Podcasts about stop funding hate

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023 on Saturday 28 October at Church House, London. ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION The self-image of Western societies as cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant has collapsed of late, with a darker view taking hold of people as extreme, hate-filled and hurtful. For example, in the wake of the Hamas attacks on Israel, anti-Semitism – ‘the oldest hatred' – has come forcefully into public view. Accordingly, controlling ‘hate speech' has become a major focus for critics and campaigners, as well as legislators and regulators. They proceed in the belief that, as one Guardian commentator put it: ‘Words of hate create an ethos of hate, an atmosphere of hate, a political, social Petri dish of hate. Eventually, spoken words become deeds.' Campaigners say escalating incidences of hate justify interventions. The most recent published date show 155,841 offences recorded in the year to March – up 26 per cent from the previous year – with hate crimes against transgender people seeing the biggest increase, jumping by 56 per cent since last year. Meanwhile, in the past five years, the number of recorded non-crime hate incidents (NCHI) has grown to 120,000. Critics say the nebulous definition and subjective interpretation of hate, which is largely in the eye of the victim or reporter, is trivialising such ‘crimes'. But is there more to this issue than definitional disarray? Some say the problem is being inflated by ‘fishing' exercises. The Citizen's Advice Bureau, for example, says ‘it is always best' to ‘act early' and report incidents even if ‘unsure whether the incident is a criminal offence… or serious enough to be reported'. Meanwhile, Police Scotland has promised to set up a new unit to tackle ‘hate crimes' such as misgendering and denying men access to ladies' toilets. Some say that what is labelled ‘hate speech' is increasingly being weaponised to silence opponents and narrow viewpoint diversity. Groups such as Stop Funding Hate aim to persuade advertisers to pull support from broadcasters and publications on the grounds that views aired spread hate and division. More broadly, fuelled by identity politics, competing groups too often accuse other identities of hate and bigotry – demonising those we disagree with is a tactic used across the political spectrum. On one side, people are labeled hateful TERFs, gammon, alt-right or xenophobic, while the other side are hate-driven snowflakes, misogynists, Remoaners, pinko commies and cry-bullies. What are the prospects of making political exchange less toxic and productive, if labelling those we disagree with as hate-mongers continues to escalate? How should defenders of freedom best make the case for free speech over hate speech? How should we understand what counts as hate speech, and how do we account for its rise to become central to how Western societies are organising their legal systems and public life? SPEAKERS Kate Harris co-founder and trustee, LGB Alliance; formerly Brighton Women's Centre and Brighton Women's Aid Eve Kay executive producer unscripted; International Emmy winner; Realscreen and Critics Choice Award winner; Creative Arts Emmy winner Winston Marshall musician; writer; podcast host, Marshall Matters; founding member, Mumford & Sons Faisal Saeed Al Mutar founder and president, Ideas Beyond Borders Martin Wright director, Positive News; formerly editor-in-chief, Green Futures; former director, Forum for the Future CHAIR Alastair Donald co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; convenor, Living Freedom; author, Letter on Liberty: The Scottish Question

Welcome to episode 46 of the Weekly Sceptic! This week: -Hypocrisy abounds in the Huw Edwards scandal -Stop Funding Hate turn out to be quite hateful, as they are accused of antisemitism -A Conservative councillor is suspended for saying Pride is a sin -London's famous Trocadero is set to be turned into a mosque  -Andrew Tate is attacked by conservative commentators  -Nick and Toby invent a new digital currency called ‘Britcoin'  Plus the usual madness that is ‘Peak Woke'  Sponsored by: Thor Holt: http://LinkedIn.com/in/thorholt  07906 321593  Stack Assistant: thestackassistant@pm.me   To advertise on one of the fastest growing podcasts in the world drop Nick or Toby a line on: thedailysceptic@gmail.com   Please go to https://dailysceptic.org and make a donation so we can continue to bring you all this high quality content.  Subscribe to Nick's podcast – the Current Thing – by going here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-current-thing/id1671573905  https://open.spotify.com/show/3AMjSzTSQvkiQMaxrqJ8YQ?si=b603a4e066294449  https://currentthingpod.podbean.com 
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Mike Isaacson: Lügenpresse! [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism's secret codes These are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim's rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today, we're talking about the lying press with Jonathan Hardy, professor of communications and media at the University of Arts, London. His most recent book, Branded Content: The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing, explores the world of branded content, particularly native advertising or sponsored content–longform marketing copy made to look like news items. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hardy. Jonathan Hardy: Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here. Mike: It's great to have you. So I'm really excited to talk about marketing with you because that's the industry I'm in now, and I do have some ethical issues with some of the techniques that we use. Now I write in the B2B space, selling services to business owners and officers, so I don't super have a problem with what I do–you know, manipulating business owners into buying things. So reading your book, what comes up again and again is that most of these marketing techniques aren't new, but the digital age has made them more invasive and persistent. Can you talk a bit about how digitization has changed the advertising world? Jonathan: Sure. Well, it's done so definitely in a great many ways but I'll talk about some key ones that really relate to the work I've been doing on branded content. In the 20th century, through most of the 20th century, we had a model that I call advertising integration with separation, which means that the advertising appeared in the same vehicles as media. When you looked at a magazine or a newspaper, you turned the page and it's editorial, you turn the page, it's advertising. Or the adverts that appeared between programs on television and radio. So we had integration, but often some quite strict rules and strict practices that kept advertising and media separate. So what we're seeing in the digital age is an intensification of two tendencies which face in opposite directions. One is towards integration, so advertising getting baked into media content and integrated with it; product placement all the way through to influencer marketing, branding content and so on. But the other trend is disaggregation, advertising getting decoupled from media. Because essentially in the digital age, advertisers didn't need–as some of them put it–to pay the premium prices to put their ads in media content. They could track users around the internet. So these are trends going in opposite directions obviously, right? One is about integration, the other one is about disaggregation. But I argue that they have one really common power, which is that they indicate the growing strength of marketers over media. Media that rely on advertising revenue are having to become more and more dependent, satisfying advertisers who want to integrate their content so that people will engage with it. And they're also desperate because of these other trends of losing ad revenue coming from disaggregation to kind of, again, appeal as much as they can. So what we're seeing is a strengthening of marketer power in the digital age. Mike: So my intention with this episode was to give a deep dive into how things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal could have happened. To start, let's get some technical details. We're talking mostly about inbound marketing today. So before we get into advertising techniques and stuff, what is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? Jonathan: Sure. Well, I'll talk about that, Mike. But we should acknowledge there's some confusion here, because these terms are not always used to talk about the same things. I think one really valuable aspect is this idea of push and pull, right? If you're pushing out messages, this is known as outbound marketing. You're sort of pushing your message out to reach people. If you on the other hand create great content that people come to you for to engage with, that's pulling. And that's known as inbound. So, so far, so good. That makes sense to me. But this is used in other ways too, and I think that illustrates actually a broader point which is that marketers, not surprisingly, are often in a competitive struggle to be on the side of the new and the innovative, and not the old and the tired. So some versions of inbound and outbound marketing I think get a bit problematic here. Because outbound in some versions is kind of associated with scattergun marketing. Right? The opposite of inbound as highly targeted aiming at particular people. And I don't really buy that. You know, marketers sometimes talk about spray and pray, for instance, you know? Chucking out messages. But quite honestly, most of the time modern marketers don't do that because they can't afford to do that. So I don't really buy the argument that outbound is untargeted. I think that's misleading. What's a bit more helpful from all of this, and actually quite a crucial issue, is if you like the challenges for a thing called push marketing. The challenge is when people are not engaging with traditional advertising forms and pushing them out, and the need to come up with more engaging content; either because it's more entertaining or it's more informative. And I think that aspect of inbound is important. Mike: So when it comes to inbound marketing, it's all about the buyer journey or the marketing funnel. Can you talk a bit about the theory behind the marketing funnel? Jonathan: Yeah, sure. I often test this out on students, but if you were studying advertising in the 20th century, you might have come across a model called AIDA, which was a mnemonic, helps you remember some important fundamentals. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. And it kind of summed up this idea of what's called in modern terms, a marketing funnel or a customer journey. Sort of how if you're a brand, people start off with awareness and then become more interested and motivated all the way up to purchase. That's essentially what the marketing funnel means. Just to relate it to branded content for a moment, it was often argued in the past that brands branded content, which means content that's produced or funded by brands, was particularly associated with that early stage–building brand awareness. But if you speak to people in the industry, they say it's not really true. Branded content is the content that serves people right across the customer journey. So if you think someone becomes more interested and they want to find more information about the product, for example, I think they're right and I think that's– We're often thinking about a new world where brands are involved in kind of thinking, "What are the information needs? What are the communication needs of consumers at every point?" And engaging with it. And amongst other things, that's breaking down some old divisions between what we might call advertising and customer services. And as an academic, I'm really interested. I'm critical of a lot of what's going on, but I'm interested in how that speaks to a changing world and convergence across communications. Mike: Where I work, we definitely use branded content across the buyer journey and we use different kinds of content for different points along the journey. So for instance, we do more informative content for when you're in the awareness stage. Whereas when you're in the purchasing stage, we hit you more with salesy content. Because that's the point where you're trying to just hear about the benefits and decide upon a final product. Jonathan: Yeah exactly. Mike: Can you talk a little bit about the software that's used to track customers? Because that's something that I don't think most people are aware about, the CRM software. Jonathan: Yeah. CRM means customer relations management software. Some of your listeners might be aware of software like Salesforce, which tracks relations between a company and its clients, or including its prospects. So yeah, customer relations management is a huge area. One of the things I looked at interestingly was the annual reports of what are called the holding companies. These are the really big groups that own advertising agencies and PR agencies. And they've been in a battle for survival and for their presence in companies, and they're often fighting alongside companies like Accenture who are offering companies all sorts of other data services. So it's a kind of interesting world in which the traditional advertisers are maneuvering to cover more ground because that ground's becoming more and more important to companies. And definitely, all the data around customers and other people in the chain is a really important battleground for these firms. Mike: Okay, and we'll talk a bit about what gets fed into the CRM in a bit. So the company I work for, we do exclusively owned media and digital ads, pretty much all inbound with an occasional email campaign here or there. But there's other forms of digital advertising, too. Let's start by talking about what owned media is. What do advertisers mean when they talk about owned media? Jonathan: Okay. This is content that's produced and published by the brand or the marketer themselves. It's got a really long history. In the United States at the end of the 19th century, the farm implements company John Deere had a magazine called The Furrow, for example. So what we now call contract publishing by a brand. Lots of other examples; the Michelin Guide to restaurants, the Guinness Book of Records, and so on. Brands have been involved in producing their own content for a long time, but this really got turbocharged in the internet age. With the early internet, brands started to create their own websites and web pages. They've now moved right across social media, for example. And some brands have become essentially media companies. So a brand like Red Bull, which is involved right across kind of music, sports, etc, is producing content of all kinds to support the brand. Your listeners, again, one of the models that's really helpful for students and might be of interest to your listeners is called PESO. PESO stands for paid, which is a term for advertising essentially, right? The brand pays and controls. Earned, which stands for traditional public relations. You work in PR, you write a great story or a feature, it gets carried by the media, you didn't pay. That's called earned media. The S is for shared. Used to be called viral, but shared is a much nicer word for things that get moved and amplified across the internet and social media. And then the O is owned. And what PESO tells us is, these things are still separate but they're overlapping and converging in the middle. Mike: Right. So the problem with owned media is that you have to get it in front of people. What are the various ways that advertisers try to get their own media to an audience? Jonathan: Well, I'm just gonna... If you don't mind, I'll just pick up this word 'problem', Mike, because it might help to explain where I come from on these issues. I think the industry is essentially looking for how to do marketing better, right? And quite a lot of people who are in academia, in universities like myself, are really asking and answering the same question. Their aim is really to help marketers do better and do research on it. And I call all of that affirmative. So the problem from that framing is how can we do this better? How can we learn how to be more effective? But I would self-describe myself as coming from a critical tradition, a tradition of critical political economy. And we ask a different question about “problem.” We say, "Are there problems in the way communications are organized and delivered? Are there problems for communication users? Are there problems for societies? And if there are, if things aren't great out there, let's identify them, understand them, and think about how to change them." So when I come to questions of problems, that's really the kind of dominant lens that I look at them. But obviously like anyone in order to understand things better, you've got to listen to everyone in this space; to industry practitioners, and I work a lot with them. So that's just a wider framing, but actually to answer your question. Well, it's interesting because historically, they've struggled. Right? Brands have kind of invested in great content and then found surprise, surprise! People aren't always interested in going to corporate websites and finding this stuff. So part of this story has been brands producing content that they need advertising, social media advertising, to say to people, "Hey, we've done this. Here's a snippet, but come and look at the full amount." That's an interesting feature. But essentially, in this space brands would say, "Well, you've got to produce material of value back to this language of sort of pull. People have to be engaged, entertained, and/or informed. Those are the key things you need to do to solve the problem." But the other thing we'll come on to is when the marketing messages get disguised and buried. Just to give you another take on problems, I think there are problems about brand's own content. Sometimes that can be really entertaining and I enjoy it like anyone else, but there are problems essentially because it's a brand voice. And sometimes that brand voice can be louder than other voices. And that essentially is an issue. But actually, I see less problems with brands and content compared to the material that's weaved into media content: sponsored, editorial, native advertising, and so on. Mike: Okay. What about things like SEO, SMO, paid search, display ads? That sort of thing. Jonathan: Sure. SEO, search engine optimization, is a practice of trying to improve your ranking traditionally in search results, but in wider areas of content so that it gets visibility and people engage with it. Right? Because we all know people don't turn mostly past the first page of search ranking results. And as I know you know, this divides into what are called relatively good practices and bad practices, sometimes referred to as white hat–in other words, everyone does this to try and be effective–and blackhat, which is nefarious 'don't do this'. What that sums up is a cat-and-mouse game between marketers and agencies and the platforms, because the platforms are concerned to ensure the integrity and quality of search results because they depend on that trust and therefore want to move some of these black practices off to the margins, if not get rid of them entirely. But we should remember, of course, these platforms are not just there to serve the consumer. They're there to generate ad revenue. And some of the tensions that play out in that space are important to note, too. But I'd say for me, again, there's a whole literature on how to do search engine optimization and if you were teaching people how to be marketers, I'd certainly say they need to understand that. One of the bigger concerns for me is about awareness. How aware are consumers of things like sponsored search results? There was some really important research done by the UK regulator for communications, Ofcom, which looked at young people and found that a majority of them couldn't recognize the difference between sponsored listings and so-called organic ones. Only a third of young people aged 12 to 15, for example, knew which search results on Google were sponsored, were adverts, or organic. That's a really, I think, important issue and an ongoing issue. Mike: Yeah, especially when it comes to children. Let's dig a little deeper into SEO. What kind of techniques do content producers both in media and advertising use to boost their search engine results? Jonathan: Oh, wow. There's a lot of terms and some great names out there to describe some of this stuff: keyword stuffing, cloaking, bait and switch. What they really have in common is artificially enhancing the value of your content without the intrinsic worth and value that would come from people's clicks and engagement. Okay? So there are a whole series from mildly artificial through to downright criminal and exploitative means to do it. One of the more serious, for example, is this great term brandjacking, where someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of a brand for the purposes of inquiring their followers, their brand equity as they say. Mike: It can be less than that too. It can just be, for instance, putting a brand's name as one of your keywords in paid search. That's brand jacking too. Jonathan: Exactly, Yeah, exactly. Mike: Yeah. So keyword stuffing, this idea of throwing search terms into content. One other thing though that bothers me a little bit where I work is the way that we go after keywords. The content that we write is pretty much exclusively based on whether there is search for it. And so as a result–I guess in the aggregate–you end up with huge patches of knowledge that just are not covered by free media. Jonathan: Yeah, I agree. I think one of the fundamental questions here is, "What about brand voice in a world where that voice comes with resources that are not widely shared?" Right? In order to be a marketer, you have resources of money. And money buys you the chance to speak. Not everyone in our world gets the chance to speak and be heard, but brands can do it through their money. Now, of course there are small brands, there are radical organizations who advertise. But we also know that the concentration of voice is often in the hands of the concentration of wealth. Which means some people, some brands, some interests, some ideas get privileged over others. And that is a really fundamental concern and it drives, for me, this issue of saying, "Well, what's the settlement for society between communications and brands?" In the old world, I mentioned the 20th century, we had some settlements. We had some rules which said, "We're going to really make sure that you know this is an advert and we're going to keep some controls on where advertising appears and how much appears and what's advertised." And the digital age is throwing up challenges all the time because new spaces, new opp,ortunities emerge for brands. And the rules are often some way behind. So those are the, kind of fundamental issues. I think voice is a really good term to use to get into that. Mike: Right. So in addition to the black hat and white hat, there are gray hat techniques which kind of straddle the boundaries of marketing ethics. One example is the subject of your book, which is native ads, sponsored content, advertorials. So, what are these? What is sponsored content? We've talked about it a bit, we haven't really defined it. Jonathan: Sure. Well, lots of different forms. But what's common to a lot of the forms I examined is in the way the industry would describe it, that the advertising is blended into the media environment in which it appears. Okay? The advertising is integrated and blended in. And I think a good way in is–building on what I was just saying to you, really–is to start by asking some questions about payment and control. Those are really key elements in tracking this story. In the old world, we had advertorials in newspapers and magazines. We still do, of course, but they're a feature of the old world. And the brand paid and controlled the content. It was an ad, but it was an ad that started to blend in to its surroundings. But what's happened in the digital age is that's taken off across all media. So we have native advertising as a term for adverts, which are also paid for and controlled by the brand, but are coming into your newsfeed on mobile social media and so on. Then we have sponsored content. And here, things get a bit more complicated because these questions of payment and control get widened. Because sometimes the brand pays and controls, sometimes the brand pays and the media, the publisher, or an influencer for example says, "No, we control the content." And sometimes it's a blend of both. And fundamentally across that spectrum, we don't have clear and consistent labeling that is readily understood by people to know exactly what's happening here. So we don't always know when a brand paid and shaped content in this space, and that's a fundamental problem. Sorry, but can I just put in–I don't know if this will be helpful or not-- but an example I was going to give from the UK is that we have a London paper called The Evening Standard. And an investigation by an online publication, openDemocracy, discovered that Syngenta, which is a US agribusiness firm, was paying for favorable editorial in that newspaper. But those stories weren't being clearly labeled as paid for and sponsored by Syngenta. And obviously, that's a big deal because Syngenta was at the time being sued by a large number of American farmers, which of course didn't feature in this more positive coverage. So here we have some problems of labeling and identifying content, we have some problems of what kind of story gets shown, but we also have an issue which goes to the heart of this where the brand could pay but the publication could say, "No, we're in control. So we don't have to label that as an ad." Mike: Right. And there's also the other problem of advertisers' control over media in general, where if there's an unfavorable story they could have it pulled. And we've seen instances of this, too. Jonathan: Yeah, it's funny. And just to share with you, sometimes when you're talking to students particularly as a professor, it's good to show them that you may make mistakes, too. So I shared the fact that, you know, I'm in a tradition which has seen advertiser influence on the media as essentially a negative force, right? And looked at, kind of, "Well, when does this happen? And how does it happen? And how is it resisted?" You know, sometimes it's resisted because journalists say, "We're not going to have it." Chrysler company told American magazine editors it wanted to be told when they were putting its ad next to content it thought was controversial. The American Society of Magazine Editors said, "We're not doing that. We stand up for free media." So, those kinds of stories. But I said to the students I have to update this. Because we're in an era where advertisers are using their power and clout, sometimes for positive and progressive ends–ends that many of you might agree with. So you know, Unilever doing an ad ban on Facebook. The current ban or semi-ban, if you like, in which one of these major holding companies Omnicom is, quote, "Advising its clients,” so it's not quite a ban, but it's advice, “not to advertise on Twitter because look what Musk is doing, who knows how this is going to play out." So in its language, it's concerned with brand safety. It's advising marketers to produce a boycott. So what I'm saying is I come from a tradition which sees advertising influence as negative. You could argue and it's important to recognize there's some positive things happening in these stories, brands doing good, right? Calling out hate speech and racism and xenophobia. That story, of course, isn't just because those brands are angelic. It's because they've been put under powerful pressure from campaigns, from #StopHateForProfit in the US, Sleeping Giants, we have Stop Funding Hate in the UK. ANd also, frankly there's still a problem. Because however good they do, they still have enormous power and they can still use it in unaccountable ways. But anyway, there's a story that just acknowledges that it's sometimes complicated. Mike: So native advertisement's gone beyond traditional news media in the digital age. Where else do we find sponsored content? Jonathan: Well, we find it right across what we could call audio-visual. We've had a long history of product placement in films and television programs but, you know, there's some big questions about where that's going next. Amazon is a company that sells things, but it's chock full of audiovisual content, sponsored brand videos, and so on. So as this world evolves, as we get Amazon's Alexa and audio marketing, we're going to have more and more content in which there's a brand role and a brand presence. Another big example is the Beta Verses. I was at a recent conference with advertising lawyers and they were kind of half-jokingly saying, "What's going to happen in this world? Are people going to walk around in T-shirts with #AdOn if it's sponsored? How is the brand presence going to be seen and identified?" And again just on this, I'd like to go back to something that was written in 1966. The code of the International Chamber of Commerce is kind of the big international code, the self-regulatory code for marketers. And it said, at the time, "Advertisements should be clearly distinguishable as such, whatever their form and whatever the medium used." Again, I like to share with you and my students, that's great language. That includes TikTok. It was written in 1966. It's really clear what it's asking for. And it went on to say, "When published into medium post that also contains news and editorial opinion, an advertisement should be so presented that the consumer can readily distinguish it from editorial matter." That's interesting because it didn't even need to add that second sentence. It's just indicating that it really underscores the importance in some of our media like news and editorial that it really matters that we can trust the content and it's not an ad. That was 1966, I don't think that describes the world today, I don't think that rule even in its current form holds, but it does exist to call on. Mike: Yeah, I know. We now have companies that are flooding their own reviews with positive reviews to boost their rankings on Google and stuff. I do want to talk about something that skeeves me out in what I do, and that's ad retargeting. So, what is ad retargeting? Jonathan: Retargeting ads are a form of online targeted advertising that is served to people because they visited a particular website. We all know this, you kind of go to a website, look at a pair of shoes, go on to some other websites, and you're being flooded by adverts for those shoes. What on earth is going on? And the answer has been third-party cookies. So to introduce another term, cookies are bits of data that get put onto your browser, so they can then follow you as you move around the rest of the internet. And those so-called third-party cookies are sold for advertising purposes; they build up a profile of you so that you can be advertised to. And that's essentially what's gone on in retargeting. Now, the world of cookies is undergoing a change at the moment, which is interesting. But all your listeners will know this experience, as you say, of ad targeting. And it's still very much present in our experience of the internet. Mike: Yeah. So basically the cookies originally were intended, as I understood it, to allow websites to remember what you have, like in your shopping cart on digital marketing or on a digital storefront. And they kind of morphed into this weird thing where they can now track you across the Internet and add things to your profile so they have more and more information about you. Okay. Jonathan: Yeah. Well, there's an important difference, Mike. The first type you're talking about is called first-party cookies. And the important thing is, again, many of your listeners will say, "Actually, some of what they provide is quite helpful to me." You know, you go to a website, you put something in a shopping basket, you don't want to pay for it. But when you come back to that site, it's still in your shopping basket, right? That's a cookie that's controlled by the website itself. And often, frankly that can be a help to us. It's still collecting data. It still raises privacy issues.But it's often helpful. Third-party is different. For example, you go to a publisher who signed up to Google's AdSense. You go there because you want to read a story, but what gets put onto your browser is a third-party cookie. And that is being used to sell advertising to reach you. Mike: The third party being AdSense, right? Jonathan: Yeah. Mike: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about market research. How have market research techniques advanced in the digital age? Jonathan: I mentioned there's this challenge to third-party cookies. And that's been driven by a number of factors. It's been driven partly because with more use of mobile, people are on different devices, it's harder to track them. It's been driven by privacy pressures which have led to important new regulation, particularly for us in Europe. And I'd say that from the UK, we don't know exactly what's going to happen next. In fact, we have a government that's probably going to relax rules that apply in Europe. But from 2018, Europe said, "You need permission to collect cookies." And there was a really deep intake of breath across the advertising and marketing and platform industry saying, "This is going to destroy the model of internet advertising." So you need permission, and we have strong rules now that demand it. As I understand it in the US, there's no federal-level regulation. But there are states–California is an example–which have brought in new rules for consent to kind of strengthen privacy and protection. So, third-party cookies are on the slide. And to answer your question about data, one of the things that is becoming more and more important is so-called first-party data. So companies, brands are collecting as much material as they can about their customers so that they can market to them. So we're seeing a huge industry growing up around digital data in the areas of customer data, financial data, and operational data. Mike: In addition to collecting their own market research data, businesses can also pay for data. So, what kind of marketing data are businesses and ad agencies buying? Jonathan: What marketers are interested, as I say, in customer, financial, operational, derive from different sources. So yeah, they're buying up to create a richer tapestry of their clients and potential clients from their own data first party and from third-party data. And we're seeing the whole ecology of advertising and marketing and media changing with the growth of these firms that are basically data harvesters and data brokers. Mike: And are advertisers the only one that are buying these data. Jonathan: Certainly not. Political movements and organizations who want richer data on consumers to target them are also absolutely buying up this data too. Mike: Okay, so now I think we've discussed is everything you'd need to know to understand how the Cambridge Analytica scandal worked. So let's talk about it. So unlike the UK, the US did not have widely publicized hearings regarding Cambridge Analytica, so a lot of my US audience will probably be unfamiliar with what happened. So before we get into the details of how the scandal worked, big picture, what was the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Jonathan: Well, I like to think of this as kind of a bundle of scandals actually because it involved failures across quite a range of organizations. Cambridge Analytica, this company that gathered and used data and sold it on to political campaigns, but other players too. I mean, it's one of the biggest scandals for Facebook. So essentially what happens–and this as a practice goes back to 2015–is a Cambridge-based researcher puts out an app which collects the data on US Facebook users. But not just them–the people who willingly took part–it accesses the profiles of all their friends and family. So in the end, data on about 87 million Americans–about a quarter of the whole Facebook audience in the US–were collected. Mike: Can you describe the app that they put out? Jonathan: Yeah. Sure, Mike. The researcher was called Aleksandr Kogan, and he put out an app called This Is Your Digital Life. It was a psychological profile app in June 2014. Either way, one group that comes out reasonably good from this story and I'm particularly proud of this or pleased about this because it is close to my heart, was the Ethics Committee at Cambridge University, because that rejected an application by this academic and also made the damning judgment that Facebook's approach to consent fell far below the ethical expectations of the university. In other words, it was deeply unimpressed with Facebook's provision. But of course having said that, we could say Cambridge University has questions to answer because this was still an academic who undertook this work. So it was an app, people who took part gave consent, but they didn't give consent for their entire network to be data scraped in this way. The crucial thing about the scandal is that data was then used and sold on to right-wing politicians in the US in various forms, to Ted Cruz for his presidential campaign, and later for Donald Trump, because it produced rich, detailed profiles of American voters, which allowed micro-targeting. And we've seen this more and more, but it's a kind of early example of what kinds of micro targeting can be done. In other words, you identify a voter who's going to be particularly triggered by rights to own and carry a gun, for example, but you trigger a different message to a different voter to mobilize them. And often those messages can be actually flat contradiction that can be at odds, but it doesn't matter. It's whatever works to build your political coalition. I think the other thing just to highlight from this is this is often framed as a digital story, but it's older and broader than that. It's about power and money. We've had lots of lobbyists who engage in political campaigns and, again, we might all agree it's okay to promote your candidate and do marketing techniques. But it's not okay to do the dark arts of demolishing a candidate through fake news and misinformation, for example. Some of your listeners might be interested; I'm in the UK, I have a great shoutout for the Channel 4 News, a public service news channel which did amongst other things, an undercover investigation in which executives from Cambridge Analytica are sort of bragging, because they don't think they're being filmed, about how they've intervened in democratic elections. It's a deeply disturbing portrait of how money and power can be used to undermine democratic processes. Mike: Okay. And Cambridge Analytica wouldn't have been nearly as successful with what they did without the plethora of right-wing content farms pumping out slanted and misleading news content. Talk about the online ecosystem that existed in 2015-2016 that allowed these websites to thrive. Jonathan: Yeah, one kind of crystallizing example, again some of your listeners will remember, was an infamous example of a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency, which spent thousands of dollars on social media ads and promoted posts in an effort to influence the US elections in 2016. So misinformation, fake authors, pretending to be Texans when you're actually in a content farm as part of the kind of quasi-state corporate world of Russia.  How did that all happen? It partly happens because of the deeper logics and business models of the internet, right? You know, promoting controversy and hate, driving traffic and engagement. It happened because of lax rules on who's the source and sponsor of marketing messages. Lots of things caused it but yeah, that was the ecosystem at the time. And I think, again, before we just jump to the digital, this happens because of money. And so much of the right which can often appear to be kind of grassroots is, as we know, funded by very rich corporate donors who often don't like to be particularly transparent about who they are and how they operate. And the left progressive forces, which are more rooted in popular movements, in the end have less resource. We don't have the power of capital. We have the power of trade unions and collective work, but relatively weakly resourced. And that's a key issue. Mike: And the content farming, it wasn't just from the Russian state, it was also private sector too. I mean, there was money to be made here. So can you talk a bit about how that was profitable? Jonathan: Yeah. Well, if you generate clicks, if you produce clickbait, then the algorithmic world recognizes success at the levels of engagement and eyeballs, and that can be monetized. We should remember that's often not the primary motivation for political campaigns, it was information, disinformation, and mobilizing people to vote for candidates. But yeah, there's an economy built around it as well which meant advertisers became very aware that they were often not choosing to support right wing publications because of the way the algorithms were driving traffic towards popular and shared content. And that's one of the reasons we saw the first wave, if you like, of boycotts and withdrawals from big brands like– big companies, rather, like Unilever who were being advised that their brand safety was being compromised by the sites that were appearing on and that many of their consumers were deeply unhappy about hate speech being connected with their advertising and advertising dollars. Mike: Yeah. So one of the things that happened too as a result of these boycotts was that major social media and search platforms kind of reformed their algorithms to try to suppress this misinformation from proliferating. So, how has the digital media landscape changed since the 2016 presidential election and since Brexit? Jonathan: Well, as I say, I think we should recognize that it's often been civil society power, political power, these campaigns that have forced marketers to divest. This hasn't just come from corporate voices; it's come from popular campaigns which absolutely deserve recognition. But as I say, I think marketers using their power for good is all well and good, if you like, but it's still an exercise in a marketer's power. And that power is ultimately private and in my view, unaccountable. I mean, a defender would say, "What are you talking about? The market decides that consumers don't like it. That's a powerful force on brands." To which you could say, "Well, consumer power does matter." Right? Ad blocking is a really good example of consumer power in this world. But consumer power is dispersed, it's not concentrated. And it's not sufficient very often to challenge corporate power and interests. So these are all arguments, essentially, for a much stronger public regulation of communications because it shouldn't be left to private power to regulate itself. But nor, however important it is, can we rely on consumers only, you know? Like other people, I believe in the importance of media literacy and better education so we can find our way through this world and decode it, but I also don't think the burden of responsibility should lie on consumers. It should be a principle. If you're big and you're in a communications space, then you act responsibly, and public regulation is the only way to kind of underpin that that is actually done. Relying on self-regulation from powerful forces in this world is not enough. Mike: Yeah. Especially when the advertising techniques are constantly changing and evolving, you can't expect consumers to be privy to new ways of reaching them. So we've talked about various advertising techniques, let's talk a bit about their social implications. What are the consequences we're seeing from the proliferation of owned media? Jonathan: Sure. Well, I like to sum up the whole world of what I call branded content around three problem areas. The first key problem area is around consumer awareness–this principle that we should know when we're being sold to. And that gets the lion's share of attention, actually, from all parties to the discussion. And that's important. It's about labeling and disclosure and identification. But I argue that that attention tends to displace two others. The second big area of concern is around the quality and integrity of the media. I don't think there's enough people in this world who are speaking up for the importance of having media spaces that are free from commercial influence and interference. So that's the second area. And then the third area, which I think is really where the radical voices come in, where the critical tradition I'm part of comes in, is this notion of marketer's power of voice. You know, the significance of a world in which the ability to pay can give you a louder voice. It's not to say we can wish that away, but it is to say that it's a way of thinking about historically that societies have put limits on that. They've said, "This is where advertising can appear. This is how it can appear." And I think we need a conversation about what those rules should be for the 21st century because at the moment, we're in a bit of a hybrid of old rules that are weak and don't work, and new spaces that are opening up. So for me, that's the call of my book, really, to say, "These are deep problems. This isn't just about surface-level techniques; this isn't just about new tools in the marketing toolbox. This is a much more deep reconfiguration of the space between commercial voices, advertising, and communication space, and we need to work out what the rule should be. I put a call in for saying we really need to have a discussion about what a 21st century version of separation–keeping media and advertising apart–would look like. And I say that because of course we can't put it all back in the box, we can't come up with a solution that would have worked in 1960 and say that's going to do it. It isn't going to do it. But I think that's a really key discussion to be had. Where should we be seeking a world which is free or freer from commercial influence and interference? How are we going to create that? How should it be configured and organized? Mike: Yeah. Going back to owned media, I mean, the owned media dominates search results now. It's basically impossible to look something up online unless you're finding it through Wikipedia without having to use corporate blogs. And there's always a limitation to that, right? There's always a wall where they will not give you more information than is necessary to hook you to their services, right? When I farm out my content to freelancers, I actually specifically instruct them that the reader should come away knowing what to do, but not how to do it. And so there's a technique to writing instructional articles that make you feel more helpless, and that's definitely what we aim for in our copy, which I take particular pleasure in making business owners feel helpless and so on and whatever. So let's talk about native. Jonathan: Can I just say, I think that's such an important point and I agree entirely, and it shows that, kind of, you know, this isn't a simple change where we can easily identify the before and after. What you're describing is a kind of world where more and more content comes from an interested party and is underpinned by money and monetizing it as a driver. And we know historically we've relied on content to come from other quarters, right? I'm very proud to work in a university world because that's a world that defends the idea of, "Well, actually we should ask questions that are important for society, not the sponsor, not the company." So that's one side. We've traditionally had media in various traditions, you know, a free press in the US standing up for the idea of independent and impartial, know the advertisers can't call the tune because then we lose something really precious and what it means to do journalism. And all of those alternative sites are weak because for me, this all comes down to these questions of resource, money and power as a way in, so they have relatively less. What are we going to do about it? Well, in Europe some of us defend and advocate for public service media, but also for new forms of public service community media, non-profit, hyperlocal, because those are really important spaces where that other content gets produced. I don't know about you, sometimes it's depressing that we don't link up the networks more effectively. Why don't we have publications that pull together all the non-governmental organizations and civil society groups who are producing great content but can't always get it out to wide audiences? We don't have a very great tradition of connecting the content with the vehicle to promote it amongst, if you like, the left and progressive causes. But plenty of people are thinking about how to do it. And yeah, absolutely, it comes through to other solutions. We need to defend and extend public media–what I call in Europe, public service media. And do that in new ways, too, because some of the old ways have been– Well, PBS in the States and all the problems of corporate funding kind of shrinking what gets said in that space, so a lot to fix too. But I think that's a really important part of the solution. We need non-commercial media, and have to work out how to support and develop it to create that kind of other kinds of information. Mike: So by that same token, open-access journals I think are also really important, too. The fact that so much media now is putting up paywalls, all these academic journals are charging $30-$40 to rent an article, and there's just really no way to get free information that isn't paid for in some way. So let's talk about native. What is the effect of sponsored content on the public? Jonathan: Let me answer that by an example I show my students, which is an Exxon advertorial in the New York Times. Exxon paid for an editorial which said, "Guess what? The solution to the climate crisis isn't the removal of fossil fuels. It's smarter use of our assets." That sums up for me some of the greatest dangers, which is sponsored content amplifies voices who can speak with partiality because they're advocating for themselves, but undermines independent journalism in the process. To give another example, Facebook, as you know, has paid huge sums into lobbying and influencing politicians in Europe because it senses danger, right? Europe has created some quite strong rules on data privacy and on cookies as we discussed earlier. Facebook took out 20 ad-sponsored content items in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. So it sets up stories with charity bosses who say Facebook is great without disclosing that they're financed by Facebook. It has people saying what great things it's doing to kind of cut content, even though it's been pushed out just after the Christchurch massacre, which of course was relayed for hours on Facebook and other social platforms before it was taken down. That's the problem with sponsored content, it strengthens and amplifies voices. And of course there are other problems; it's disguised; it's hidden; people aren't aware of it. We should know who the source of our content is. In fact, just be interested to talk to you because you're working in journalism. I think one of the things I grapple with but would really like to see more debate out is about the disclosure of sources. Now, I know from the Human Rights tradition and so on the absolute importance of protecting a journalist's sources. Because we don't get good stories if journalists can't protect whistleblowers and others. But we need something which protects that important public interest right. That gives readers better guidance to what the provenance, you know, what's behind the story. We could have ingredients in food and drink, but what were the sources? And in particular, we definitely need to know when there's been a paid source underlying a piece of content. So what drives me in that debate is one of the things that happened in the UK was we had a debate about political advertising on Facebook, which said we should be told better when there are political advertising. But that was running alongside another debate about how to save the British press, which was saying let's have more native advertising. So we've had contradictions and gaps in the way these issues have been treated. And I think we should recognize what's happening underneath, which is we don't always know the interests and sources behind our content. And we should do. Particularly when it's either a political voice or a commercial voice. Mike: Yeah. And I want to give a shoutout here to Corey Pein and his book, Live Work Work Work Die, where he talks about how the tech world typically, they don't really concern themselves with following rules and regulations. They just kind of do what they do and then just once regulators catch up to them, they hope they've made enough money where the fines or penalties or whatever is insignificant to how much profits they've made. And we see that with what happened with Facebook and I guess Twitter to some extent where they weren't regulating political advertisements at all. At least in the United States, political advertising has certain rules for financing and stuff that you have to report it and stuff like that. And so in the 2016 election, that was just out the window. And that's been fixed. Facebook now requires that political advertisements are registered as such, and they only get served in certain ways. All right, so there are regulations in place regarding advertising. What safeguards exist to protect the public from nefarious advertisers? Jonathan: I think just to respond to what you were saying, these are kind of almost the deeper myths, the deeper stories that have been told. The story that internet innovation was somehow kind of natural, inescapable, has-to-be-done-this-way. You want change and all these great services, this is what comes with it. It's going to be driven in these ways, we're going to move fast, we're going to trip over the old rules. I don't know about you, I think that is a myth in the making and it doesn't stack up, and it's already fragmenting and under pressure. So when Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg gets into US hearings in the likes of Cambridge Analytica, he has to say something different at that point. He has to say we do stand up for privacy and consumer protection. The problem is he doesn't fully deliver, and perhaps the bigger problem is the grand-sounding statements are there to reassure investors and markets and other stakeholders, but behind the scenes, Facebook carries on paying millions into lobbyists who go and influence politicians to make sure the rules are kept as weak as possible. So that would be my summary. In the space that I've looked at, native advertising and so on, we see a kind of mixed progress. So just taking the United States, 2015 Federal Trade Commission comes in with new rules and guidance on native advertising. And the rules are certainly an improvement: they're sharper; they're clearer. But what happens? Compliance by the industry remains low. Some early studies found 70% of marketers within I think a year of the new guidance weren't compliant. It got a bit better. But all the latest studies show right across publishing or influencer marketing, there's a compliance problem. There's that lobbying problem I mentioned. So the big marketers say, "Yes, we want to be responsible and transparent, it's in our interests that consumers know they've got ads." But actually then go and lobby. And the kind of thing they lobby over is to say, "Leave it to us what the disclosures should be." So what happens is consumer awareness is very low. Lots of the academic studies in this area have found awareness rates of about 10%, right? People being able to fully identify ad-sponsored content in news publications, for example. And it remains very low. So these industry people are kind of saying, "Well, leave it to us. We need to be fitting for the platform." And the result is consumers have low awareness and are confused. And people like me in this debate and in my book say, "We should call this out. We should have– If the objective really was consumer awareness, then we should move to clearer and more consistent labeling." And why I perfectly accept Instagram and Facebook are not the same thing and TikTok is not the same thing, if we had much more consistent labeling, we'd be in a better place. So one of the things I've argued for in Europe, for example, when we have product placement on television, unlike in the US it has to show a sign–a P sign to tell you that there's product placement. And not just at the end of programs as you're used to where the credits roll very quickly, but before and after each ad break. So why don't we have a sign, a hashtag ad, or a B sign for branded content across all branded material? I think that's an important argument to have because I think we're going into a world which is going to become even less recognizable as these new forms and formats emerge. Mike: Okay, so we've talked about some of them already, but what kind of policy gaps do you see with respect to marketing and media? And what do you think we should do to patch them? Jonathan: Well, I must just say it's a lovely time to speak to you and your audience about this because we've just started–I'm very proud of this–a three year research project which is looking into the rules and regulation of branded content. So we have what's called a Branded Content Governance Project and we're looking at the United States, Canada, Mexico, the UK, every country in the European Union, and Australia to kind of track what the rules are and what we can learn from that to do better. When I map this, I see the forces sitting in four areas. There's regulation, public regulation. There's industry self-regulation, when it makes its own rules. There's the power of the market, ad blocking, for example. And there's the power of civil society arguing for better. And I think we're at a point where self-regulation by the industry is failing. And that's becoming recognized not just by activists if you like, but by governments too. So we need a new settlement. And I think that needs a strengthening of public regulation as I've outlined. But I think all the elements need to work together. And that means putting pressure on companies to actually do as they say and strengthen their own self-regulation. Mike: Okay. Let's talk a bit about the stakes. So given the current digital landscape, what do you see the internet looking like if policy does not catch up with advertisers? Jonathan: Yeah. Well, that's a great question. Pretty chastening one, isn't it? There's a famous moment in 1994 where the chairman of Procter & Gamble, Edward Harnes, gets up and does a speech to the American Association of Advertising Agencies. And it basically says, "Hold your nerve. Things are happening, digitalization is about to happen. You could get slaughtered. The digital world could help people bypass ads and evade them. But if you keep your nerve, you can dominate this space." And I don't know about you, Mike, but I feel he was right. [chuckles] We knew this was happening in the early internet, the commercialization of the internet. But that corporate model and that corporate dominance is dominant. It's strong. However, I think we always need to look for sources of hope. And if it's dominant, it's also contested. There are forces challenging it, whether those forces are kind of carving out space for public media as we discussed, or whether like I am with others, we're kind of arguing for the rules to be improved on behalf of consumers and society. So I think we're losing, but classic Gramscian and optimism of the will is required. And to recognise all the things that are being done to highlight the problem and think through solutions. Whether that's very local ones like– I mean, something we haven't mentioned I think is very important is kitemarking, right? Small publications, non-profit or low profit saying, “We're going to signal what standards are to readers." And that's good for the publication but I think it also is good for awareness. It says, "Well, yeah, why is this publication different from these other commercial ones?" Because this is how it engages with advertisers. So I think that's all really important, too. Mike: All right. Well, cool. Well, hopefully, we can save the internet. Thanks, Dr. Hardy, for coming onto the Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the lying press. The book again is Branded Content out from Routledge. Thanks again, Dr. Hardy. Jonathan: Thank you. Mike: If you liked what you heard and want to help us pay our guests and transcriptionist, consider subscribing to The Nazi Lies Patreon. Subscriptions start as low as $2, and some levels come with merch. If you don't want to commit to monthly donations, you can give a one-time donation via PayPal.me/NaziLies or CashApp to $NaziLies. [Theme song]

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.Today's edition features one of the big beasts of Australian media - a rare, full length interview with News Corp Australasia's executive chairman Michael Miller.It's not quite fair to describe Michael Miller as a News Corp lifer. He joined the organisation as a junior marketer in April 1992, but briefly left during the tumultuous reign of Kim Williams. During that short period, he ran APN News & Media (these days known as HT&E) as its shifted its centre of gravity from newspapers to radio. Miller was the man signing the cheques when the company's Australian Radio Network boldly poached Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson from Southern Cross Austereo, and remade the radio landscape.Miller came back to News Corp as executive chairman at the end of 2015. By that point, the worst of the newspaper industry's existential crisis was over, but the business model was far from certain.Since then the company - which publishes The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Courier Mail and The Telegraph news mastheads among many others - has proved the sceptics wrong by succeeding with paid subscriptions. Even as the company cuts 5% of its global workforce to navigate an uncertain economy, news publishing seems in a safer place. In today's conversation, Miller points out that last time Unmade's Tim Burrowes interviewed him on stage, back in 2018, the company had 420,000 subscribers. It's since passed 1m.The business model for news publishing was also boosted by the politically-driven News Media Bargaining Code, which forced Google and Facebook to strike deals with local publishers. Miller offers a warning for the consequences for the industry (and Facebook) if, as seems likely, Facebook's parent company Meta walks away from renewing its deals next year.And Miller points to the next battleground for payment - AI. In the same way that Google and Facebook were asked to pay to deliver content originated from news publishing, Miller says the same argument about ChatGPT is “inevitable” and imminent.The interview also tackles the polarising nature of News Corp's content, how it addresses advertisers boycotts led by the likes of Sleeping Giants and Mad F*****g Witches (“Don't give in to bullies”), and the evolution of its columnists.Miller also puts forward an argument for optimism in the most challenged journalism space: local news.Transcript of Michael Miller interview with Tim Burrowes:Tim Burrowes:My guest has arguably the biggest job in Australian media. Michael Miller is Executive Chairman of News Corp Australia, a role he's held since 2015. He's been with News Corp for most of his career, since joining the company's marketing team 30 years ago, next month. You'll know News Cook from its portfolio of metro news mastheads, including the Telegraph, the Courier Mail, and the Herald Sun for its national title, The Australian, for news website news.com.au, and for its TV news operation, Sky News Australia. The company also has majority stakes in Foxtel Group and in property platform REA Group. Michael Miller has had a front row as News Corp evolved from a newspaper company into something much more complicated.On Monday News Corp held its D_Coded event for digital marketers, which is one reason for the timing of this conversation. Now, Michael, the last time I interviewed you on the record was on stage at Mumbrella360, five years ago believe it or not. Now the title of the keynote you gave that day was Persuading Audiences and Customers to Pay and Stay. Even then, I'm not sure that the whole publishing world was convinced that subscribers could be the main means of funding newspapers. When Rupert Murdoch started the company on that path more than a decade ago now, many, many people predicted that it would not work. Yet here you are. Is it still about getting people to pay and stay?Michael Miller:It is, and many in the industry now have moved to a subscription, an audience funded model, and that whether it be a streamer, whether it be your local out of industry, you've got supermarkets. But particularly for us, I think back of five years ago in July of, I think it was 2018, we last spoke, Tim, we had about 420,000 subscribers. And on October last year we announced we'd just passed a million. And that when I reflect on five years ago, it was a question of, do we actually have a sustainable model for journalism? And today I can say far more confidently that we do, and that's a good thing for not just for media companies, but also for those who rely so much on them.Tim Burrowes:And I suppose one of the things we have seen the pendulum swinging even more so than during that conversation, was that move towards subscriber pays as opposed to advertiser pays. Has that pendulum reached as far as it will, do you think? Because I guess you almost have two constituencies really, don't you, the advertisers and the subscribers/readers?Michael Miller:Yeah, I've always described us traditionally as a business of a dual-sided marketplace where we are connecting those audiences with our journalism, with clients who want to engage in entrusted contextual environments. The pendulum is to continue to swing from being client dominated, to being far more consumer balanced. And a good business is diversified revenues, but also diversified audiences too. So I don't think that pendulum has stopped yet. It has had a good three, four years. It's still growing, but the fatigue that I think particularly news and information has seen over the past few years has definitely some to settle in and that it's now I think a challenge for all media companies to look at bundling partnerships and a more compelling value offer, which goes beyond just traditional news.Tim Burrowes:Well, before we speak more widely, I'd like to maybe talk about a couple of the announcements from this week, from D_Coded. I'll invite you to put your marketer hat back on and explain the total commerce proposition if you could please.Michael Miller:Yeah, total commerce has been something which we've been working towards now for a number of years and that we're in McKinsey estimate, this will be a $500 billion market globally, in the coming years ahead. And so from a News Corp perspective, total commerce refers to a suite of client solutions that integrates our content and commercial content with the ability to purchase at the lower end of the purchase funnel. And that it does connect using our data that we share with both Foxtel and REA, to connect clients more accurately through contextual content in an actual purchase of our sites. And that's something which we've been working on for a number of years.Tim Burrowes:And this I suppose is the really interesting thing that we are talking increasingly about, offsite strategies. Is that a signal of where media is going, or where News Corp is going?Michael Miller:I think it's something which we all media are going to. You think of the origins, we have mastheads in our portfolio called the Advertiser. And that commercial messages in trusted news environments is nothing new, that's been well established now for centuries. And this is an evolution of that and it's the latest of that, whereby our clients are asking us to get closer to their customers who are our consumers, and that we know we don't want to interrupt that environment that they're consuming their news in.And it's part of the reason we invested in companies like Medium Rare and the work they do with Australian Institute of Company Directors. It's Qantas, David Jones amongst many. It's the reason why we invested in Visual Domain, because a lot more of this content now is video and audio, and not just in print and pictorially. Well, it's why last year with D_Coded we announced shoppable video and vertical video and that the years we've been building up to this moment, whereby I think the market is now ready and accepting that it's total commerce that we can provide a solution from top end of funnel to the purchase at the bottom end.Tim Burrowes:And is this a conversation to mainly have with brands and marketers directly or via their agencies?Michael Miller:My observation is that sitting in many different parts of organizations and there's not a consistent location who owns this, because in some cases, a brand is still important in terms of that purchase decision and that sits in one part of a business. But then digital commerce sitting in another, social sometimes hits and that's your off platform audience, as we find in our business, is particularly important in terms of pushing people down into that purchase funnel. And I feel like there's some companies that don't have that end, that their cradle to grave processes are in place and they're still working through that, and to be fair, so have we. But I think that's what we now have got clarity on in terms of providing not just retailers, but insurance companies, in terms of FMCG goods directly, fashion, fast fashion, these are all areas and the Black Friday, Cyber Monday for us continues to double the past three years as a indicator of a consumer's propensity and willingness to pay.Tim Burrowes:One of the interesting things I took from the Total Commerce part of the announcement this week, and I accept this wasn't the central part at all, but you as an organization, you did talk a little bit about using AI as part of this process. Which I think is an interesting moment, because obviously since ChatGPT broke through and OpenAI broke through, it's the topic of the time. How are you thinking about AI's place within News Corp going forward?Michael Miller:We've been using AI for a number of years. It's not new to the category and not new to us as a company, in being able to be a newsroom assistant, in being able to quickly analyze audiences that are on our various sites. And so, Vidora is the brand we use. We use a reporting tool called Verity, which is world leading and publishers around the world are looking at what we've done in terms of understanding who is paying and who is staying and what they're reading prior, what they're reading post, demographically, geographically.It gives us a great insight in how we've changed our company in terms of allocation of reporters and staff, but also the rounds that we choose and where we see growth opportunities. We use AI in News Connect, which is in our seven year long data product which we've worked with other leading data brands, the banks, the cards, the retailers, to be able to provide over well, nearly 3000 different segments for different clients that are custom-made for them. And AI is a big part of our News Connect product. ChatGPT is another layer and it's exciting. I think it's here to stay. I don't think it's a fad, but it's early days as well, we need to understand how best to use it and how not to use it.Tim Burrowes:And do you see that conversation around using generative AI to create editorial content? Is that a Rubicon that must not be crossed or is there a place for it for the low value commoditized content? How are you thinking about that part? Because that must be the most sensitive part of the conversation about AI.Michael Miller:There's probably three layers that are top of mind for me at the moment. And as I say, this is still evolving, but attribution is important in journalism, that you're quoting the source, the person. But equally now, I think it's important for trusted media to declare if ChatGPT and generative AI is your source. So that's how I think about that in terms of first layer of journalism. I see it as being a newsroom assistant rather than being a journalist replacement, and based on historical information and comments and a variety of sources, and that it doesn't though, give you context to the current and any predictive despite its term, around what others may behave differently tomorrow.And so, that's the role of a journalist is to be inquisitive, is to be forward-thinking and is to be thinking around guidance too, how we should be thinking about events or issues socially in the future. And that I haven't seen yet, ChatGPT be able to meet that need. The third layer is how ChatGPT has been built and it's drawn in many different sources, primarily though trusted media brands and that again, we're in that situation where there's a business being built here, which is a user utilizing the content of others, not just trusted media brands, but without attribution and without payment. And I think that is a concern for the original creators who are not benefiting, but they're seeing their journalism or their hard work, they're cataloging benefited by others.Tim Burrowes:I first remember probably in something like 2008, 2009, Rupert Murdoch, your proprietor, talking fairly fiercely about the role that Google was playing in using news content to drive its search results and suggesting that it would be fair to receive a payment. And I, like many people at the time, thought that seemed a bit unrealistic, and yet it came to be. Have you yet got an evolved position on whether we've got the same principle at stake when it comes to generative AI? Is there a point when you would want the likes of Microsoft or other people who partner in OpenAI to be coming to the same sort of conversation that the News Media Bargaining Code conversation drove?Michael Miller:I think that those conversations are inevitable, if not going to be accelerated and that's not in dispute about where the content and advice is coming from and they're already asking for payment models from consumers and that's not right.Tim Burrowes:Now, in Scott Morrison as Treasurer and then Prime Minister, you had somebody who was very sympathetic to that argument. Do you yet have a sense of what the view of the current government is? I know it is very new and happening fast, so I don't know if you've got to that conversation yet.Michael Miller:The news bargaining code that was introduced 18 months ago, received bipartisan support and that I'd take that as being that they are supportive conceptually and of the principles behind the code. So it's not a conversation which we've had to have as we've had it probably two years plus prior, in that they've indicated their support. As now other countries around the world are following Australia's lead in looking at how they regulate in their own markets.Tim Burrowes:And do you think that will now extend to the conversation around AI as well, naturally, or is that a conversation that will need to be forced to make it happen?Michael Miller:I take partnership as approach. I would be wanting to have conversations with our potential users of our journalism as a first port. Going in with lawyers at a first meeting is never a great way to start any relationship. And so, I would prefer to be meeting with those and discussing what does a fair partnership look like. And I think that at the same time, a lot of the ChatGPT content that's generated isn't attributed either, and that would be a benefit I think to those organizations to hear that and see that as being part of the offer they make.Tim Burrowes:While we're talking about frenemies, you are getting into vertical video. That was another one of the announcements this week, which I guess gets one thinking about TikTok. Are they... It's unfair to call them the new kids now, but are they where the attention is beginning to swing towards now, as opposed to Facebook as the previous social media foe?Michael Miller:Their definitely video consumption is on the rise, that there is now, it's Reels for Facebook, it's Google Web Stories on that platform, and it's TikToks for TikTok. And so yes, as our content or journalism may be used on that platform, that's a conversation that as new platforms come to bear, I think the code need to consider those and that if we go back 10 years ago, back to the origins of even prior to Facebook in the 15 years ago, they've evolved greatly and that I think that the code needs to continue to evolve to counter for new entrants to the market, but also how their business models have changed in line with how consumers are changing. And the acceleration of video has been dramatic over the past few years and that's where TikTok has benefited to Facebook's expense. But as they are increasingly using the content of others, then that's a fair conversation to have.Tim Burrowes:Well, a couple of points of the last few years that I'd love to just get your perspective on, now that they're in the beginnings of the rear view mirror. Now the first one we have talked about already, which is the News Media Bargaining Code negotiations. How would the economics of news look now, if that process hadn't happened and Facebook and Google hadn't been nudged into making those deals in 2021 to pay the publishers, how would the landscape be now?Michael Miller:Oh, there'd be pressure on all media, not just news media who have not just got commercial agreements, but partnerships now in place. Arguably there's been an investment made, as I say, that could be both in kind or in cash, depending on the different arrangements that are there, which has enabled some of those companies that are now seeing some headwinds to create. For me, I feel how they reinvested in the arrangement they've come to, to accelerate the growth of their digital business. And that's probably the approach I've thought of at News Corp, is that this isn't about a bottom line return to shareholder moment, it's about an opportunity to reinvest in a digital future. And that is now when I think of the core, it's a digital core and that's been the opportunity of those arrangements, have now created. And so, how would it look? I think it would look a lot barer. I think I'd be concerned that we would have less players and that is not good for the consumer ultimately, but for Australian media more broadly.Tim Burrowes:There is some speculation that when Facebook's agreements start coming up for renewal next year, they seem to have far less appetite to renew perhaps than the Google News initiative does or Google and Alphabet more generally. How do the economics change for you if Facebook and their parent company, Meta, don't come back to the table next year?Michael Miller:Should that be a decision they make, it would impact the ability to reinvest and that's how I consider it. I can't talk for others, but that would be disappointment. I don't think it'd be good for their business either, to be frank. I think that we refer, for News Corp to combined Google and Facebook, we sent 2.9 billion referrals last year and that is value to them and a large proportion of their total referrals come from news media companies and that I see it particularly as they think through video and how they respond, and we produce 80 reels a week for them, which is the largest exercise of a type in the world. There is definitely value which those trusted brands give to their platforms. So I don't think it's good business for either, but it wouldn't be good business if they were to walk away and whether they're, I'm not sure how they detangle their relationship with their audience without the use of news. I don't know technically how they achieved that either.Tim Burrowes:Now I suppose another key moment over the last five years or so, we look back at 2020, when all publishers, including News Corp had to make some big decisions as the pandemic kicked in. You pretty much got out of the print business for local newspapers. That's nearly three years ago now, it's just flying by. When you look back on that period now, was this just an acceleration of something that was inevitable or was there anything that could have changed that story and changed that trajectory do you think?Michael Miller:I think it was an acceleration of the inevitable, that we had seen for the decade prior that local newspapers had predominantly, or had been funded wholly by client dollars, they were your car yard, they were your shopping malls, they were your local job markets. They were the swap meets, they were the tenders. Council stopped advertising, council notices they disappeared. A lot of the key major advertisers in communities that relied on local foot traffic moved to social platforms. They moved to the portals of CarsGuide, realestate.com.au, and that there wasn't a model to fund those.The uncertainty of the pandemic meant that most of those businesses were unable to trade and that we didn't know how long that would last for. And so, we made the conclusion that those dollars that had already started to drain and they're accelerated at the start of the pandemic, were not going to come back. And that to transition them to still be digital models, not printed as well, was something which we had seen occur in other markets around the world. And it pains me because I'm a print lover and someone who's grown up on it, but it equally got accepted that our audiences had moved digitally, our clients had moved digitally, and that you weren't able to hold onto the old, you had to plan for the new.Tim Burrowes:I'm also a print lover, grew up in local newspapers, started delivering the local paper when I was 13 years old. So I'm very much from the campus of supportive of local news. I struggle to see models emerge that really help fund the local journalism that used to happen everywhere of a reporter in every courtroom, a reporter in every council meeting, a reporter arriving at the cop shop every day to see what was going on. I'd love to hear some reasons for optimism about that sort of journalism being funded at that granular, local level in the future. Are you seeing signs at all?Michael Miller:No, and that is the big revelation and that I think we were one the first companies in the world to see the value of hyper-local news. In the past three years we have launched 24 new mastheads in areas where we previously did not have a print publication. What people subscribe for, what's that moment where they say, "I'm going to start paying for...", is a local reason. It is court reports, it is tender applications, it's developments that are happening around the corner. It is local crime, it's the local football footy team. So as I said, we've invested in 24 new publications in high consumption areas.We've also started a local sports streaming service. This year we will broadcast 2,300 local, national, and state sports games which become part of your masthead. And the benefit for those organizations is that we continue to report upon those as part of your local masthead, and that's what people initially pay for. What they stay for is quite different. What they stay for is network news. It's news about the latest diet, it's the post-COVID travel trends. It's the advice around superannuation. So the combination of hyper-local and network is, what is the beauty that we're seeing and we're not the only one seeing that around the world, but I think we were the first to see the benefit of the void that had been left for hyper-local news that people need, and they have particularly needed that the past three years.Tim Burrowes:Well, you mentioned a little bit earlier your view on partnerships, which it does strike me that News Corp is a less insular company than it was once seen. Few examples came to mind for me, last August you signed a deal withv Ooh Media to deliver news across their screen network, Seven West Media's Perth newspapers tap into News Corp resources, HT&E, which you ran for a while when it was APN News & Media. That's partly owned by News Corp, about 13% or something. How do you think about how, as one of the I suppose two big beasts, about how the company should act within that commercial media ecosystem?Michael Miller:I sometimes feel that some days I'm going to sit opposite a company and compete. Some days I'm going to sit next to them and compliment. We print and we distribute the Nine and the ACM publications. Increasingly our audience is off platform, 72% of our audience does not come directly to our mastheads. So the majority of it is coming to us from seeing a Ooh Media screen. It's seeing us on Insta, Facebook, on a search result and that increasingly we need to look at those off platform top of funnel, and that's part of the reason why we see audience growth coming from.Because with those more greater eyeballs becomes greater familiarity of the brands and the content than journalism that we produce and they're more likely to become a news.com.au audience, which become part of our total commerce solution, or they hopefully become a subscriber over the longer term. And so, that's where partnerships become and every partnership is different. I wish there was just a simple cookie cutter model approach, but people have different ambitions and drivers to their own business and that you mentioned Seven West, I've mentioned a lot of media companies already in this conversation who we do work with, and that probably our growth will come from taking shares to those who are not based in this country rather than those traditional competitors that we all grew up with.Tim Burrowes:Now in your stint at APN, you got some exposure to the outdoor advertising sector. Let's talk the potential for mergers and acquisitions. Would it make sense for News Corp to own a QMS or an Ooh Media or somebody like that do you think?Michael Miller:It would be inconsistent with our, I suppose past mandate. We're a content company. My experience from out-of-home in Australia is that Australia is one of the leaders in the world in terms of out-of-home technology and those companies are predominantly landlord and they're leasing from landlords and selling their leased assets to clients. They're not curating content and that's why we see companies like media partnering with us for content. Now I don't see us as the potential out-of-home player, because it's not our core skillset set. Don't never say never, but I'd say that our skills are in content creation, curation and amplification, and that I'd much prefer to stay in those areas that we'd lead in and not necessarily venture into those that others do better at.Tim Burrowes:What do you expect to see happening in M&A and in the wider market this year or going forward? Are you expecting to see much occur?Michael Miller:I would expect that most companies will focus on their core. For us, that's a digital core. And I worry less about revenue lines, more about cost lines, and managing your cost base. I think we're still seeing, where does the post-COVID bounce settle on its recline and that there may be opportunities that emerge, particularly with some of the tech businesses that are looking now more stretched as the valuations and models are showing signs of strain and that we're not convinced yet that some of them are as sustainable as what they were looking 12 months ago. So our priority is definitely on that. We're seeing good growth in our core digital business and that we need to ensure that the great work that our print teams are doing maximized in terms of that digital transition.Tim Burrowes:I'm glad you mentioned that wider outlook now, it is matter of public record that News Corp is currently cutting 5% of jobs globally. Now you were running News Corp's New South Wales operation back in 2012 when the local newspaper industry had what felt at the time it's near death moment. How does this year feel compared to that?Michael Miller:I feel that this year is far more certain than 2012, a decade ago. I think the industry was uncertain about the paths that, and not just those in news media, but more broadly we had the multi-channels, we saw the start of Netflix globally, and we now have that it's disrupted linear TV viewing. We're starting to see the next wave of programmatic and couponing and digital advertising. That's when I'd say Google and Facebook, or now Meta, we're really starting to take solidified a position as a ad business. I was reminded earlier that there was the double-click purchase by Google, the impact that had on the ad tech market. And so, you were starting to see the digitalization back in 2012 of out-of-home and that we were all very uncertain about where the client dollars would go and where we would have a consumer base that were prepared to pay.And that I'm going to get the year wrong, but it's around that time that the iPad launched and there was a sudden moment of, this is how people are going to consume print. It's all going to be digital, but it's going to look like... It takes time for consumers to change their habits and we see them early adopt in Australia, second fastest in the world after Norway here. But do we stay with that habit? Not always, but sometimes we do. So you got to be a fast follower, or sometimes, other times you got to lead. But yeah, this feels very different to 2012. I think we as an industry should be more confident about what our business models are.Tim Burrowes:I suppose at the same time, any media organization is expecting a tough few months. I wonder, how do you balance communicating honestly with your staff about the challenges ahead and the jobs that might need to go as a result of that, versus finding a way of offering a vision for an optimistic future for journalism?Michael Miller:We often hear the announcements in the people who are unfortunately leaving companies. We advertised on digital and in print on Monday for last week, of new cadets to join the company. We have skills in audio that we didn't have 10 years ago, skills in video, skills in data, and that there are new people who are bringing a great talent to our journalistic, it says proposition and offering to consumers, and that you got to balance that out and times and that a lot of our plans are already in place around the recent announcement. You've got to be honest with your teams and say that sadly there will be some people who will leave and some people who will be redeployed, and some people who may choose to leave additionally. And we've seen that happen as well. But I think the past few years has maybe masked what was going on below the surface and we're now having to deal with that in larger numbers, not just at News Corp, but at all media companies, not just in Australia.Tim Burrowes:Now I keep referring back to the conversation we had on stage at Mumbrella360, the getting audiences and customers to pay and stay presentation. Now during that News Corp's content can polarize and that has long been the criticism of News Corp, that your editors pursue agendas. We've seen the rise and I think maybe the fading of campaign groups like Stop Funding Hate or Sleeping Giants. Their method I suppose, is to try to persuade advertisers to stay off certain platforms. That's been a big challenge I think for Sky News Australia. Now you must have developed a playbook for advertisers by now. What is the approach when these moments arise?Michael Miller:I wish there was a playbook, Tim, and that we could just roll out the... Every issue has different layers, different perspectives, and you're dealing often with different people. In terms of, first of all, the activists and the sleeping giants, the mad Witches. And others, yes, we went through a period of time when they worried, a number of clients out there, not just about News Corp content, although we were primary, and Sky News. They were activists who were trying to impact change to their own agendas. The good clients, the good companies were the ones that wanted to have a conversation and to understand the concerns both of the activist groups, but also get to the facts around what they were hearing. And again, in many cases there was misinformation which ultimately undermined the position of those activist groups to achieve their outcome.And that misinformation has been their downfall, and that we've worked through that in having honest conversations. There were a small number of clients that jumped, that they responded due to the fear of what they could be trending online. And I've seen that happen from time to time. But on mass, I'd say the majority of our clients who are targeted are still with us and that a key message that I would say is, don't give into bullies. In terms of then, other critic groups are former prime ministers and political polarization.I think they've got their own views and not always defend their views to their ability to have a view. That's what free speech is about. I don't need to agree with them. But ultimately, as we saw through a parliamentary inquiry that the impact of that, their concerns were not found to be of the magnitudes of which they were expressing and didn't receive the support ultimately that they had wanted. I think it comes back to if we need to make changes, if we need to evolve as an organization based on the feedback we're receiving, we got to take that on board. But additionally, we're not the type of organization that are going to respond to those intimidations and the agendas of others and that we've seen that come from, let's say minority groups. But that hasn't been a concern that I currently and luckily dealing with, but no doubt it's just around the corner.Tim Burrowes:Do you think you have evolved as an organization though, when it comes to the polarizing type of content?Michael Miller:I think we're always evolving. I think that the market has moved a lot as well. We've been through a phase over the past five years that opinion-based journalism is really on the back of social media, where we could all express an opinion and we were driven to hear others' opinion, but then we got swamped by, what is opinion, what is fact. And that has being part of the news fatigue and the opinion fatigue, which we've been drowned out by. And if anything a part of that evolution is a return to trusted, fact-based reporting and presentation and that it's clearly sourced, clearly attributed and presented as, this is fact and this is opinion. And the separation of the two I think is now a benefit of those media companies that follow that approach. And so, you're always evolving. In terms of some of the areas that we've been criticized on.We constantly reflect on the views of, not so much the views that may differ to particular columnists and I. We have a broad church of columnists and people within the organization and that it's important that we are always encouraging new voices to be... And not just our own, but opinion writers to be expressing views which are maybe contrary. And then I look at the voice today and we've got a Chris Kenny who is an avid advocate for it. We've got someone like a Paul Kelly who looks at this from a constitutional lens. We've got others who, indigenous writers who are writing it in, I suppose indigenous Australians who are writing this as a pro and it doesn't go far enough anti. And so, when I think through the history of time and the role of news media, it is to further the debate to help Australians understand the issue and our policy makers have a platform to express their views so that we can arrive at the right decision. So I'm giving you, every issue is different.Tim Burrowes:Now, Rupert Murdoch recently marked 70 years at the helm of the company, which just sounds remarkable when you say it out loud. Now he is in that leadership role alongside Locklan. You've seen that joint leadership evolve. I think you would've come back to the organization just after Locklan came back. How do you sum up that sort of joint leadership role now, from where you see it?Michael Miller:I suppose that's at a board level. I personally report through to Robert Thompson, who's the global CEO. The board look at many different broadcasting, business information, news media, real estate interests. Rupert and I deal far more with Lachlan now, as the co-chairs. And that obviously they would discuss many of those issues together as they would with other board members as well. I understand it's not always your traditional model of having co-chairs, but it's not unusual either and that it's a balance that appears to work. I don't know, I'm not on those board meetings to give a context of the dynamics at the time.Tim Burrowes:What else in media is intriguing you at the moment? I know you are interested in niche business models. I wonder what developing models you've been keeping an eye on, either here in Australia or overseas, which are capturing your attention at the moment.Michael Miller:Yeah, definitely deep niches. I came across a business, a publisher they call themselves who's specialized in watches. They claimed $100 million of revenue and that as there are wine collectors and car collectors, there's also watch collectors. I'm not one, but they want to know who the makers are, the history behind them, how to ensure them, and the swapping of them. There's expos and conferences, there's commerce, the total commerce solution to it as well. You look at the wine industry, you look at now just aspects of pets. There's passion points, there's music that I've learned a lot about when I was with now HT&E, in terms of people's passion points. Food is another one. It's not just travel generically, it's aspects of travel. It is arts travel, it is, I suppose adventure travel just on bikes.And so, the great thing is that you can now develop deep niches that can attract an audience. What I'm partly interested in that is that, how does a bundle with your core business? And so, in recent years we've invested in stock head, being for those stocks that don't get a lot of coverage. Kids SPOT has been part of the portfolio and is having another resurgence in terms of a source and destination for B2B and young parents to congregate and have a community around their kids. I look at the race net and punters to investments we've made and the passionate community of people who love the track. CODE Sports now has been another revelation in terms of its long form storytelling around our passion for sport. It's not all sports. We don't claim to be a competitor to a Wide World or a Herald Sun, but it is the stories of sport and there's a group there who make the time and have that passion.And so, how then do you include that as part of your broader subscription to a news corporate masthead? And that adds value. There's a proposition there. I see that many of the UK publications for five quid, you get to have puzzles and crossword for the year and it's a retention pace and it's a smart business model. And so, that's where I'm interested in what we've called in telco land triple or quad players of the past.I can see that reemerging as being part of your value proposition. And in reality, we've always covered stocks and puzzles and done long form storytelling, but it's in specialist environments where you can buy them separately, you can buy a part of, and that's what excites me as, we're getting into the storytelling of new genres, in new ways, using audio, using video, using UCG. Taste is the biggest cooking club in the country by a long way, and that's a passion point. And they're the ears that I'm always looking for that is inspiration and thinking, how big can you get it here? And sadly, the reality is, we're a country of 25 million people. I wish we had another zero at the end of that, which then you'd get some scale.Tim Burrowes:Now a slightly unfair question, asking to pick one, but if you could point to one act of journalism from News Corp in recent months that sums up the company's direction of travel, what would you choose or what would you think of?Michael Miller:Oh, our news award winner last year was Hedley Thomas. He is a journalist who has evolved into a podcaster, his recent podcast, Shandee's Story, and not only reopened the case of 23 year old Shandee Blackburn in Queensland, around the systemic failures of the Queensland government's DNA laboratory that he has given hope to over 200 families who do have unanswered questions. This is far bigger story than the Teacher's Pet. According to Hedley, the Teacher's Pet downloaded 85 million times. And so, why has he been successful, I think is probably more, it's enduring, it is fearless, it is about fairness, it's about transparency, and it's about that accountability of those in who didn't ask the questions around Lynette Dawson. Now he did, he did the job that the law enforcement and politicians didn't do. And so, that is what good journalism is about and it's about making a difference. And so, that's probably the one that these people are aware of, that it's indicative of multi-platform storytelling using resources, but the commitment to finding the truth.Tim Burrowes:Now, last week we heard the news of the passing of Brian Walsh, who was the steward of Foxtel's TV making. A bit hard to ask you to sum it up, but how would you sum up the contribution that he made?Michael Miller:And his contribution was far broader than Foxtel. I remembered getting the news late on the Thursday night. I first came across Brian as a kid marketer in the mid '90s. We were launching the Sunday Magazine, which was a big deal at the time. There were over a million copies that a magazine would go into, the biggest magazine day one in the country.And he was a mentor to me in the launch of that entertainment based publication. But Brian has managed sporting stars. He was a talent manager. When the movies would come to Australia, he was their publicist on the ground. He would put on the halftime events at NRL Grand Finals. Now his days of promotions manager at 2SM and in radio, then leading to marketing. He was generous in his sharing of experiences, he wasn't a competitive guy. He loved the story. He loved connecting with audiences and he's going to be missed. But his contribution, as I say, is far greater than his colleagues at News and Foxtel. It's his contribution is to many people and probably, but look, he probably made a difference to many who didn't even know his name.Tim Burrowes:Well, last question from me, and this is the last question I ask everybody. What would your critics say about you and what would your supporters say about you?Michael Miller:They're the critics. We've got a few. Journalism is not there to be popular. It's often standing up for the unpopular, for those without a voice, for those who are unable to represent themselves in the conversation. And while we are standing up for the unpopular, we're not always popular and therefore we do have our critics. And that is what they would say about us, is that we're their version of what the news is, is not necessarily what we publish every day. And yeah, that's a tough job for an editor to decide what has got to be led, but we are there to make a difference, it'd be how I would respond to those critics who would like to see something different. We'd like to see their view of the world played back at them, but we are there to make a difference. And that part of that is being fearless and saying principle.Tim Burrowes:And what would your supporters say about you?Michael Miller:A measure that I use is, how are we going, how are the Australian people responding? And they're both your critics and your supporters. And that ultimately, I look at, do we have a growing audience? That's got to be your measure. Is that more important than your share price? Is that more important than your net promoter score? I think it ultimately is. How are your customers responding to what you're doing? And in the past two years, we've grown from 16.8 to 18.1 million Australians. So we've got a growing audience. And so, we are doing something right for them and why do they come to us? They come to us because they trust us. And that we're there for free thinking, free markets and free speech, and we're going to protect that and stand up for that. That means standing up for Australians. And that while we've got a growing audience, I'd say we're doing our job. And that our supporters would say, we trust you.Tim Burrowes:Michael Miller, thank you very much for your time.Michael Miller:Thank you, Tim.textTime to leave you to your Thursday.Audio production was courtesy of Abe's Audio, the people to talk to about voiceovers, sound design and podcast production.Message us: letters@unmade.mediaI'll be back tomorrow with another update tomorrowToodlepip…Tim Burrowestim@unmade.media This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.unmade.media/subscribe

In this week's super-sized episode, Toby and Nick discuss the Oxford Union debate –‘Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far' – in which he and Konstantin Kisin both spoke in favour of the motion. Toby describes how Konstantin's speech has racked up 20 million views on Twitter compared to his 30,000 (which Nick attributes to Russian interference). They also discuss Reginald D Hunter's lazy smear against GB News and Stop Funding Hate's targeting of Nick's now famous ‘peanut allergy' analogy to describe the over-sized influence of the trans lobby.  They then move on to talking about Nick's Andrew Bridgen article in the Daily Sceptic – ‘A Bridgen Too Far' – and whether invoking the holocaust is ever a wise move. This week's first sponsor is The Jasmine Sari by Philip Tucker, available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07TVFGV8S Nick and Toby theorise about what's behind the Conservative MP Steve Baker's recent tweet about being an LGBT+ ally – Nick thinks it's because Left-wing ideas have now captured even the right of the Tory Party, while Toby thinks he's trying to shore up his woke credentials because he'll be looking for a job in the tech sector after the election. They chat about Clarkson and the futility of apologising to a woke Twitchfork mob, how Harry accuses everyone of being a hatemonger (yet spews a fair amount of bile in his book) and how, within businesses, the pursuit of high social status seems to have replaced the profit motive. Toby and Nick develop an idea for a new reality show called ‘So you've been cancelled' in which Jeremy Clarkson, Jordan Peterson and JK Rowling duke it out for top honours. This week's second sponsor is Dan Gaskin at Crest Mortgages: https://www.crestmortgages.co.uk/ 0116 5023 000 Nick and Will Jones talk about the week's most interesting stories in the Daily Sceptic and Toby and Nick discuss everybody's favourite pantomime villain in Davos and Toby tries to persuade Nick that Klaus Schwab isn't quite as powerful as he pretends to be, while Nick delivers a sobering rejoinder… This week's last sponsor is Thor Holt and you can find him here: https://www.thorholt.com/, https://thorholt.substack.com/ or https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorholt/ or on his telegram channel at @thor_holt (visit https://belle-epoque.co.uk/ for Thor's meet up) And… Peak Woke is back! To advertise on one of the fastest growing podcasts in the world, drop Toby a line on thedailysceptic@gmail.com Please go to https://dailysceptic.org/ and make a donation so we can continue to bring you all this high quality content. Subscribe to Nick's substack: https://nickdixon.substack.com/ Produced by Jason Clift Music by Tinderella

Toby and Nick discuss Matt Hancock being forced to eat a kangaroo scrotum in Australia, how Toby sabotaged his own chances of appearing on I'm a Celebrity, what it would take for Nick to take part, the remainer media trying to force Suella out, whether the word ‘invasion' is racist and whether Rishi is ok or not. Nick and Toby discuss Elon, the chief twit, and his take on the Paul Pelosi ‘incident', the savage (and encouraging) sackings at the top level of Twitter and how paying for a blue check mark devalues the concept. They discuss the toxicity of the hard left campaign group ‘Stop Funding Hate' and the mischaracterisation of their targets, the unbelievable balance and fair play of GB News and an incredibly tone deaf piece in the Atlantic where the author forgives herself for 2 years of hive minded bad judgement and authoritarian behaviour Nick is joined by the Daily Sceptic's editor, Will Jones, for a rundown of last week's most interesting stories And lastly Nick and Toby vie for this week's title of Peak Woke with the usual mad offerings Please go to https://dailysceptic.org/ and make a donation so we can keep bringing you all this high quality content.  This week's sponsor is Thor Holt and you can find him here: https://www.thorholt.com/ or on his telegram channel at @thor­_holt  Nick's substack: https://nickdixon.substack.com/ Produced by Jason Clift  Music by Tinderella   

What a week it's been for Matt Hancock (Ex Secretary of State for Health) the Conservative Government and the country. Intrigue abound! This week we explore Matt's indescretions, FUEU, NHS bed allowances, Covid spending, Bourbon creams, Stop Funding Hate, UK staff shortages and MUCH MORE! Also welcome a new guest, Laurie (Or Eddie Stobbart/Trucker...it's up to you!)Send us an email: therealnormalpodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/realnormalpodFollow us on our SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealNormalPodcast/

The ladies discuss controversial new UK news channel, GB News, which features partisan anchors and guests who appear to be passionate about right-wing politics, despite Britain's broadcasting laws requiring news channels to remain impartial, and debate whether we need such a channel to represent viewpoints that are allegedly suppressed by mainstream broadcasters like BBC News, Sky News and Channel 4 News.--------------------------------------- FOLLOW THE CONVERSATION #EthnicallySpeakingInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/unitedmelanincoFacebook: https://facebook.com/unitedmelanincoTwitter: https://instagram.com/unitedmelanincoLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unitedmelaninco/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/UnitedMelaninGroupGet in touch with us: ethnicallyspeaking@unitedmelaningroup.com---------------------------------------- LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE https://unitedmelaningroup.com/es081(Website – Show notes)https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/gb-news-fox-news-british/619210/(Article – Fox News Gets a British Accent – Helen Lewis for The Atlantic)https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jun/14/gb-news-launch-gains-more-viewers-than-bbc-or-sky-news-channels(Article – GB News launch gains more viewers than BBC or Sky news channels – Kevin Rawlinson and Jim Waterson for The Guardian)https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology/campaigners-urge-advertisers-not-fund-fox-news-style-channels-britain(Article – Campaigners urge advertisers not to fund “Fox News style” channels in Britain – Richard Wilson for Ethical Consumer)https://stopfundinghate.info/2021/06/14/gb-news-advertisers/(Campaign – GB News advertisers – Stop Funding Hate)https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/gb-news-lord-alan-sugar-dan-wootton-b1865290.html(Article – GB News: Lord Sugar calls out Dan Wootton for asking ‘stupid bloody question' in awkward interview – Jacob Stolworthy for The Independent)----------------------------------------Join Monah, Nushy Rose and Sophie Hannah, three smart, curious and opinionated highly-melanated women, as they and their guests discuss everything from current affairs to pop culture, and everything in between. No subject is off limits for these ladies, especially when it comes to issues affecting British communities of colour. Get ready to laugh, learn and liberate your mind, because if there's one thing you can guarantee, it's that the Ethnically Speaking ladies will be giving it to you straight!----------------------------------------Music by GC

Has the BBC lost its "bottle" - or appetite for confrontation - with government? The Corporation's former Baghdad Bureau Chief Patrick Howse thinks so after witnessing their lack of appetite for Jennifer Arcuri's revelations about her four year affair with Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor. He discusses the episode with Byline Times editor Hardeep Matharu. Plus Richard Wilson explains the origins of his campaigning organisation Stop Funding Hate. Funded by subscribers to Byline Times. Produced in Birmingham by Adrian Goldberg and Harvey White.

Has the BBC lost its "bottle" - or appetite for confrontation - with government? The Corporation's former Baghdad Bureau Chief Patrick Howse thinks so after witnessing their lack of appetite for Jennifer Arcuri's revelations about her four year affair with Boris Johnson when he was London Mayor. Was there a conflict of interest between Johnson's role and Arcuri receiving more than £100,000 of taxpayers cash and attending trade missions with him? He discusses the episode with Byline Times editor Hardeep Matharu who wrote to the BBC asking why they hadn't covered the story in their flagship news programmes.Plus Richard Wilson explains the origins of his campaigning organisation Stop Funding Hate.Funded by subscribers to Byline Times.Produced in Birmingham by Adrian Goldberg and Harvey White. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 2015 columnist Katie Hopkins published a piece in the British tabloid sun calling African migrants “cockroaches.” Ms. Hopkins is not alone. Speaking at election rallies in 2018, Amit Shah, India's Minister of Home Affairs, called Bangladeshi migrants “termites.” Shah’s spiteful rhetoric echoes authoritarian leaders, genocidaires, and war criminals who not only orchestrated mass violence but destroyed nations through dangerous speech for petty political ends. Dangerous speech and ideology that catalyze mass violence are strikingly similar across the world and through time. There is evidence that hate in the media leads to real-life violence. Researchers across the world have proved over and over again that hate in media leads to anti-migrant and anti-minority hate crimes. In response, social media campaigns like Stop Funding Hate have been launched to stop companies from advertising in and providing funds for certain newspapers and media platforms that use "fear and division to sell more papers." Today, joining us to discuss online hate and how making funding hate unprofitable are Richard Wilson and Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie. Richard Wilson is a writer, human rights activist, and co-founder of Stop Funding Hate. In August 2016, the campaign sought to make hate unprofitable and promote the idea of 'ethical advertising' by persuading companies to pull advertising from media that incite hatred against minority groups. Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie is an Assistant Professor and the Executive director of Foundation London Story, where her work revolves around Hate Speech and Hate crime. She looks at how the hateful narrative contributes towards dehumanizing minority and vulnerable groups. Her campaigns and research were instrumental in getting OpIndia - a right-wing web-based tabloid (comparable to Breitbart) defunded from Google AdSense. The podcast is available in video and audio formats. You can listen to our last episode here:https://thepolisproject.com/politics-podcast-ep-4/

Stop Funding Hate founder Richard Wilson discusses the campaign to persuade advertisers to pull their support for bigoted media. 

In this episode of #TheNewAbnormal I interview Matt Rivitz, founder of the activist community "Sleeping Giants". (He's also a freelance copywriter - his past jobs inc being Creative Director of TBWA/Chiat/Day and Senior Copywriter at Goodby Silverstein & Partners.) After witnessing the public rise of racism and sexism in the media and social media in 2016, he started Sleeping Giants, a crowdsourced campaign dedicated to advertiser safety and responsibility in the digital age. It now has an international network of Sleeping Giants chapters in numerous countries and territories including Australia, Canada, Brazil, and across the EU. In year three, Sleeping Giants is continuing its mission for brand safety and responsibility by working directly with advertisers to help them understand and navigate this complex and ever-changing media environment. Therefore, Matt and I discuss his inspiration for setting up the Sleeping Giants community, and issues relating to social trust, brand transparency, corporate responsibility, misinformation and disinformation. Oh - and the issue of 'moral neutrality' for brands and those working to promote them...

In the first part of the episode, we introduce the topic of customers talking back, starting with the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which lobbies companies not to place advertisements in divisive British newspapers. Information about the campaign is available on their website https://stopfundinghate.info/ . We also mention the example of fake reviews of gendered Bic pens on Amazon as a form of customers engaging in social critique through humour. You can find a selection of those fake reviews here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/12-hilarious-reviews-of-a-pen-just-for-women)    Another (inadvertently) humorous example of customers talking to companies is a Twitter exchange between a customer of Domino’s Pizza and the company. We then go on to discuss electronic word of mouth (or eWOM for short), with Bernard and Erika referring to a number of relevant studies: Babić Rosario, A., Sotgiu, F., de Valck, K., & Bijmolt, T. H. A. (2016). The effect of electronic word of mouth on sales: A meta-analytic review of platform, product, and metric factors. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(3), 297-318.   Kim, K., Yoon, S., & Choi, Y. K. (2019). The effects of eWOM volume and valence on product sales – an empirical examination of the movie industry. International Journal of Advertising, 38(3), 471-488. Luca, M., & Zervas, G. (2016). Fake it till you make it: Reputation, competition, and Yelp review fraud. Management Science, 62(12), 3412-3427. The proportion of fake reviews on Trip Advisor was reported in The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hotel-and-caf-cheats-are-caught-trying-to-buy-tripadvisor-stars-027fbcwc8  (paywall).   The study about how confident people are about being able to spot fake reviews is summarised here, along with a test to find out how good you are at detecting reviews that are not genuine: https://theconversation.com/how-to-spot-a-fake-review-youre-probably-worse-at-it-than-you-realise-121043  Two pieces of software to help distinguish real from fake reviews are Fakespot.com and Reviewmeta.com. Moving to the credibility of authentic reviews, Bernard mentions the following  studies on how so-called netspeak as well as attractive user images affect the credibility of online reviews: Ozanne, M., Liu, S. Q., & Mattila, A. S. (2019). Are attractive reviewers more persuasive? Examining the role of physical attractiveness in online reviews. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 36(6), 728-739.  Our interview for this episode is with Camilla Vasquez. Some of her publications are: Bridges, J., & Vásquez, C. (2018). If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless? Current Issues in Tourism, 21(18), 2057-2075.  Vásquez, C. (2014). The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London: Bloomsbury.  Vásquez, C. (2019). Language, Creativity and Humour Online. New York: Routledge.  In the final part of the episode, we analyse a Twitter thread that starts with one customer asking a company this mock question on Twitter: “Hi Skyscanner! Just wondering what you’d recommend I do during the 47 year layover your website has suggested?” For further information, references and transcript visit our blog on: https://wordsandactions.blog  

Welcome to the second episode of “Making Friends With…” - a new special series where the Tech for Good Live team sit down for an in-depth interview with someone who is doing exceptional work in the tech industry. In this episode, Bex and Jonny chat with Richard Wilson, co-founder of Stop Funding Hate. They talk about the origins of the organisation. The push back from the media. Supporters. Trolls. And how they managed to make the campaign such a huge success. We hope you enjoy the episode. Please drop us a review on iTunes, and if you’d like to hear more interviews and conversations like this, let us know who you’d recommend we interview. Send thoughts, suggestions and feedback on Twitter @techforgoodlive. Thanks!

Happy new year! The festivities are over. Songs are no longer being sung. Sleigh Bells are no longer ringing. And smiles and happiness feel like a distant memory. That’s right - it must be time for the Tech for Good Live podcast to return. On this weeks show we talk about the impact of AI on smart hearing aids, 400k being spent on three charity projects for digital inclusion, Facebook’s loss is Apples gain, and a Rollercoaster ride that you will definitely need to use the toilet on. Host Bex and pod regular Jonny are joined by offical "Friends of TFGL", Tom and Sophie from Dsposal. Our special guest this week is writer and human rights activist Richard Wilson, co-founder of the excellent Stop Funding Hate campaign group. Launched in August 2016, the campaign aims to make media hate and discrimination unprofitable by encouraging companies to pull their advertising from the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express.

We delineate a few different ways of protesting. We talk about Brexit and try to dissect some criticisms of the EU. We ask Donald Trump some empathetic questions.---- This week's links ----[1] We Are Many - film by Amir Amirani - http://wearemany.com/[2] Martin Luther King - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.[3] Emily Pankhurst - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Pankhurst[4] Millicent Fawcett - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millicent_Fawcett[5] Ghandi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi[6] Seinfeld - Check at the end of the meal system - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC3ah71Meyg[7] Stop Funding Hate - https://stopfundinghate.org.uk/[8] Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race - Reni Eddo-Lodge - https://amzn.to/2uInkrp---- Credits ----Music by http://michaelforrestmusic.comTalking is by Ivanka Majic and Michael Forrest---- Follow us on Twitter ----https://twitter.com/ivankahttps://twitter.com/michaelforresthttps://twitter.com/PodcastGrand---- Find us on Facebook ----https://www.facebook.com/grandpodcast See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

"Have you ever seen shelves that tidy?"This week we talk about mass media in a few of its forms. There is some ranting.---- This week's links (unordered)[1] Stop Funding Hate https://stopfundinghate.org.uk/[2] Plain English Campaign - http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/about-us.html (not necessarily what The Sun use)[3] Contrapoints https://www.youtube.com/user/ContraPoints[4] Link to Doctor Who video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtPZ96oHH-4[5] The problem of induction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction[6] All Swans Are White - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability[7] John Oliver / Last Week Tonight - https://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight[8] Adam Ruins Everything - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1rZAT2GtmI&list=PLuKg-WhduhkksJoqkj9aJEnN7v0mx8yxC[9] Online game that perfectly demonstrates the dynamics of mass media (doesn’t really work on mobile) - https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb[10] Infographic - we’re doomed! https://www.flickr.com/photos/150411108@N06/35471910724/[11] Gamer gate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy[12] Feminist Frequency https://youtu.be/4ZPSrwedvsg[13] In praise of bias - http://www.thebookoflife.org/in-praise-of-bias/---- Credits ----Music is by http://michaelforrestmusic.com/Talking is by Ivanka Majic and Michael Forrest---- Follow us on Twitter ----https://twitter.com/ivankahttps://twitter.com/michaelforresthttps://twitter.com/PodcastGrand---- Find us on Facebook ----https://www.facebook.com/grandpodcast/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week I’m joined Tolulope Ogunmefun (Oh Goon May Fun) who is more famously known as comedian Don’t Jealous Me. Tolu’s Youtube channel has amassed over 41 million views on Youtube and was the star of his show the T-boy show. He has been cast in Sick Note on SKY 1 starring Rupert Grint, and recently Man Like Mobeen on the BBC. Tolu has just released his first children’s book titled ‘The Frog and his Dancing shoes.’In today’s episode, we talk about the point he felt like giving up and what happens when the work you love starts to feel like work. Tolu opens up about his desire to have his ‘big break’. He defines what success means to him and why he still considers himself to be successful. We cover how he was able to meet his agent and his Manager and the impact that they have had on his career. As well as when he got into hot water with Michaela Coel.The key takeaways for you guys are: how to rebrand and develop your career when you are known for being one thing. How to diversify your offering and knowing when to get an Agent or Manager and how to deal with and overcome online controversy. This week’s Support This! Goes to Stop Funding Hate a campaign that aims to stop brands from advertising in newspapers that run sensationalist anti-migrant headlines. Visit stopfundinghate.org.uk for more information.Brand and marketing expert Prisca Moyesa will be back to discuss executing your visions. To submit your branding or career questions you can visit wannabepodcast.com and select branding clinic. Tweet your questions to @wannabepodcast alternatively if you’re old school like me you can send them to wb@shoutoutnetwork.co.uk. This podcast is created by the ShoutOut Network. SON Save up to 25% on central London recording studios by visiting shoutoutnetwork.co.ukSubscribe on iTunes and share this episode with a friend who might be interested in fashion design and manufacturing.Follow WannaBe @WannaBepodcast on Twitter and Instagram.Visit wannabepodcast.com to read extended show notes and freebies.You can follow me @ImiMorgan on Twitter and Instagram. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's spiked podcast, Bruno Waterfield discusses the Tory/Brussels showdown, Sean Collins laments the Russia panic gripping America's political class, and Naomi Firsht says Stop Funding Hate has declared a snooty war on press freedom. spiked-online.com

Paperchase has apologised for a promotion offered in the Daily Mail. The stationery retailer backtracked after being targeted on social media by campaigners. Stop Funding Hate believes that an advertising boycott can change the editorial stance of newspapers they disagree with. Amol Rajan is joined by Owen Jones, Johnny Hornby, founder of The&Partnership, Christian May, editor of the newspaper City AM, and Jane Martinson of The Guardian. Donald Trelford was the editor of The Observer from 1975 to 1993. His new autobiography is called Shouting In The Street. Mashable has reportedly been sold for $50m, just a fifth of how much it was valued at last year. Buzzfeed and Vice are also expected to miss revenue targets for the year. As advertisers now concentrate their spending on Google and Facebook, do some digital publishers have an unsustainable business model? Will consolidation in the industry mean reduced choice for consumers? Presenter: Amol Rajan Producer: Richard Hooper.

This week's episode of Media Voices features two interviewees discussing UK papers' obsession with immigration, the emotive language used on their front pages, and whether anything can halt that trend. First, newspaper analyst Liz Gerard takes us through the recent history of tabloid front pages, then Stop Funding Hate founder Richard Wilson explains the goals of the campaign. In the news round-up, Chris and Peter discuss the news that UK current affairs magazines have seen a year on year rise in circulations and the MediaMavens project, which aims to see what a news publication looks like when only women pick the stories and headlines. Peter sings us out.