If you live here in Shitsville, the way your motoring content gets produced and digitally delivered changed irrevocably last week. CarAdvice.com, which was acquired by Channel Nine for $35 million recently, has merged with the Drive Network, which had become part of a joint venture between Fairfax Media and 112 Pty Ltd. Nine acquired Fairfax, and all of a sudden it had two big motoring mastheads - three, if you count TheMotorReport, which had been subsumed into Fairfax/Drive/112...whatever.
I know. It’s like visiting a friggin’ crime scene and seeing 15 different blood types light up under the blue light. It’s gunna take a while to sort all that out…
I think it’s safe for me to say this was CarAdvice merging with Drive the way a hungry lion would typically merge with a gazelle on the Serengeti. Which is quite palatable - if you’re the lion.
I am thrilled to see Drive have the opportunity to extend our innovative dealer lead model to CarAdvice’s online audience, and look forward to working with the team.
That’s a comment attributed to Chris Polites, CEO of the Drive Network, in the official CarAdvice press release, which I find delightful. I’d love to submit Mr Polites to a polygraph on that statement. Find out how thrilled he really is, and how enthusiastically he’s looking forward to ‘working with the team’.
Mumbrella, a kind of obscure eddy current in the online editorial marketplace, says it understands up to 10 redundancies will occur as a consequence of the merger.
And I guess that makes sense: You’ve got two machines pumping out the same editorial content. Why not just use the best machine and rebrand some of the output? Economies of scale.
No need to send a Drive journo and a CarAdvice journo to some event, when you can send the same dude or dudette and just re-brand the words.
But if you think about that more deeply maybe that’s a problem: It’s one fewer voice ‘out there’ in relation to whatever motoring news and current affairs occurs.
So this could be a good news or bad news development for you, the consumer of automotive news, and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. See, Nine plus Fairfax equals a spectacularly powerful media entity.
CarAdvice plus Drive (I mean, Drive is now just CarAdvice anyway, the way Skoda’s Karoq is a Volkswagen Tiguan with a hair and makeup tweak) … CarAdvice plus Drive equals a lot or automotive media grunt. Lots of eyeballs. Lots of traction.
So the car industry is certain to jump all over it and play its usual bullshit game, which is: “We didn’t like what you said, so we’re pulling our ads.” That’s the implied threat that almost every motoring journalist I know is concerned about, if ever they are moved to write comment that’s carmaker critical.
And carmakers are powerful. They do a shitload of advertising and this is a major contributor to the bottom line for media enterprises generally. If you’re a journo, you don’t want to get between a publisher and some cash.
But here’s the problem: Carmakers can’t afford not to advertise with a media entity as big as Nine-CarAdvice-Fairfax-Drive-MotorReport-whatever. Not if they want the population exposed to their bullshit marketing campaigns.
So it’s going to be interesting to see who caves in on this. Because it really is a Mexican standoff. Carmaker fires first - they lose exposure to half the population, and Nine takes a short-term financial hit.
If Nine and related entities call the bluff, they might lose the dough in the short term, but if they have the balls, they’ll emerge far more powerful - and able to report the truth more easily - into the future.
Just reading the tone of CarAdvice since the merger - and I have no inside knowledge of this … I read the same reports you do and look at who’s sleeping with whom … but the tone tells me CarAdvice is fellating the car industry somewhat less enthusiastically than previously.
So that’s a positive, and they recently installed Josh Dowling … whose thing is sticking the knife in, to the extent possible if you still want to be invited to lunch next week. So that’s another plus for audience-centricity. If that’s a word.)
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