Battle for media thrones: Coming ready or not

Our media are no strangers to doing battle and 2026 is looming as a cross between Game of Thrones and Adolescence.

The GOT analogy is easy: It relates to territory, treasure that is real or imagined, and a touch of fantasy.

Our mainstream media will continue to wage the ongoing war for whatever territory in Westeros (or is it Essos) they can get their hands on. They will send raiding parties to snap up what remains after the Iron Throne of the Seven (transnational) Kingdoms has plundered the treasure house. And, symptomatic of the paranoia borne of years of attrition, they will scan the skies for signs of dragons.

The battle plans for territorial gain have been progressively revealed over past weeks and will be primarily fought out in the once-glittering realms of audio and video.

RNZ has signalled that it will deploy new forces in the fiercely contested territory of breakfast radio. This is a strangely undeclared war: Although the state-owned broadcaster is desperate to reclaim the crown from NewstalkZB’s Mike Hosking, it maintains a fiction that they cannot be directly compared. Yes, one is commercial and the other is not. Yes, they have separate rating surveys. However, at the end of the day their conflict is simple: they are both fighting for as many sets of ears as they can get. Continue reading “Battle for media thrones: Coming ready or not” →

Good reasons why Skinny’s clone Liz needed more than AI

There is a glimmer of good news for all those bright, talented creatives in the advertising industry who think artificial intelligence is going to steal their jobs.

A study by Australia’s Monash University on behalf of the advertising agency TBWA has found that human creative concepts always outperform generative AI creations.

Does that mean that Liz from Kerikeri should not have bothered handing over her biometric data to become the cloned frontwoman of those Skinny mobile tv commercials that proudly proclaim to be made with the help of AI? No, because the irritatingly obvious creations were the brainchild of real people and the use of AI was trumpeted by Skinny and its parent company Spark as a clever marketing ploy.

The Australian study was aimed at testing whether artificial intelligence could, in fact, replace creatives in dreaming up advertising ideas and slogans. The finding: AI consistently fails at creativity.

The Monash researchers took 1000 creative advertising campaigns and fed them into large language models (LLMs) that were first asked to strip the advertising messages down to single sentences. The cunning academics then fed the single sentence into the AI machines and asked them to create advertising campaigns.

TBWA Sydney chief creative officer Matt Keon told The Australian that the LLMs had quickly removed all of the creative elements while reducing the campaigns to single sentences and then consistently failed to produce such elements in their recreations of the campaigns. Continue reading “Good reasons why Skinny’s clone Liz needed more than AI” →

Some welcome good news on newspaper front…not for all

It is too early to put money on it, but there are signs New Zealand metropolitan newspaper readership may be stabilising.

The latest Nielsen survey shows most metropolitan newspapers have held their own year-on-year and some have actually improved their numbers. The outlier is the largest of our newspapers, The New Zealand Herald, which has dropped 10,000 readers to now stand at 503,000.

The most impressive performer is The Post. The capital’s daily has increased readership by almost as much as the Herald dropped – up over nine per cent from 93,000 to 112,000. Its Stuff stablemate, the Waikato Times has been even more impressive in percentage terms. Its readership grew by more than 12 per cent to stand at 55,000. The Press in Christchurch (90,000) and the Otago Daily Times (87,000) were relatively stable year-on-year, although both experienced small declines from the previous quarter.

The weekly coverage by all metro dailies is up 36,000 to 1.55 million.

In the Sunday market, the Herald on Sunday dropped 3000 year-on-year to stand at 308,000 readers. However, Stuff will be pleased with the Sunday Star Times which upped its numbers from 178,000 to 191,000 (a 7.3 per cent rise). Overall, therefore, the Sunday readership is also improving.

Remember, these are readers of the respective newspapers and does not include the digital audience that I will come to shortly. The Nielsen figures measure the number of people who read [Newspaper] in the issue period. They show there is yet life in print editions, although we must not get carried away by the smell of newsprint and printing ink. Continue reading “Some welcome good news on newspaper front…not for all” →