As I said on #TheDrum last night, the disheartening thing about the @MediaDiverseAU report is not the numbers - those should be obvious to anyone who consumes TV, radio or print in Australia - but rather the defensiveness with which the report was received.

That shows that networks still don’t see the obvious opportunity in diversity. At any network upfront they’ll tout “innovation” from start to finish but demonstrate one metric by which they're identical to their competitors and all of a sudden “innovation” isn’t so important.

Networks will decry declining audiences, shrinking ad revenues and contracting markets but demonstrate one area proven to grow audiences and reach new markets and they inexplicably refuse to acknowledge it.

The canary in the coal mine here is advertising. Commercial networks depend on advertisers but ever notice that advertising on commercial networks is more diverse than the programs they’re shown in?

This isn’t because FMCG companies are trying to be nice, it’s because they see benefit in market growth. If a network refuses to hear what its audience is telling it that’s bad enough, but if they refuse to see what their advertisers see that is a recipe for commercial disaster.

If you ran a network would you continue to deliver the same programming year after year, all the while complaining about how your market is shrinking, or would you try something that actually reflected the audience you and your advertisers were trying to reach?

My only issue with the @MediaDiverseAU report is that it’s titled “Who gets to tell Australian stories?”

To me this is more about getting networks to see the benefit to themselves.

I’d have called it, “How Networks Can Better Connect With Audiences and Advertisers”.

If all your competitors eschew diversity, diversity is innovation, and innovation is commercial advantage. Networks initial reaction may be defensiveness, but they ignore commercial realities at their peril.