to alter the fate of an irrevocable family trust has been blocked and smacked down as a “carefully crafted charade” in a ruling by a Nevada probate commissioner. Words by Calum Jaspan. Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.
Strength: Content, Choice and Creativity
It’s that time of year when people are reflecting on the best (and worst) of 2024.
👉 And you know what that means? Lists!
👉 The Sydney Morning Herald has put out its ‘TV year in review’, offering up the 20 best shows of 2024, including Hacks, Fake, Boy Swallows Universe and Colin From Accounts.
👉 In a similar vein, Rolling Stone has highlighted the 10 best TV performances of 2024, including Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor in Doctor Who and Anna Sawai as Lady Mariko in Shōgun.
👉 If you’re in more of a movie mood, Variety has a list of the best movies of 2024, including Baby Girl, Challengers and Inside Out 2.
👉 Trying to have some screen-free time? Well, The Guardian has the best books of 2024, with everything from fiction and biographies and memoirs, to graphic novels and music.
Weakness: ABC Loses Control of the Narrative
In addition to ‘best of’ lists, mid-December is also the time of year when media companies shake up talent lineups, don’t renew contracts, and – sometimes in doing so – attract the ire of the audience and their staff.
👉 This is very much the case for the ABC, which has been in the headlines non-stop for everything from the organisation’s Chair, Kim Williams, attacking international podcasting giant Joe Rogan to disgruntled audiences over Radio lineup changes.
👉 The public broadcaster has now well and truly lost control of the narrative though, with every departure – suspicious or standard – becoming a story which feeds and fuels the perception that too many good people are getting the boot. 👉 One staffer spoke to Crikey and said it was “utterly demoralising” and “distressing” to see the amount of changes going on.
👉 This sentiment, it seems, is not unique with The Guardian obtaining a letter which staff sent to the ABC Board, which claimed ABC Radio management has shown no understanding of the vital role of public broadcasting, and that presenter changes have trampled on audience trust.
👉 The letter says: “We have a unique relationship with our audience who fund us to provide information, entertainment and company. We believe that recent actions have trampled on this relationship of trust. We believe this is a mistake and undermines what has been achieved here in a century of broadcasting.”
Opportunity: Pill Testing
There appears to be some serious momentum behind drug checking as we hurtle further into the summer festival season, and indeed ‘Silly Season’.
👉 The first major opportunity in this space came in late October, when the Victorian Parliament passed legislation, making it the first jurisdiction in the country to have dedicated legislation to support drug checking.
👉 Ingrid Stitt, Victoria’s Minister for Mental Health, said: “No drug is ever truly safe, but with this new legislation, Victorians can be better informed about their drug use. We have made it clear since announcing this trial – these changes don’t make drugs legal, but by having pill testing services in place, we can help to keep more Victorians safe during busy summer festival seasons.”
👉 From there, it was announced that Beyond the Valley would be the first of 10 music festivals to have an on-site drug checking trial.
👉 Pete Sofo, Director of Festivals and Major Events at Untitled Group, a Sound Story client which organises Beyond the Valley, said: “[Drug checking] should just be a normal part of festival operations, just as much as medical, patron welfare, fire planning, traffic planning, the whole thing."
👉 And now it’s been revealed that pill testing could be coming to NSW music festivals, with drug reform advocates upping the pressure on Premier Chris Minns.
Threat: Christmas Party Pain
Speaking of Silly Season, one of the biggest threats to staff, company reputation and brand can be the humble Christmas party.
👉 No matter how many articles you read about ‘Golden rules for employers’ around Christmas parties, or your rights as an employee, there are often people who push things a bit too far at the end-of-year gathering.
👉 Things can be particularly tense if the year has also involved cost-cutting, redundancies, internal tensions and increased demands.
👉 Who could forget Mumbrella’s own Christmas party back in 2021 which started as a rumour, turned into an Opinion piece on the site, and wound up as Twitter fodder and on the Daily Mail?
👉 To avoid such reputational and safety issues, Sound Story has heard of some organisations who are steering clear of Christmas parties altogether (although some may argue this is also to do with $$!)
👉 Indeed at time of writing this week’s SWOT, a story broke about a senior Channel 9 news executive who has been dismissed after allegations of inappropriate remarks at the work Christmas party – so it’s already happening!
The Fun Stuff
Quote of the Week: “Batoul’s got a secret weapon: humour. She is the unexpected comedic genius of our team. Behind her focused exterior lies a quick wit that always catches us off guard. Who would have thought she could effortlessly switch from a sales leader to a spontaneous rapper? Her impromptu fire rap during the Old El Paso campaign blew us away. That’s the Batoul we love – serious when she needs to be, hilarious when she wants to be. It’s this perfect blend that makes her an incredible colleague and friend,” Jessica Hunter, Head of The Brag Media, on her friend and colleague, Batoul Peters (Head of Partnerships ANZ) in this week’s Dynamic Duos on Mumbrella.
📺 Show of the Week: Douglas Is Cancelled is part comedy, part drama as it explores the PR disaster facing a Breakfast TV host who is in danger of being ‘cancelled’ over allegations of a sexist joke. You watch this show without hearing the joke yourself, so you’re in constant conflict about who is the actual ‘bad guy’, who is pushing which agenda and how you want it to end. You can watch it on ABC iView.
🇫🇷 Team Tidbit: Sound Story team member Geoff Cope-Watts recently ate his way through Paris, and if this photo compilation of some of his tasty treats doesn’t make you envious, we don’t know what will!
