Australian media is “united by an urgent search for growth and implementing the organisational transformation necessary to deliver it”, according to the 18th edition of Price WaterhouseCoopers’ Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook.
The report aims to provide some insight into navigating the challenges and opportunities of the contemporary Australian entertainment and media landscape across 12 segments: consumer magazines, consumer and educational books, filmed entertainment, free-to-air and subscription television, games and e-sports, internet advertising, music, newspapers, radio, out-of-home media, and internet access.
For those media organisations focused on innovation, report authors Justin Papps and Charmaine Green say “the search for growth has in many cases meant a ‘back to basics’ re-orientation around fundamental value delivered to consumers, and a willingness to break away from legacy models defined by platform”.
They explain that this means that the consumer magazine business now views itself as the ‘lifestyle media business’, newspapers as the ‘news media business’, the live entertainment business is now the ‘multifaceted customer experience business’, and so on.
Papps and Green state that the urgent search for growth is fuelled by two contrasting forces: the fragmentation of audiences across different platforms and devices; and, the consolidation of media owners as larger players strive to provide multi-platform solutions.
“As consumers have spread their time across multiple platforms, events and devices, the difficulty of aggregating a mass audience has increased. The ‘race for reach’ has become a growing challenge for advertisers. The industry has responded with cross-platform innovation and asset investment. New integrated advertising solutions are helping media organisations deploy effective campaigns in an environment of channel proliferation.”
The report also points to the challenge of growing the audiences’ “share of wallet” between different subscription-based media sources.
“In an Australian economic environment characterised by minimal inflation, flat-lined wage and household expenditure growth, and where new players continue to reduce the pricing power of incumbents, the opportunities for price-driven growth are much diminished. This will be of particular challenge to the growing number of businesses implementing subscription models, where the battle to survive as the second or third service for households will be hard fought,” report authors state.
And the challenge of growing audiences’ “share of attention”.
“While consumption of media across all devices may be increasing, time is a finite resource, so the competition for consumer attention will be fierce…The relationship between attention-growth and revenue-growth will drive increasing strategic focus across industry on winning the marginal minute of consumer attention,” says the report.
To read the report’s coverage specific to consumer magazines, visit this article. To read the report in full, visit the PwC Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook 2019-2023 webpage.
