The Weekend Mumbo: Trust us, we’re the media
Welcome to the Weekend Mumbo. Here you will find a short analysis piece on something compelling that happened during the week, followed by a small collection of the biggest stories Mumbrella covered and why they are worth the read.
Welcome to the Weekend Mumbo,
Do you trust Mumbrella? Do you trust me? Do you trust the person sitting across from you while you have a coffee in your local cafe?
In the era of ‘fake news’, scams and phishing – who can you trust?
Trust us with your details – we’re the media
This week we had a number of reports and research come out about trust.
Interestingly, two of the key parties Aussies are not trusting of are journalists (like me) and the government (you know, the people who write our laws, decide our tax rate, manage our defence force).
That’s pretty worrying given the importance of each of them to our society. And unfortunately both have featured in the top ten lists of untrustworthy for a while.
This week also saw the release of the latest Roy Morgan ‘Net Trust’ rankings. According to the report, the top five most trusted brands in Australia are Woolworths, Coles, Bunnings, Aldi and Kmart.
While the least trusted or most distrusted brands in Australia are Meta (Facebook/Instagram), followed by Optus – which suffered a significant drop in trust due to its customer data privacy breach back in September. It went from 17th to 2nd. Coming in third was fellow telco Telstra, followed by Amazon and News Corp.
Optus suffered a significant drop in customer trust
So based on this, Australians trust the brands that feed them, cloth them and help repair their home, but distrust telecommunications and media companies.
Admittedly, Amazon is a borderline in that it can also sell you food, clothes and many a-household-item (especially ones you never knew existed), but they are more a communication platform and now with Amazon Prime they definitely fall into the media cohort.
Given how much personal information social media, media and telecommunications companies have about users, it isn’t surprising that we the public don’t trust them.
And just like their telco counterparts, media companies are taking on more-and-more personal data. As anyone who has tried to read an online story or watch a TV show on BVOD knows, no log-in, no play.
During the week we heard from executives at Nine and News Corp sharing the benefits for brands in advertising alongside news content during the Independent Media Agencies of Australia’s (IMAA) first major event for the year, Operation Kick Off. Given the most highly ranked program in Australia most days is news, in particular Seven’s nightly news, that seems to make sense.
But one of the other key things to come out of that presentation was that traditional media players are increasingly looking to get into commerce.
They see the retailers getting all that love and they want a piece of it.
Now, Facebook and Instagram have already ventured down this path with varying degrees of success. Likewise a number of TV networks have thrown their hat into the ring with various e-commerce integrations. Think 7Shop and Paramount’s The Checkout in conjunction with Twitter Australia.
Paramount has begun e-commerce integrations
And even retail giant Woolworths, the “most trusted brand in Australia”, has started getting in on the whole-funnel experience with its media division Cartology, a “multi-channel media solution” enabling brands to reach customers at “every step along the path to purchase”, providing “unique opportunities to influence their purchase decisions”.
No longer content with knowing just our viewing/content consumption habits, media companies want to know what we are buying, how we are paying for it and where we are getting it delivered.
As Nine’s director of content partnerships, total publishing, Lisa Day told the Operation Kick Off audience, in 2023 it’s about publishing moving “from a billboard to a shop front”.
“Where we seamlessly integrate and blend and sell your products within our brands and network.
“We want to work from amplification, top of funnel, all the way down to transaction at the bottom of the funnel.”
News Corp, not to be outdone by Nine, also this week launched a new travel program with commerce capability via its Escape platform. The new Escape To… shows enable audiences to book and buy the same travel experience while they’re watching, directly from the website escape.com.au.
News Corp’s new Escape platform
Now, back to my earlier point about trust. Media companies don’t rate too highly on the old trust barometer, and yet they are all trying to get into our (digital) wallets.
E-commerce opens up a whole other level of personal data capture for media companies. It’s a huge risk for them and consumers.
As has been seen with Optus, the more you take, the more you have to lose. Let’s hope that as we enter this new era of media-integrated-commerce there are plenty of checks and balances to keep that data safe. Because once you lose trust, it’s very hard to get it back.
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Olivia Kruimel is the managing editor at Mumbrella. She has more than 15 years of experience in journalism, communications and marketing. Her journalism career began at Fairfax Media (now part of Nine) and includes various B2B publications such as B&T, Travel Today and ALB. As a marketer Olivia has worked for Standard Chartered and various global law firms.
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