WOMEN IN TELEVISION BREAKFAST Date: 29/3/2011 Name of speaker/s: Petra Buchanan, Tanya Denning, David Speers, Johanna Blakley, Bruce Mann, David Malone Name of session: ASTRA Women in Television
ANNOUNCER: Good morning and welcome to the annual ASTRA Women in Television Breakfast. Please welcome to the stage our ASTRA CEO, Petra Buchanan.
(Applause)
PETRA BUCHANAN: Thank you for joining us. As many of you know, this event provides a chance for women in television to catch up with industry colleagues and to hear from some inspiring and informative speakers. The ASTRA Women in Television Breakfast provides a unique forum for knowledge sharing and collaboration. It is also the place where we formally acknowledged the depth of skills and expertise displayed by experts in television. I am pleased to announce this year we have broken all previous attendance records. We are at maximum capacity.
I would first like to acknowledge the indigenous people on whose land we meet today, and pay respect to their elders, past and present.
I would like to also announce that a proportion of ticket sales will be donated to Red Cross disaster relief funds.
In June last year, for the first time in Australia's history, we had female prime minister. We also had a female premier. Women held significant positions across the board in Australian politics.
I think the number of women presenting at this conference today is indicative of the leadership roles that women play in our industry and I hope you will be here today to listen to them.
Over the past year we have seen the proliferation of new products and devices. These innovations have provided choice to how Australians can consume content. We can see these devices are encouraging innovation and promoting new forms of interaction with audiences. We can also see that that consumption is no longer a one-way street. The continued rise of social media and the growth of content available on broadband through various devices is redefining the concept of audiences and how they engage with content. Even in this environment of new and emerging devices we can see the consumers are continuing to be drawn to compelling television. TV audiences continue to grow. Viewing on traditional TV sets is up 7% nationally in 2011. This is at a time when internet usage is increasingly confirming that the screens are being added, not replaced. At the same time, ABS has predicted that televisions will outnumber people in Australian households for the first time this year. The social significance of television and its ability to bring people together continues to be as relevant now as it ever was.
I would now like to go through the proceedings this morning. Following the introduction, breakfast
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
will be served and you can network and chat. Then we will hear from two inspiring professionals who will share with us their knowledge and views. First we will hear from Tanya Denning, a former journalist and speaker with great experience. She is the Director of Content for National Indigenous Television, NITV. That role involves responsibility in areas such as programming, scheduling, digital communications, acquisitions -she is very busy! Tanya will talk about the power of the media and its ability to influence and bring stories to audiences about awareness, reconciliation and indigenous issues. She will also talk about the important work of the Media Reconciliation Indigenous Network Group. Following Tanya, Sky News’ David Speers will introduce Johanna Blakley who is the director of the Norman Lear Center, based in the US. It does exciting work around convergence of entertainment, commerce and society. I believe that Joanna's address will get us thinking about social media and how it is changing notions of gender in media demographics. Also, how the rise of social media is redefining social stereotypes but at the same time providing us with more information about consumers and audiences. It will be interesting to hear from Johanna about these trends and how it will continue to shape and influence our future.
Then we will have time for a Q&A session moderated by David. I ask you to think about some questions - don't be shy! Then we will have the ASTRA Pioneer Award for 2011. It started last year and formally recognises the acknowledgements and contributions in leadership and creativity of people working in the television industry.
Our industry is undergoing fundamental change. The media and communications sector continues to develop new and groundbreaking products and services. Unfortunately, the speed of regulatory reform languishes. ASTRA remains committed to regulatory change and representing the interests of its members. We will keep members up to date through our website, submissions, events, and by our linked-in group. We will continue to work with our members, industry and governments to ensure that the significant investment made by the industry to the Australian media landscape and the Australian economy are understood and acknowledged.
I am pleased to have here today members of the ASTRA graduate program. Ten graduates have worked within the subscription television environment. They were selected through a competitive process and are now working in diverse areas of broadcasting from production, through to marketing and operations. This is an important commitment that the industry is making to nurture new talent.
In October last year an ASTRA survey of people workinig within subscription televisioin revealed that there is near gender equality in the industry in Australia. We will continue to measure and to share this information. There is still much to strive for and also to be proud of in this growing industry. I am proud to be part of an industry that values individual potential, encourages creativity and contributes to the social fabric of this country through the stories it tells and by the opportunities it offers.
Please enjoy your breakfast.
(Applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tanya Denning, Director of Content for NITV.
TANYA DENNING: Hello. I too would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians, past and present, on whose land
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
we meet today. I am not from around here. I am a Birri girl, from around Bowen, in central Queensland near the Whitsundays. I grew up in a place called Blackwater. It was a town outside the mission where my family are from. Blackwater was the place where my dad was able to take my mum in the ‘60s. He was a ‘Ten Pound Pom’ and fell madly in love with my mum. Blackwater was the centre of my universe when I was a kid. We went out bush, and hung with the kids there. It was a very patriotic town. It was a male-dominated town. The schooling was very much about Australia and its history. I would start and end the school week singing ‘God Save the Queen’, and when the school came to terms with the national anthem, we would start and end the week with ‘Advance Australia Fair’.
Despite the teachings of this Australia in the classroom, the white elephant was always missing. The white elephant, or should I say, the black elephant, being the history of my people. I would go home and tell mum and dad what I had just been taught - and I was quite a shy girl, I was born deaf in one ear and partial in the other and tongue tied. It took a lot for me to get up the nerve to bring it to the teachers’ attention that it's not true - the experiences I had at home were so different to the classroom that I just had to set people straight.
We had one commercial channel and a lot of the information was from the TV. There were no black faces, no Aboriginal faces, no Torres Strait Islander faces on the television. That was a lot of my education as well. I switched on the TV one day and saw a beautiful Aboriginal woman reading the news. I was six years old, and that memory stuck with me. She was so articulate, she spoke so clearly. And I had trouble with my speech. To see this woman obtain such authority and speak was really a turning point in my life.
Mixing that with the fact that I wanted to tell the whole story to people, as shy and insular as I was, I knew that I wanted a career in media. The power of what it did to me, the power of the kids that I would argue with who felt so strongly that their knowledge of aboriginal people was correct - because of what they saw on TV. It was only what they saw in news and current affairs programs. But those were not the images of my life, my family, the laughter in my home, the languages within my home. The cultures within my home.
So, I set about my path, went and studied, went to university and kept on banging on the door of the local ABC. There weren't many jobs, and I would do anything. I kept knocking at the door. They let me hang around, then I became an intern, and eventually I worked around at community radio stations until I could get my break at the ABC, because I really only thought that journalists work at the ABC.
I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Eventually the ABC gave me a cadetship after several years of hassling them and I became a journalist at the ABC. My ultimate dream. I was put into regional centres, I did the hard yards. I wanted to get into long form documentary production. I had persistence. I had to continue. You had to do your remote and regional ABC gigs. You have to read, be the junior journalist in the newsroom. So I went to SBS to get more opportunities doing long form. My career went on between ABC and SBS. I really enjoyed my life as a journalist, as a storyteller, exposing some big stories, such as deaths in custody as well as other big Australian and international matters. When I came back in 2007, I was approached to join a new network, a new channel called NITV. I didn't know what NITV was, but I knew about it because it was something that my people have been lobbying for, for a couple of decades. We wanted to have indigenous media in indigenous hands.
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I was slightly reluctant. I loved being in the field. That was my passion. I stood back and realised, how often do you get the opportunity to shape a new channel in this country? How often does it come about to be involved in a channel with a conscience that could possibly change the lives for not only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but every Australian? The possibility that I might not just have black faces read the news, but I could have black footy hosts, Aboriginal travel show hosts, Torres Straight Islander cooking show hosts. A gameshow hosted by an Aboriginal person. A 24-hour channel, seven days a week -we could do so much. Than the reality set in - we didn't have much money.
But most of us there are young, Generation Y, and you can’t tell us we can't do something or that it’s not possible. So we went about doing a channel. Towards the end of last year, I became the Director of Content. We wanted to make NITV more than just playout service. We wanted to give it an identity and make it a channel. My creators were so excited to do something with the channel and with energy. We set about rebranding the channel, becoming a real player in the industry. Generally, other channels are driven by ratings, but for NITV, we have to be driven by emotion. My team of creatives went about rebranding, we took vision from the board, from people - and the vision is about awakening and sharing unique experiences, the experiences and imagination of Australia's first people.
For me, it was seven words. I took each of the words and they each belonged to a day. Instead of the day being driven by commercial elements, we were driven by the word ‘awakened’, Tuesday was the day of ‘power’. Thursdays was the day of ‘celebration’. We would have our footy shows on Thursdays, as that was the day of celebration. We shared the cultures not only of our country, but also indigenous peoples around the world.
After three years, the channel was not just a play out service, it was a real live news service every day, pumping out with live shows every week. In this service, my small team, only about 30 or 40 of us were running this 24 hour a day, seven days a week channel. We’re young, we get on with it!
We do the live news shows, panel shows. We have thought outside the box and have done high volume and low cost models and are starting to change our content to bring in the quality and values. The word is getting about.
We wouldn't have been able to do this without the support of the industry. The support of indigenous filmmakers, particularly the Media Reconciliation Indigenous Network Group. There was a movement happening at the same time that NITV switched on - the Media RING group was formed. Without Media RING, NITV would not be achieving what it is today.
I would like to run a reel to encapsulate what I have been talking about.
(Video plays)
(Applause)
As you see, NITV informs, educates and entertains. NITV is a practical measure of reconciliation. I hope you switch on and become part of our journey. Thank you, ASTRA, and for your time this morning. I look forward to today and meeting women in television throughout the day. Thank you.
(Applause)
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
>> Please welcome one of Australia's leading political journalists, Sky News’ Political Editor, David Speers.
DAVID SPEERS: That's a tough act to follow! A fantastic address, Tanya.
Good morning. Welcome to the Women in Television Breakfast. I am David Speers. You may have noticed that I'm not a woman! But I am in television. I am also finding my way in social media as well. The guest I am about to introduce knows something that all of us in media need to know - women dominate in social media. Over the years, we have seen the rise and rise of social media - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Twitter has become a really powerful tool in journalism. From the dramas overseas in Egypt, et cetera.
The power of the media is so important to recognise when it comes to presenting opinions and different views and different faces. When it comes to social media, that does provide a platform for those differences to be seen in ways that traditional media are still coming to terms with.
Our speaker today has followed many of the media’s changing trends over the years. She will share her thoughts on social media, women and the networked audience. As deputy director of the Norman Lear Center, Johanna Blakley spent a lot of her time blogging about how our entertainment interacts with our social and political habits. She is researching a wide range of topics from celebrity culture, digital media, intellectual property law... She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California in Santa Barbara. She taught courses in popular culture and 20th-century literature. We will do a Q&A after her address. Please join me in welcoming Johanna.
(Applause)
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: Hello, everyone. Can you hear me OK? Great. Thank you, David, for such a lovely introduction. I think your comments about social media were right on target. I hear a lot of comments about social media I don't agree with these days - that is a refreshing change. I want to thank Petra for being a marvelous host and for inviting me to come to this beautiful country, meeting friendly, lovely people. I have fallen in love with Sydney.
Can I have the slides up, please? Today, I'm going to argue that social media, the applications you know and love - or love to hate - are actually going to have a transformative impact on all of the traditional media industries. That should come as no surprise. You’ve probably read it a million times, but I think my next claim may surprise you: Social media will help to free us from some of the crazy assumptions about gender. I think that the growing influence of social media is actually going to dismantle some of the demeaning stereotypes that we see about gender in global popular culture as a whole.
If you haven't noticed, media tends to provide a pretty distorted mirror of our lives and I would say, particularly, of gender roles. As everyone in the room is well aware, the media industries, radio, television, publishing, games, use rigid segmentation techniques in order to understand audiences. This is classic demographics. They came about as an audience segmentation technique because it
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was too difficult, too expensive, to figure out actually what audiences were interested in. As a proxy, you would figure out where the potential interest is would be of particular demographic groups. You would use labels to understand large segments of the audience and create content you hope would be interesting to them. There was a three-step process, identifying the demographic group, assuming they have a certain interest, then trying to pitch the products and content you think would be of interest to that group.
So because media companies do not have access to the information we actually want, instead of developing content that might be riskier towards particular demographic groups, they based their content on a series of assumptions about what people like. What do 18 to 24-year-old women like? You want to be thin! You want to get married! You like to watch movies with happy endings. But if we want to make something for an 18 to 24-year-old male, we want explosions, violence, good sports action. So lower-level assumptions made about these groups, which didn't offer any kind of granularity, didn't give the opportunity to really target content to individual people.
The reason this is so important, if you want to understand global popular culture, you have to understand the DNA. The DNA is basically the assumptions we make about demographic groups. At the Norman Lear Center, we have done a series of studies looking at, for instance, the impact of the focus on the 18-49 demographic and the media industries. We have done some research and found research which has debunked the notion that it is a good idea to create media content and advertising geared towards youthful demographics, 18-24, or the 18-49 bracket. It includes a lot of people at many different life stages. But you still find, certainly in the United States, the market I know the best - television, radio, film, games, publishing - still desperately going after these youthful demographics.
But things are changing. The reason it came to a head is because the Baby Boomer generation after World War II, when they were young, there was a reason to pitch programming to young people, as there were a lot of them. Now they are actually ageing out of the 18-49 demographic. Nielsen is the most powerful rating agency in the United States and here as well. They don't do detailed ratings analysis for anybody over 54. In the US market, it's as if these people don't exist. In the US market, our material goes around the world. You find over and over again, radio, television, publishing, they are all hell bent on finding the most difficult demographic out there. That is, young men. Where are they?
I don't know how many of you watch ‘Mad Men’. It has been available here for a while. This is one of my favourite characters. She creates psychological profiles of characters on the show. Psychographics have been around since the 1960s, trying to find underlying profiles in consumers. Even though it has been around since the ‘60s, it has had a limited impact on the way in which media industries monetise and segment audiences. Demographics have really been the way.
At the Norman Lear Center we have been studying how demographics impact media and advertising for some time now. And of course, we have to take into account the rise of social media. We have discovered some interesting things. Social media networks allow audiences to redistribute themselves in a way in which they have an opportunity to escape demographic boxes. Geography does not mean so much online. National boundaries do not mean so much. What you're doing is redistricting content, remixing things, sharing things, critiquing things, on a level we have never seen before.
People are self-organising in new ways. They are having conversations with one another. They are
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not focused on demographics - are you a male? Are you 18-24? How much money do you make? Media companies know they have to understand the audience, but the future will be online, connected, interactive, and have certain expectations. There is a huge focus on online and social media audiences. One reason they are having such a hard time understanding those audiences is that they are still trying to put them into demographic boxes. It is not just because old habits die hard. It is because that is how ad rates are determined.
There has been a long series in the ‘Wall Street Journal’ called, 'What They Know'. It is all about surveillance technologies, used by marketers, in order to figure out what people are doing on websites. It has had quite an impact in the United States. They know when a visitor visits one of the top websites in the United States, they have over 60 trackers installed on their web browsers. Somebody is gathering a great deal of information about what you are doing online and sometimes they are selling the information quickly on the open markets. The interesting thing is that it takes a lot of educated guessing, and a lot of complex algorithms, for them to try to reverse engineer all of that information about what you are doing online, in order to figure out which demographic box you fit in. They have to come up with educated guesses to figure out if it is a female or male, what age they are, how much money they make.
It is ironic. You would think they would really like to know what you are interested in. Demographics has only ever been a proxy - an attempt to figure out what you might be interested in. But social media offers us the unprecedented opportunity to actually know what people want. When you go online, and look for communities of people which have coalesced, the new mass audience of the future, you will find taste communities. People don't aggregate around age, gender, income. They aggregate around interests. Think about your own life. When you go online, or at a place like this, you connect with people with a shared interest. That is when you can have an engaging conversation. It matters less if they are male, female, age, income. It is the same dynamic for a brand. They want to have a conversation with you, they want to be friends with you, that is why the social media sphere as a place for media companies is so active. Really, every business out there, they try to communicate with people in these taste communities.
They are called mass niche committees. They are demographically diverse, and the future for media companies. I have been doing a lot of research on social media, in particular, on the impact of social media on the US television industry. It has been a long-running project, and I have been reading articles here and there, stating that women were the dominant users of one's social media platform or another. Facebook – there are more women on Facebook, spending more time, generating a lot more content than men. Flickr, by far, another where the dominant demographic is women, uploading photos and talking by showing them. Even on Twitter, an article said that more men Tweeted, but more accounts are held by women. So, I thought, it seems to me that social media might actually be dominated by women. Is that the case globally? I started digging around for good research. I found these statistics. These are from June, 2010. They did worldwide surveys in every region of the world and found: women dominate social networks. Women spend a lot more time than men on these websites. It is worldwide.
I was surprised that it was also the case in Third World countries. Internet, computers, smart phones? What is the impact of this going to be? What about for people like you, executives in media industries? Will this industry be driven by women from now on? Representations will seriously shift in the world. Will we see more females in video games? Wouldn't that be nice?! More women driving expensive movies, blockbusters featuring female characters. I do think that there will be a change, a profound change, in that type of content we see. But I don't think that the chick flick will take over.
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
Women are taking over social media and that is having a profound impact on media industries, but the surprising and exciting thing about this is that women will be instrumental in planting a stake in the heart of the chick flick and all these other contrived entertainment forms geared towards shallow demographic stereotypes about what young people like, about what guys like, about what Asians like, about what indigenous people like. We now have detailed information about what actual people like. We are complicated people. That will lead to some complicated and interesting content.
This is a great time for the media industry to serve up more appropriate content to its audiences and targeting advertising to people who care about what is being advertised. Also for consumers to have a reflection of their world that is a bit closer to their living experience.
Of course, people in the subscription television industry and the media industries have to understand what people are interested in and what they like, what entertains them - that is the carrot you lure people in with. When people tell me what they are into, what they are fans of, that tells me something profound about them. It tells me something they are passionate about. That's why I work at the Norman Lear Center. We take entertainment very seriously! People write it off as just about leisure, turning your mind off. As we heard from Tanya, those representations on television help shape your world. Your world is shaped by the things that you find interesting. You decide to place your attention in them. Social media is so revolutionary in that it makes transparent in a whole new way what people care about. I think that will have a transformative effect on gender stereotypes. I'm so excited to see what this new world would look like and I believe a lot of people in the room today will be the ones who orchestrate this change.
Thank you very much.
(Applause).
The girls who helped me with the presentation are so fabulous!
DAVID SPEERS: Thank you. The one thing that struck me... Whenever I visit a website, 64 tracking devices are installed on my browser?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: That is the average! Most of it is third-party... When ‘Wall Street Journal’ investigated this, they found out that it was beacons, cookies, etc. They went to major portal sites and saw how many cookies were installing on people's browsers. Apparently it is because of so much third-party content, which is installing the cookies.
DAVID SPEERS: What happens with that information about where I am going on the Web? Where is it going?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: Sometimes it is just the company that put the cookie on your browser. But there are also open market exchanges in real time where this information is traded and sold. It is very cheap per click. It is one thousandth of a cent per click. But it becomes valuable information for automotive companies, for example, and people in different sectors who want to know how people are browsing online for certain types of content.
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
DAVID SPEERS: Given media companies can access that sort of information and have a far more granular look at what their viewers and audience are interested in - what turns them on and what they are passionate about - it is a far more detailed snapshot of the people they are chasing. What are they going to do with that? It seems to me, to make a chick flick, the purpose is to have a mass audience. Making a blockbuster takes a lot of money. You still need to have this stuff out there. You still need television shows like 'Mad Men' reaching a big audience, to make it worthwhile.
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: 'Mad Men' actually only reaches a tiny audience in the US. A hit show in the US is 36 million viewers. This one is only 2 million viewers for ‘Mad Men’. They have never been able to get a large enough audience. The US audience is so fragmented with cable channels. Niche areas. That is the biggest problem for the broadcast networks. They are more deeply committed to locating broad audiences and they are finding it harder to use the detailed social media data... Subscription television is more likely to benefit from this. They have more niche channels. It is important that they establish this intimate connection with their audience. I think the stakes are much higher in that area.
DAVID SPEERS: Do you think that will see the death of demographics, then?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: I think demographics are always going to be important. It is just that it has had too large a role in the media business for too long. Now we have data that is more useful for media. Unfortunately, people are trying to use that and just turn it into demographics again. That will shift in time.
DAVID SPEERS: Do you say that women are better than men in this?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: I get a lot of comments like that - "Women are better than men and they will produce better programming because they are female!" But that's not it. Media markets have been dominated by male content for decades. So many blockbusters feature men because men will only go to movies that feature men, but women are willing to go along to them. A lot of people have thought that if women can take over the media industries or media networks, they will get revenge! They will put chicks in everything! But at this moment in history, women coming to dominance in social media, it is very data driven. It is about specific interests of people beyond demographic categories. Even though women might take over social media and remain in charge, I don't think it means they would dictate programming and make it more female. It will just be much more focused on what people actually like because the data is available.
DAVID SPEERS: I want to ask you about the importance of social media. A colleague of mine at Sky News might be moderating a session later today, and we were talking earlier about Twitter. But we mentioned that we aren't on Facebook. You didn't understand that. How important is it for people to be on all of these platforms?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: Twitter is essential. I am appalled… Where I work at a school for communications and journalism -
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there is a broader range of use of it there, but I work in the humanities and social science fields and I can't tell you how contemptuous a lot of academics are of Twitter. They think it's about what people had for breakfast. That seems to be the prevailing stereotype but anyone doing research on current events knows that it is the most useful tool because it is a global network of up-to-the-minute commentary.
It is a very different sort of social media platform than Facebook. Facebook is very protected, sort of a walled garden.
DAVID SPEERS: It is fascinating to see how it is developing. And for content creators in the room, how can they modify their trade to embrace this change?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: These days, everything is a media business. In your own life, you have to master these tools. This is the skill set of the future. How you communicate as an online persona on all of these different platforms. That is the expectation of audiences, that it will be a give and take, an interactive conversation. Television is not going to be a passive media, we realise that.
DAVID SPEERS: I did say we would take questions from the floor. Do we even have a microphone? I maybe should have checked that. At the back, does anybody have a question? There is a hand up down the front?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: You can see that?
DAVID SPEERS: Pop your hand up if you have a question. Just give us your name and where you're from.
MINNI: Thank you very much for your talk. My name is Midi Stormont. If women are dominating social media, what are they boys doing? Are they playing with the Xbox? And is there are any fears that social media will become marginalised if women are doing it? Will it become something which is more marginalised?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: I think it is an interesting question. That is one of the temptations, to think that anything which has the taint of female cannot be marketable to males. I think that is partly where the shift will occur. It is partly because of the potential anonymity on social media channels that you end up being able to shirk some of the gender stereotypes and to step outside the box of expectations based upon you when you are invested and involved in a leisure activity. Online is a different space and forum. One of the reasons we were so shocked that women dominate online media is because there is an anonymity, a genderless exchange of information. It could have gone without note for so long.
I was interviewed recently, and the anchor said, “What are guys doing? Just working in the garages and fixing cars now?” That has been the perception, men have been so hard to find, that is why advertisers are desperate to reach them. Women have a lot more financial power, they spend most of the income money in homes, and that will continue to be the case. But I think there is going to be
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an egalitarian result from this new medium, which just happens to be dominated by females.
DAVID SPEERS: That sounds good. We had another question…
JOANNA: I am another Joanna as well, from FOXTEL. I wanted to ask you, I just finished a multi-platform producer scholarship and it is one of the first courses. Do you think there will be more training for women in Australia to know about social media and fundamental things you are talking about, day in, day out?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: It is a big concern at the University of Southern California. How they were training people for print and broadcast did not apply to online. It has been a rough transition. Recently, I have been working with a Masters in Professional Writing program as well - people generating content. They are terrified about social media and online. They were afraid there is no way to make money out there and they are not sure how to segue the skill set they have from traditional media to this new, interactive media. You have to give so much control to the viewer and audience. It is a complex industry, to be training people to become the new generation in media. There is a lot of soul- searching going on, particularly in journalism schools around the United States. They are terrified they might be generating a bunch of talented writers who are not going to be able to make a living from their craft. This is a problem which we need to solve, and part of it has to do with becoming a lot more literate about interactive media. I think we use it in personal lives, but we don't necessarily have a credible apparatus for understanding at and looking at its impact. That is a way in which curriculum has to change everywhere.
DAVID SPEERS: Do we have any other questions? I will take these two. Yes?
DANIELLE: My name is Danielle and I am from Baker and Mackenzie. If we are trying to satisfy so many different niche interests, do you think there will be implications for the quality of the content we are producing? Will there be a trade-off in that area?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: That's interesting. I think one of the things which should become an important aspect for television in particular, as opposed to broadcasting stuff to mass audiences, is that markets be less constrained by national boundaries as we go forward. These are global audiences. People have no idea that they are having conversations with people who are five, six, seven, 8000 miles away. These are the ways in which audiences are going to be located and understood in the future. We are in a transitional phase, we are still focusing on our own geographic area. We are focusing on national interests. But is not going to be long before we start looking at global communities. It is a mind bending thing to think about, that is that audiences could be niche, but also be global.
I am very hopeful that this content will be very sophisticated. It will reach rather large audiences because we are talking about a global population, rather than a regional or national population. And they will be more attuned to the interests of the group. We have seen this unfolding in the US market where niche cable networks are becoming probably successful because they attract audiences which are legible and understandable to advertisers.
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
DAVID SPEERS: One or two questions just at the back.
ANNA: I am Anna and I’m from Red Bee Media. I don't see the things that you're talking about leading to less sexism in the media. The images I seen in the magazines, TV, film, they seem to be increasingly sexist. For example, the graphic of the ‘Twilight’ movie. The boys have their own fan club, nobody knows the girl. We see the girls of the Playboy Mansion, ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’… It is becoming more and more extreme.
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: Things are not yet responding to the information being received from social media. It will fit once again with comfortable, demographic boxes. That is one reason why we still see very sexist fare coming out of Hollywood and production companies all around the world. My vision is for five years from now, and how the shift will change between now and then. I think a lot of convincing will have to happen and advertisers and advertising agencies will have to change their ad business. They will have to change expectations. That is when we are going to see a very refreshing change.
People in this room will become convinced that this is the new method of understanding audiences. They will be a part of the shift, and it will be in a good direction.
DAVID SPEERS: Last question - up there? We will take the last question now.
DANIELLE: Thank you very much for the great talk, my name is Danielle. I work for FOX SPORTS. I wanted to ask a critical question about the measurement of social networks. What measures can be used? Is Nielsen taking the leadership in being able to identify where the niche communities are?
JOHANNA BLAKLEY: Nielsen is definitely making adaptations. But they are very slow, I think, in promoting information as a way of disseminating content. It is online companies which have been more aggressive in understanding engagement online. That is the tricky thing, to understand how engaged somebody is on a piece of content online. It’s based on a million potential factors. How long they watch the video, whether they fast forward, how many people they share it with, whether they provide a comment - what is the relative value of each kind of input? To what degree should media companies respond to that input in order to adjust what it is they are serving? Or adjust the content they are producing? Companies like Nielsen are trying to get on board the boat, but it is a slow process. It is more the online native companies who realise it is the future.
DAVID SPEERS: I would like to welcome Bruce Mann, CEO of XYZnetworks, to present the ASTRA Pioneer award.
BRUCE MANN: Thank you. ASTRA believes in recognising the outstanding achievements of individuals in the subscription television industry. This recognition is formalised each year through the presentation of this award. The recipient is determined by the board, in recognition of talent, leadership and contributions to the overall success of the Australian subscription television industry.
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
This year’s recipient has had a distinguished career, working in Channel 9 and Channel 10, then moving to executive roles working for News Ltd, PBL and the Nine Network for a decade before moving to subscription television in 1996. He helped establish, as the first CEO, the first major advertising arm, MCN. In 2000, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of FOX SPORTS, then a single channel operation which has transformed into the market leading sport broadcast group, Premier Media Group. Today they produce FOX SPORTS 1HD, 2HD, 3HD, FOX SPORTS 1, 2 and 3, FUELTV and the HOWTO channel. They also have foxsports.com.au and distribute FOX SPORTS digital in pubs and clubs. Premier Media Group produces many hours of television a day.
He has been a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for years and has served on the board of Channel 10. Enough of the formalities. He is known as "Big Red" and is a passionate Queensland supporter, especially during the State of Origin. What is less known about him is that he does an amazing impersonation of Tony Barber! His great aunt is Ginger Rogers, hence the red hair! I would now like to present the award to a highly respected leader and someone I consider a friend. The recipient of the ASTRA Pioneer award is... David Malone.
(Applause)
DAVID MALONE: Thank you for those kind words, Bruce. I think QLD have won the last five years! NSW needs to lift their game.
When you hear your career laid out like that in a couple of minutes, it is quite daunting. But I have had a great ride and enjoyed every moment of it. Listening to that presentation and hearing what is ahead of us is also fairly daunting, but I'm sure the people in this room are capable of taking this industry forward.
I would like to say how honoured I am and privileged. There are a lot of people who are pioneers and have built this industry to what it is today. I reflect back on 1996 when I first joined FOXTEL. I was employed as their sales director. To give you a sense of how dynamic the industry has been, I was there for four weeks looking at the possibility of being a sales director at FOXTEL and within six weeks we were setting up a joint-venture company for which I was becoming the CEO to start ad sales for subscription television in Australia.
With grit and determination we have created an astounding industry. In 1996 the industry I came into had only just over 2000 subscribers. In those days we had five distributors and we were producing just a few more than 30 channels. The business has transformed and I am so pleased to have been part of that process and to work alongside really amazing people.
It has been an amazing journey. It has been full of challenge. But it has given me the opportunity to work with some terrific people. I didn't want to go through - there are so many people I could name - but I would like to recognise a lot of people. The members of the ASTRA board. The terrific work that Petra has done. I would like to recognise Kim Williams and John Porter. We have spent a lot of time working with those organisations preparing new deals and new channels. Some of the individuals that worked with me in the early days like Leigh Monti, Peter Hudson - this was a business that started from scratch. It took a great deal of creativity and imagination and works to get that business started. When I see what has been created in the MCN businesses today and what Anthony Fitzgerald and his team have created, it makes me very proud to have been part of that
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.
small beginning. It is a great credit to them what has been achieved in recent years.
If I talk about my time at FOX SPORTS, I had a colleague who was basically my partner through the time I have been there - a tremendous asset, a tremendous friend, and really great partner, Jon Marquard. I must recognise my assistant, Belinda, who I would like to give a round of applause to. While I am up here receiving this award, she has done countless hours of hard work supporting me, often in the background, to allow myself and our business to prosper in the way that we have. I am absolutely humbled when I think of the other people across the industry. I am proud to be receiving this award today. I am excited about the future of the industry going forward. There are a lot of other people in the industry here today. We have a bright future ahead. I wish you all well, and thank you very much!
DAVID SPEERS: Congratulations, and that is where the Women in Television session is going to draw to a close. For the rest of the day, enjoy. Please, once again thank all of our speakers and award winner this morning.
(Applause)
DISCLAIMER: This document has been compiled through captioning and should not be viewed as an official transcript.