If you read retail trade press regularly, it won’t be feeling like a happy new year. As the above headlines show, in just the first few weeks of 2020 we have seen at least 11 established Australian retailers either closing stores, going bankrupt, issuing profit...
Many towns and cities in Australia are facing a Christmas shrouded in thick smoke, or worse, from raging bushfires. While the overworked volunteer Rural Firefighters are putting out deadly real fires, retailers have been putting out their own fires in 2019. It’s safe to say it’s...
Netflix global numbers are phenomenal and scary in equal measure: Netflix has acquired a whopping 150 million subscribers, but has amassed $42BN in debt and longer-term payments relating to content (broadcast rights). Their annual programming budget for Netflix Originals alone is reported to be US$15BN....
There is no one single way to grow and evolve as a business. Sure, consistent sales growth would be great (but not always a reality), a growing pool of potential customers would be amazing, a dynamic and current brand that magnetises people is always helpful....
Innovation is too often mistaken for invention. The true definition of innovation is finding a better way to do something that improves on how it was done previously, that adds value to the user. An organisation’s innovation department often ties themselves in knots trying to...
The way we define a media owner is changing rapidly and so too is the way we define an audience. Customers, we would argue, are a more valuable audience than “viewers” or “listeners” or “readers” of typical paid media channels. This is because customers are...
The digital age has seen many pioneering businesses fall by the wayside due to their structural inability to adapt, reluctance to adapt or slowness to adapt. Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster immediately spring to mind. But in today’s connected economy where trust is the most important...
Yesterday, Bloomberg announced that Walmart has been pitching new TV shows to advertisers. These are shows that Walmart are producing and distributing on vudu – the streaming TV service that they own. Wait a minute, Walmart are a traditional retailer… what are they doing producing...
Having spent over 3 years championing the importance of owned media for companies wishing to connect better with their customers and leverage their channels for incremental revenue, there was some excitement when we discovered a recent report by Forrester echoing our views. Firstly, to their credentials:...
It may surprise you, but the fastest growing division in Amazon is not its e-commerce sales, or its services like Prime, but their media sales division. Revenues have more than doubled from $1.8B in 2017 to $4.6B in 2018. And if you think that’s impressive,...