Best of the Week: Did the IAB’s CEO just get fired?; Sparring with Jules Lund; Love Island and TV’s next incarnation

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week. Wherein I’m going to attempt to combine writing about Nine’s Love Island with listening to John Coltrane. Which is like pairing a Big Mac with a bottle of 1945 Mouton Rothschild. Nonetheless, A Love Supreme Part 1 is playing, and the catch-up TV I just watched is already starting to feel a little like a bad dream. A Love Supreme? I suspect that most people reading this wouldn’t choose to watch Love Island. Which is fine. It wasn’t for you. Or for me. But this series will provide signals about the direction of network television viewing and commissioning, which is what makes it matter. By the way, I’m no reality TV snob. In my view, the episode of Big Brother that aired in the UK on August 17, 2000 - when the housemates confronted “Nasty” Nick Bateman about his cheating - will never be surpassed as a moment of unscripted drama. But then again, I was 29 then, and still in the target demographic. At the age of 47, I’m of no interest to Love Island’s sponsors. They’re after today’s 20somethings. So it doesn’t matter at all that I hate the show. For reality television makers, the world is more competitive. Contestants are much more savvy about how they will be portrayed, and audiences more cynical. And more importantly, the way television is watched has changed. Which is what makes Love Island so interesting. It’s the first big reality commission targeting a non-analogue audience. Or to put it another way. It’s TV for people who don’t watch telly. The broadcast slot is on Nine’s digital channel 9Go, with streaming and catch-up viewing on 9Now. Love Island sees Nine fly a group of hot, and - it would seem not-terribly-bright - 20 somethings to a Spanish villa. They then indulge in a series of games, manufactured dramas and protected sex. We know it’s protected sex because Four Seasons Condoms is a sponsor. I was going to say that I can’t wait to see the brand integration, but actually I can. Produced by ITV Studios, it closely follows the UK format, with the voiceover from Irish narrator Eoghan McDermott a more defining part of the show than host Sophie Monk, who doesn’t turn up in every episode. But [the broadcast ratings](, the likes of the Daily Mail informed us on Monday, were “dismal”. Which is where the changed landscape comes in. Traditional television metrics are now little help when trying to understand whether a show like this is a hit or miss. Overnight ratings of a show on a secondary channel will always be dismal compared to the main channels. Which makes the overnight ratings virtually irrelevant in assessing the success or otherwise of Love Island. With the exception of sport, we’ll never see a show on a secondary channel deliver a 1m+ metro audience. Nine knew all of that when it commissioned Love Island. The truth is, we may not know whether Love Island has worked until the end of the series and catch-up viewing accumulates. Social media buzz and news coverage may actually provide more information than the overnights. What we do know so far is that it brought more 16-39-year-olds to 9Go than usually tune in. In the timeslot, the national 16-39 audience grew by 84% for the week. Which sounds great, til we realise that’s from a small 50,000 to a still-small 93,000. Across the board, it was a rise of 9% to 200,000. For a main channel, dismal, for a secondary channel… pretty good? Alongside that though sits the newish OzTAM VPM (video player measurement) numbers, which aren’t broken into demographics, but indicate a catch-up or live streamed audience of 115,000 for the first episode. In other words, that’s additional viewers who didn’t watch it on their television. Incidentally, after SBS’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Love Island occupied the next four slots of the VPM top five for the week. This was better than Seven’s Home & Away, or Ten’s Masterchef. Or indeed, anything else on Nine. So some of this commission can be seen as an investment in the future direction of TV viewing habits, for a time when the VPM figure is the number that counts. A further factor to add to the mix is that these video streams add to the scarce inventory of video viewers who can be served ads programmatically. Improving daytime video viewing will help supply catch up with advertising demand. The commission is also an interesting one in that it’s never going to be a mainstream show. At a time when the networks are going for 25-54, and all the family, this is 16-39 all the way. It’s not intended for the main channel. Nine’s for-all-the-family play is the domain of Australian Ninja and Talkin Bout Your Generation. That’s why they didn’t have to bleep the phrase “you little f*ck”, even though they’ve chosen not to show the actual f*cking so far. (And I am indeed aware of the irony of needing to use asterisks in this email to beat the firewall profanity filters.) But I think we do now know enough about Love Island to understand that the numbers are not a disaster for Nine. And certainly not “the biggest and most expensive TV flop ever” as one of our commenters put it on Mumbrella. Regardless of ratings, the investment can probably be written off against the lessons the network will learn about the new dynamics of broadcasting. Experimenting is no bad thing. This is franchise building, but not with a plan to build off-Broadway, before coming home to Nine. Love Island is home. It will be fascinating to see whether the audiences find it. Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye As seems to be traditional in Australian media, we saw a Friday afternoon announcement of a media executive departing with “no job to go to”, as the polite journalistic code for “pushed out of the door” goes. Yesterday’s turn in the departure lounge was Vijay Solanki, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which joins ADMA - the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising - on the list of industry bodies seeking a boss. While [Solanki’s immediate departure was announced as a “resignation”](, it seems likely he was unaware he was resigning until Thursday. When a member of the Mumbrella team spoke to him that morning about the IAB’s industry manifesto session at Mumbrella360 in 11 days time, Solanki had no clue he would be gone within hours. With so many stakeholders, politics and issues, running an industry body must be a thankless gig for anyone who wants to make a contribution to their industry. Solanki brought enthusiasm and energy to the role during his short time in the seat. But it’s still a virtually impossible job. Like many industry bodies, the IAB is at a point where it is struggling for both an identity and a purpose. Its funding model limits the breadth of its constituency. On the one hand, the big funders are increasingly wondering what they’re getting for their money - Telstra left earlier this month, and I hear at least one other is on the way out of the door. But on the other, there’s always been an air around the IAB, that it’s the voice of the big boys, not a place where the smaller players will get a proper say. Under previous CEO Alice Manners, the IAB did make noises about becoming the “big tent” of the industry, but its funding structure never really allowed it to happen. If not just the digital duopoly, it’s the magnificent seven. Four years on from those stated ambitions, the IAB board consists of representatives from Google, Facebook, News Corp, REA Group, Fairfax Media, Nine and Carsales. There are three tiers of membership. And to have any significant influence on the governance of the IAB, it’s pay-to play. We won’t see one of the small players on one of the main boards. There’s an intriguing PDF on the IAB website spelling out the “benefits of membership”. For $3,500, your company can get basic membership, which will get free tickets to their events and some other bits and pieces. For $5,500, your membership includes a seat on one of the IAB’s ever-increasing number of consultative “councils” (talking shops?). That includes the audio council; the video advertising council; the mobile advertising council; the regulatory council; the audience measurement council; the standards and guidelines council; the ad effectiveness council and the technology council. Have you noticed over the last couple of years that half of the people in the digital industry seem to be boasting on their LinkedIn profile about their membership of one IAB council or another? Remember that they didn’t get that seat by popular acclaim - their employer bought it for them. You too can be a thought leader at $5,500 a pop. Then comes the top tier - “executive council membership”. And like the best clubs, they don’t reveal the price, although I understand it’s $150,000 a year. And those are the members who get a real say in the direction of the body which claims it speaks for the whole industry. Only executive council members get guaranteed speaking slots at IAB events, the PDF document reveals. They’re also the only members guaranteed “input into strategic policy, guidelines and key plays”. Plus they’re the only ones eligible to sit on the two IAB councils that matter - the ones for technology and measurement. A democratic organisation it is not. To regain relevance, the model would need to change, and the IAB would need to find ways of representing the interests of the wider industry at its highest levels. With confidence in the IAB’s favoured industry metric of Nielsen fading at the small end of town, the association faces a dilemma. Should it continue to back Nielsen against the likes of ComScore - which is the leading metric in other parts of the world - or is its job to be a voice of the various publishers in the lower tiers who have concerns around the quality of the job Nielsen is doing? In a debate currently raging about the digital duopoly, how can the organisation take a credible stance, when both Google and Facebook are big funders and policy-influencers? Being boss of the IAB is a complex role. It demands a deep understanding of the intricacies of digital advertising - both the technology itself and the politics. It also requires a diplomat, able to not only wrangle the competing agendas of its members, but to sometimes save the industry from itself when it comes to taking a long term view on things like industry standards. There’s a reason the IAB never took a stand on autoplay videos when they were being phased out in the rest of the world, and the answer lies in its board membership. It also means being entrepreneurial - the creation of all those councils was a great idea for driving membership of the mid-level tier. But the funding pressures for the IAB are only going to get worse as members question what they’re actually getting. And of course, there’s lobbying to be done too, which is what I suspect the big players are really paying for. The board will need to pay top dollar to find a CEO who has the ability to tick all of those boxes. And with Solanki’s enforced exit, the salary expectations for any remotely qualified candidate just went up. If your predecessor has just been pushed out, you’d want danger money. Giant Steps So should start-ups try to be profitable? For a while I’ve been sceptical about the business model for fast growing influencer platform Tribe, which was founded by TV and radio personality Jules Lund. I’ve had a hunch that the business wouldn’t look half as attractive if it wasn’t for the charisma and energy brought to it by Lund. After they’d done an early investment round, one investor I spoke to questioned how scaleable the idea would be. Like many early stage startups, they were still looking for their real model, suggested the investor. So I was delighted that Lund fronted up for the Mumbrellacast this week. [You can hear our (slightly tetchy) conversation via this link](. In large part, he answered my questions, particularly on scaling Tribe’s model. Until he spelled it out, it had never properly dawned on me that a key point of difference for Tribe is that it doesn’t go after the mega influencers. It’s about the smaller, hopefully more authentic influencers who are passionate about a single thing. That made sense, as does the steps Tribe takes to fight fake followers. But we stumbled upon a philosophical difference. Should the boss of a startup have ambitions to be profitable? If you want to hear that part of the conversation, we tackled this question about 30 minutes into the podcast. Lund was surprisingly honest: he’s not in it to build a profitable company; he’s in it to build a big one, that he can sell. I’m sure lots of tech founders are - I’m just not used to them admitting it. I always thought the mantra was that you were here to make the world a better place. When I asked about profits, Lund looked at me like I was slightly mad. “It’s a tech company. You don’t make profit. We won’t be profitable. I don’t think Uber’s profitable. “We’re a tech company, we don’t even see it through that lens.” I must admit, I think we come from differing philosophies. When we built Mumbrella, we never took external investment, and bootstrapped everything. Which meant that any investment next year would always come from being profitable this year. Perhaps that’s why our ten year growth was steady rather than stellar. Of course, it’s not that way with most tech startups, who tend to grow through bringing in more investment, and spending that on capturing even bigger marketshare, then in turn using that number to attract even more investment. To think otherwise would be as naive as a Daily Mail TV reviewer judging the success of Love Island based on the overnight ratings. Secretly, I’m sure many a founder’s dream isn’t really to be the biggest in the world, but to be bought by Facebook for a billion dollars. So credit to Lund for being honest about his own route plan when I pushed him again on whether he even had a plan on how Tribe could one day be profitable. “To be honest it’s more around an exit. You build these companies to be able to sell them in four of five years. “If we were to tell our investors we were on a path to profitability they would be gutted.” The risk in such an approach comes, of course, if the next round of investors fails to come through and you run out of money. Then the only thing that suddenly matters is reducing the burn rate before you run out of runway. That’s what killed so many tech startups in the Dot Bomb, and again in the GFC. But the growth-until-exit plan has also made some founders very rich. I’ve a hunch that Lund will be one of them. My Favorite Things With less than a fortnight now until Mumbrella360, it was a hectic week. I grabbed a catch-up with News Corp boss Michael Miller ahead of my on-stage interview with him. It’s going to be an interesting conversation. I’m also locking in questions for my Wheel of Truth participants. If you’ve an idea for a curly one, please do flick it through via the email address below. The event, at the Hilton in Sydney, kicks off with our networking afternoon next Tuesday June 12, and the two-day conference follows on the Wednesday and Thursday. If you are thinking of joining us for the networking, I’d urge you to grab a ticket before the weekend is over - we’re close to selling out. And if you haven’t had a chance to look at the program yet, [please feel free to do so via this link](. As ever, please do tell me what you think via tim@mumbrella.com.au. My colleague Paul Wallbank - paul@mumbrella.com.au has the pleasure of running the newsdesk this weekend. Meanwhile, I’m jumping on QF1 later today for a quick jaunt to Singapore, where I’ll be interviewing candidates for editor of Mumbrella Asia. Have a splendid weekend. Toodlepip… Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](