Best of the Week: Was it all a jet lag hallucination?

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to a thoroughly jetlagged Best of the Week. Today’s writing soundtrack: The not-so-distant sound of seven teenagers boisterously playing Friday night Dungeons and Dragons while I hide in the study. Who knew that D&D is still a thing? Of penetration and jazz hands Would you like to know what’s the best thing about jet lag? The answer is nothing. Jet lag sucks. After a week-and-a-bit in the UK where my body clock stayed stubbornly in tune with the Australian timezone, I’m back in Sydney and finally fully synchronised with London time. As well as that constant feeling of being slightly sick, jet lag gives every waking moment a slightly hallucinatory quality. Did I really watch the newsreaders of Channel 10 do jazz hands in a song-and-dance performance, or was that a surreal dream? When I transited through Qantas’s Singapore lounge listening to a BBC podcast with scientist Dr Karl Kruszelnicki talking about how to beat jet lag, was he really there in person when I glanced up? Hearing the voice of Qantas pilot Richard de Crespigny - the man who eight years ago this week saved the lives of the 469 people on board QF32 - announce on the tannoy that he’d be flying my plane home. Did I later have a weird chat with him about where he gets his customer communication skills? Did I really just hear marketing bad boy Mark Ritson call pompous brand academic Byron Sharp “the dark lord of penetration”? And did a Sky News commentator really refer to Chinese people as “black-haired, slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned”? The answers are: Yes, they did do that dance. Yes, Dr Karl was in the lounge. I didn’t say hello. There wasn’t much point. Although we’ve met a couple of times before, his prosopagnosia is even worse than mine. Yes, Captain de Crespigny was at the controls. No - I didn’t chat to him; that was a dream that says way too much about the subconscious of somebody who thinks about work too much even on holiday. Yes, Ritson did once again tweak the nose of his academic nemesis. And yes, it was Ross Cameron finally getting himself sacked from Sky News - of course. It’s been a weird week. Sleepless in the ICC Let’s start with the day I got off QF2 in Sydney. (Or more accurately QF7002, as the flight was belatedly renamed because of some sort of drastic computer meltdown in London.) And it was straight to Ten’s upfronts, at the International Convention Centre. As I’ve previously written, the point of running upfronts is to give everyone with ad spending power in the market a reason to turn up and think about the company for a couple of hours. It’s a projection of power and confidence in the coming year. With almost no sport, a struggle to attract audiences to its traditional news lineup and a brand new advertising team from next month, Ten had the toughest task of the big three. I went in cynical, which only grew, as the first few lines of their big song and dance number struck up. I’ve long admired the talents of Neil Patrick Harris to pull off [his amazing 2013 live opening to the Tony Awards](. And for TV nerds, [the split screen of the director’s live show call for the “Bigger” performance is exhilarating and stress-inducing stuff](. He sang, danced, rapped, jumped through hoops - literally - and performed magic tricks - literally. So my heart sank a little when Julia Morris got stuck into “Bigger”, the song Harris had created in homage to Broadway. “They’ve stolen it from the Emmys”, I slightly incorrectly whispered to the agency bigwig I was sitting next to. “And it’s smaller.” But as each of Ten’s on air personalities did their best to get out their line or execute their dance move, I began to realise that the guests were loving it. And they didn’t know or care that it was a reworking of a five year old broadcast, which first went out on Ten’s new owner CBS. Confirming that I was being curmudgeonly, it’s the first time I’ve seen a standing ovation at a TV upfronts event. There were no big surprises in what followed. They put a brave face on Ten’s new “tactical” approach to sport. Motor racing and the Melbourne Cup don’t make up for the loss of Big Bash cricket. Instead, it was all about providing alternatives. There was a strong signal that The Project is where Ten will try to stay in the current affairs game. Direct competition with the pure news brands of Seven News and Nine News appears to have been conceded. It was also something we touched upon later when [we chatted to programming boss Beverley McGarvey in the Mumbrellacast](. If you choose to listen, at about 46 minutes in I lobbed in what I thought was a routine question about appetite for a return to the breakfast battle. My expectation was that I’d get the usual “never again” answer. Instead, it was a far more nuanced rumination on a brief for an alternative type of show. Wake Up cost them a motza. And then killing Breakfast with Paul Henry doubly so. McGarvey certainly wasn’t shutting it down. “If we were ever to go in that space again, we wouldn’t do the same. Having a third breakfast show exactly the same as the other two is not something we’re going to do. We consistently look at all our day parts and go ‘where are all the opportunities and where’s the available audience?’ That’s constantly an open conversation.” Does the breakfast timeslot need to be live, I asked. The answer seemed less than hypothetical: “In the morning they don’t sit down and watch it, they listen to it, and they dip in and out. So you have to consider that when you’re putting something out it can’t be something that requires a long narrative arc. I think it has to be a quick snackable narrative arc that repeats - or you’re out of the house or dressing the kids. But you’re not sitting down with a cup of tea at 7am saying you’re going to relax for half an hour.” I can think of alternative formats that meet that brief. Channel 4’s old show The Big Breakfast from the UK, or, ironically, what Paul Henry did after Ten’s Breakfast, a simulcast talk show on TV3 and Radio Live in NZ. To be honest, I didn’t fully pick up on the implications as we recorded the interview. Listening back, it sounds like something is being seriously considered. Which is perhaps inevitable. To new owner CBS, I’m sure a network without a breakfast offering is only three-quarters of a network. The event also saw the unveiling of the new brand strategy. Ten becomes 10. Eleven becomes 10 Peach, One becomes 10 Boss. I must admit, habit still makes me write it as Ten, not 10. And a style convention conversation looms for the Mumbrella editorial team, where editorial practice is usually to spell every number up to ten, then to revert to numerals. And we usually follow good grammar to help the reader rather than each individual brand’s style. So Foxtel, not FOXTEL; and Ooh Media, not oOh! Media. Before that fun conversation begins though, I’ll stick with Ten for today. The rebrand strategy does make sense though and it goes way beyond the much discussed new lotto balls-style logo. Eleven and One were historic, based on the over-the-air channel slots. But, as I’ve parroted before, [the best number of brands is one](. The viewers (and listeners, now Ten has an audio play too) will think of everything as the output of Ten. It’s the strategy Seven took from the start of its multichannels, and Nine adopted three years ago. But will the market support Ten? The vibe in the room is that media buyers want the network to succeed, if only to keep Nine and Seven honest. (For the first time in a while, this week I heard somebody describe commercial leader Nine’s approach in the market as arrogant.) However, I detected no great appetite for backing Ten’s new stuff from the beginning. I’m not sure anybody will be betting their marketing budgets on immediate success for Sunday Night Takeaway. Particularly when the big brands are trying to decide (and in many cases haven’t yet) whether to go with Seven’s cricket, Nine’s tennis or to hedge their bets. For every case study of Coles’ successful gamble on the new Masterchef format a decade ago, there’s Bunnings’ backing of The Renovators. Which means a painful process for Ten of gradually winning an audience for its new shows first, then monetising it properly. Even though, as McGarvey emphasises, many of the new formats aren't actually new - Takeaway from ITV in the UK, Dancing With The Stars from Seven - brands may well decide to wait and see. And so will I. Long on Ritson, short on Sharp Speaking of brands, Thursday night took me to The Establishment in Sydney. And it’s a long time since I’ve been there on a Thursday night. However, on Thursday we were one floor up from the meat market. And it struck me as I waited for the elevator up to the “State Of Brand” presentation how much of a brand Mark Ritson has become within our industry in his own right. “Are you here for the Ritson event?” was the question, not whether I was coming to the State of Brand event. It was a good panel, which my short news story didn’t really do justice too. [Brent Smart’s rationale on why it’s in a client’s economic interest in making their agency love them]( sounded far cheesier written down that it did said on stage. And as usual, a few choice soundbites from Ritson - this time on the “horseshit” around brand purpose - didn’t capture his convincing case for that point of view. I’m starting to come round to the idea that many brand purpose initiatives are about making marketers feel better about what they do than in shifting product. Particularly when the actions don’t authentically reflect the brand. But Ritson did point to a drumbeat which is getting louder. The evidence is growing that sensible brands need to find a 60:40 balance between investing in long term brand building and short term sales initiatives. If you haven’t yet heard of The Long and the Short of It, by the UK’s Les Binet and Peter Field, you’re going to. The next big marketing debate - indeed, already under way, is about the science of balancing short term and long term marketing goals. It’s set to be as influential as Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, or perhaps more so. “You’ve all bought it and none of you have read it,” as Ritson put it. Outside at last Meanwhile, Friday brought the news the [Ross Cameron has been sacked from Sky News]( for comments about “slanty eyed” Chinese on Outsiders. At least this time co-host Rowan Dean kept a straight face while he said it. It strikes me that the Sky News brand, with its global footprint, has far less tolerance for anti-Chinese sentiment - remember John Mangos’ sacking for similar comments in 2011? - than other types. The swift move may hold off Sleeping Giants Oz for a little longer. Clocking off and full of myself Meanwhile, it’s time for me to damage my body clock further and go back to bed. Last night’s 6-8pm nap was a BAD idea. Please do take a listen to this week’s Mumbrellacast, where our media writer Zoe Samios carried me through that interview with Ten’s sales boss Rod Prosser and Beverley McGarvey, whilst thorough editing made me sound less spaced out and jetlagged than I felt. The Mumbellacast also tackles [John Sintras’s speedy exit from SBS](, [Facebook’s eventful week]( and [that banned VW ad](. As one recent (five star) iTunes reviewer said of The Mumbrellacast: "Great - even tho Tim's utterly full of himself". Which is a view I’m happy to endorse as perfectly legitimate, when accompanied by five stars. And finally in this week’s housekeeping, do yourself a favour. The one person I’ve learned more from about marketing strategy than any other is Ted Horton. On every occasion I’m lucky enough to talk to him he makes me think differently about how this industry really works. Ted almost never speaks on stage, but he’s a late addition to this Friday’s Mumbrella MSIX conference. He’ll only be talking for ten minutes, but I bet you remember every word. [Get tickets here](. Should you wish to do so, please drop me a line at tim@mumbrella.com.au. And our deputy editor Josie Tutty - josie @mumbrella.com.au - is running the newsdesk across the weekend. Meanwhile, I suspect I’ll be spending the weekend sleeping while it’s light and prowling the house while it’s dark. 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](