Mumbrellacast

We've crossed the picket line to present this week's episode of the Mumbrellacast. Around the time of recording this episode, ABC employees were returning to work from their 24-hour strike -- the first in 20 years -- which means the skeleton staffers won't have to dust off those old Seachange episodes just yet. But nothing has been resolved, so it remains to be seen if another strike is on the cards. We break down what the workers want, why they haven't gotten it -- and why managing director Hugh Marks is acting as if working for Aunty is akin to doing national service, with lines like: "I understand that in the current climate higher pay would help many individuals, but we must also remain focused on the long-term sustainability of the ABC and its relevance to all Australians." Kyle Sandilands filed suit against ARN last Friday, and we got hold of the "concise statement" lodged in Federal Court on his behalf, which we've published in full on the website, and which we unpack on the podcast. The document also reveals, for the first time, the exact amount that Kyle is earning, and under which financial column each of those "services" falls under. There's a curious "consultancy fee" for ARN's hip hop-based digital station CADA, which caught our collective eye. Our guess is Kyle isn't instructing them on which ASAP Rocky album tracks to playlist. We also talk press releases, following Medianet's Amrita Sidhu's declaration at CommsCon on Wednesday that 73% of journalists told them they "often or occasionally" receive what they suspect to be AI-generated pitches. "Make no mistake about it though," she said. "Our thematic analysis shows the majority will lose trust in the pitch ... For them, an AI generated pitch is a lazy pitch. It's a non-researched pitch. It's a potentially false pitch. There goes the trust." We debate whether journalists can detect an AI-generated pitch, and the rising use of press releases in journalism. Finally, we hear from Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory’s Jen Davidson, who feels we are ready for what she dubbed "Naked Communications 2.0", referring to the storied agency that pioneered unbundling strategy from execution. Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Thursday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

The highest paid radio host was officially terminated from his job this week, after his equal-highest-paid co-host Jackie Henderson was let go a few weeks back. We're talking about Kyle Sandilands of course, which is where we begin this episode of the Mumbrellacast. Is this the end of the saga, or just the beginning? Or the long, long middle? We pick apart the wording from Kyle's impassioned media release, issued a few minutes before his ex-bosses at ARN made the news official on the ASX on Wednesday morning. He has called the lawyers in, and is claiming that his former bosses made it impossible to actually remedy the alleged breach. Surely Sandilands won't give up his $100m pie without a dragged-out, knock-'em-down legal battle. We speculate wildly on what might happen next. And sticking with radio, we parse the year's first radio ratings survey, where the main take-away message seems to be that -- in the world of radio -- change takes time to stick. Christian O'Connell replaced Jonesy and Amanda in Sydney breakfast for ARN's Gold, and the listeners were not willing to stick around for the shift. A few stations changed names, and listeners ran away. It's early days though -- we still believe. Finally, a bunch of top executives in Australia’s advertising industry are facing a future of falling financial returns, as consolidation, shrinking remits, and hordes of sentient robots that love a good em dash have killed off the million-dollar leadership salary -- perhaps for good (in every sense of the word). But where do all these executives end up when the well runs dry? Maybe they can join Kyle at Lowes? Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Thursday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

Chris Howatson has called out the mass consolidation of advertising agencies sweeping the global holding company sector, describing it as a confusing strategy that could hamper long-term growth. Speaking to the Mumbrellacast, the founder of Howatson and Co said the approach focuses on merging creative brands that don’t scale, while media operations, where scale actually delivers efficiency, are the parts that make financial sense. He added that holding companies may continue to make extreme margins on media through principal trading, but this will mask the declining value of their creative businesses as more top talent leaves for independent agencies. Howatson’s comments come as the agency marks its five-year anniversary, with the founder outlining his long-term commitment to remaining independent, keeping headcount under 200 even at the cost of taking on new clients, and explaining why he believes the industry is entering a creative renaissance despite consolidation and AI disruption.

Four years ago, Tim Burrowes came up with the idea of the Unmade Index, which tracks daily the fortunes of 14 Australian publicly listed companies, ranging from once-mighty media companies like Seven through to tiny (read: $40m) businesses like Gumtree. Unfortunately, since its January 6, 2022 inception, the index has tracked the massive decline of the local media industry, with the total value dropping by more than 60%. If maths isn't your strong suit, that's a big fall for stocks -- which investors generally prefer to increase in value. As discussed in the podcast, the past four years have been absolutely transformative, just not in a good way.

Good things come to those who wait, and the out-of-home advertising industry, and the media buyers who book the campaigns that grace billboards and bus shelters across the country, have certainly been waiting for the next iteration of Move for quite some time. Originally called Move 2.0, then reverting to simply Move, the long-awaited and much-touted out-of-home audience measurement tool is finally live, having been in development since 2021, and teased numerous times along the way. Elizabeth McIntyre, CEO of the Outdoor Media Association, appears on the Mumbrellacast, where Tim Burrowes quizzes her on the future of out-of-home advertising, the granular new Move system, and what's happening within the OMA. Burrowes also asks McIntyre about her own plans, now the big project has been completed and delivered. For the uninitiated, Move tracks audience data from around 180,000 outdoor advertising sites around the country, by modelling a synthetic audience of 2.2 million Australians and their daily movements. This system was built after tracking the movements of 5,000 people over a fortnight across more than 280,000 different routes. It then predicts the likely audience of each out-of-home advertising point. This information is calibrated against independent data sources for further accuracy, and is available in hourly increments. Listen to the whole conversation on the Mumbrellacast, by subscribing on your favourite podcast app, or clicking on the player above.

Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, featuring zero serious misconduct breaches -- aside from references to both Alan Bond and Donald Rumsfeld, of course. It's been quite the week in radio-land, with ARN using the dump button on Kyle Sandilands for "serious misconduct" which is, of course, legalese for "teasing his co-host for believing in star charts". We smashed the glass and issued an emergency podcast on Tuesday evening shortly after ARN dropped the bombshell that the Kyle and Jackie O show is no more -- you can listen to that here -- but today we investigate what is likely to be a long and drawn out legal battle between Sandilands and his former station. Victoria-Jane Otavski from Blackbay Lawyers unpacks all the legal elements for us, and looks at whether or not the network actually has a case for alleging serious misconduct in breach of his contract. As she asks, how can someone remedy a behavioural breach that's already happened -- without using some serious time-space misconduct. This week Mumbrella broke the story that Australian content platform Envato was sacking up to a third of its workers. Envato has flown under the radar for many, but for certain creatives it provides songs, sounds, stock imagery, and photography -- paying billions out to the creatives who made the original pieces, while providing a rich content library to those who need it. It was bought by Shutterstock last year for a whopping US$245m, so this is a major Australian start-up success story gone slightly pear-shaped. We look at why it needed to make such a drastic downsizing, and whether or not AI has reared its mechanical head (spoiler: it has). Finally, we look at Vinyl Group's acquisition of Val Morgan Digital, which will see the media company add Buzzfeed, Ladbible, Popsugar, Vox Media, and Choctop Monthly to its growing stable of brands (fair enough, I made up Choctop Monthly). We wonder aloud whether the $7m (plus $3.5m in Vinyl stock) was too much to pay, or if this is all part of the masterplan to build a media stable to fuel the company's music tech dreams? Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Wednesday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

"What I uncovered as I tried to get my team set up time sheeting ...  was that not only are they incredibly frustrating for the people doing them, and the people chasing them, but the data that comes back from them is not very accurate." That's Freddie Mckenzie, co-founder of Manifest, a startup using AI to automatically construct timesheets at agencies. Mckenzie, speaking with Tim Burrowes in the latest episode of Mumbrella's Unmaker Series podcast, says he's well aware that many in the industry think billable hours is a broken model: but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.  "The agency model and the whole industry runs on time: time's a really important component at the moment. It's becoming less important as we go into the future, but ultimately it's a service-based industry ... [and time remains important for] understanding your costs, understanding your resourcing, understanding your team, and understanding your business." Manifest began as an internal tool ("Shutterspeed") built inside Mackenzie's Auckland production company Vivid Creative (now Chameleon). The system uses machine learning to automate time sheet tracking, and Mckenzie says that pricing model will initially be based on standard per-seat SaaS models. McKenzie told Burrowes that while some people may have privacy concerns about the software, it was probably worth it even on an individual basis because for many agency people, timesheeting is the worst part of their job. Manifest is not a simple timesheeting stand-in: it's designed to give managers a better understanding of their own operations.  "Charging based on time is definitely becoming obsolete really fast -- it de-incentivizes agencies to use AI tooling because it's supposed to make us faster."  "What Manifest is designed to do is help you understand how outputs are created and how value is created inside the agency," he says.

The news that the Kyle & Jackie O Show is coming to an end is a consequential one. The sudden and dramatic axing of FM radio's biggest show of the last two decades has enormous consequences not just for Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson, but also for ARN Media and even rival Southern Cross Austereo. Tonight's ASX announcement also sets the stage for a legal battle between Sandilands and ARN. In an emergency edition of the Mumbrellacast, Tim Burrowes was joined by Ben Willee, executive director for media and data at Spinach Advertising to unpack the consequences of the media story of the year. What next for the two presenters, and how on earth will Kiis FM fill the breakfast shows in its tow biggest markets? Ben Willee has a bold suggestion: Beg Gold FM's Brendan Jones and Amanda Keller to return to breakfast, and ask Chrsitian O'Connell to switch networks to Kiis.

It’s results season, and this week Nine, SCA, and ARN all reported the various fortunes of their companies. The night before they announced their financial results -- and the very next business day after the retirement of chair Kerry Stokes -- SCA's board decided to dump boss Jeff Howard, who used to run Seven, and was very briefly CEO and managing director of the newly merged Seven/SCA. The timing of this decision sent quite a message to the market. Former SCA boss John Kelly (back when they were "all about audio") is now interim CEO of the company's TV and audio divisions, and decided to use the SCA investor call as a gentle audition to shareholders for the top role. He looks in with a good shot. After all, it was very clear which of the two companies involved in the Seven/SCA merger is doing the heavy lifting in financial terms, and it's not the one that screens three hours of Home and Away each week ...

Hundreds of thousands of hateful comments are sitting on the Facebook feeds of Australian news publishers, according to a scan from a social media startup that is using multiple AI models to understand comment intent and context. “Conversational intelligence” company Sence scanned 4.8m comments on 114 publisher pages and found virulent racism and violent threats among around 400,000 harmful comments attached to news stories. The New Zealand operation — which has signed up The All Blacks, NZME and Radio New Zealand in its home market — is now pushing into Australia and is using the scan as an illustration of the extent of the problem.

Apple has shaken the world of podcasting again this week (let's not forget the "pod" part of the word comes from the iPod) with the announcement that it is adding videos to its podcasting platform, with an option for listeners to toggle between video and audio-only. Youtube is the top platform for podcasts in the world, and Spotify has been focusing on video-led podcasts of late. Yet, CRA's Podcast Ranker -- the"only official measurement system" for podcasts -- doesn't count video plays in its count, meaning it's leaving a lot of the audience out of the equation. Eleanor Dickinson wrote about this topic, speaking to Karl Stefanovic's podcast producer Keshnee Kemp and Spotify ANZ head of podcast Prithi Dey. We discuss the topic further on the show. Also discussed is Joe Aston's investigative commentary publication Rampart which, he disclosed to Tim, is making “multiples” of $500,000 in revenue after its first year, and was profitable by month two. It's an example of a thriving media company in a market that has seen so many others fail of late. (You can listen to that full interview here.) Is it good business sense for a business publication to sue its own subscribers? That's what Todd Scott, the owner and publisher of New Zealand premium finance masthead NBR is doing, taking some of its biggest customers to court if they don't ensure their employees all have their own logins. Scott reckons he's make “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from publicly shaming these companies -- so it appears to be good business sense, indeed. And finally, Tim chats to newly minted Ooh Media CEO James Taylor about whether his out-of-home business is being undervalued by the market.

Former Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston sat down with Mumbrella's Tim Burrowes for an Unmakers Edition of the Mumbrellacast. The pair covered a lot of ground, including a probing discussion on the economics of Aston's operation, his interview guest list, the character of former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, and his plans to expand beyond "the Joe Aston Show".

12 February 2026 In this week's Mumbrellacast, our hosts discuss the spray ACMA chair Nerida O'Loughlin copped from Sarah Hanson-Young over the media watchdog's lack of regulation regarding the Kyle and Jackie O show's continued infringes; the merging of WPP's creative agencies; NZ retailer The Warehouse's eight-week advertising blackout; and Hal's conversation with The Guardian Australia's Liz Wynn on the publication's move to require its most dedicated users to log-in to the site to access its news. Join Hal Crawford, Nathan Jolly, Eleanor Dickinson, Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy for a look at everything under Australia's media and marketing umbrella.

4 February 2026 Thanks to Earmax Media for sponsoring this episode. Click the link HERE to see podcast advertising campaigns that really work, or email hello@earmaxmedia.com directly. Be sure to check out Tim's chat with the team at Earmax — Andy Maxwell and Ralph van Dijk — HERE. In today's Mumbrellacast, our team reviews new advertising work for Coopers, Mirvac, Westpac, Bupa and Colorbond; discusses a spate of closures in Australian print media; and Eleanor interviews ex-Clemenger BBDO talent, Vinne Schifferstein, who co-opened a new AI agency, MC&V. Join Hal Crawford, Eleanor Dickinson, Tim Burrowes and Abe Udy for a look at everything under Australia's media and marketing umbrella.

30 January 2026 We are interrupting our normal schedule to bring you an emergency Mumbrellacast, after both Nine and Nova delivered major news to end the working week. Join Nathan Jolly, Tim Burrowes, Hal Crawford and Abe Udy for a look at everything under Australia's media and marketing umbrella.

28 January 2026 For this week’s Mumbrellacast, we have a live recording from the Perth edition of the Compass roadshow, where we heard from the cream of the Western Australian media and marketing community. At The Globe, Tim Burrowes moderated a panel where Block Branding co-founder and creative strategy director Mark Braddock; Social Meteor managing director Luke Whelan; chief marketing and growth officer at HIF Australia Kristina Green; and marketing consultant Alice Manners discussed ChatGPT's impact on the world, whether bravery still exists in marketing, and the reliance on gambling advertising dollars in the media.

21 January 2026 In this week's Mumbrellacast, we head to Adelaide for the Compass event, where four of the city's leading lights in the marketing and media world talk about recent changes in government policy, the struggles of running an agency, and how Adelaide is a bellwether for the rest of the industry. From the surrounds of the wonderfully named Elephant British Pub, Tim Burrowes moderates an all-star panel that features Sean O’Brien, managing director at Nine Adelaide, Katheryn Korczak, co-owner of Nation Creative, Michael Healy, CMO of the Royal Automobile Association, and Adele Gibb, managing director at Carat.

This week’s Mumbrellacast is a live recording from our Compass Melbourne event, where a panel of media and marketing insiders discuss the challenges of the year ahead. The panel — Thinkerbell's chief executive officer, Margie Reid; Southern Cross Austereo's head of marketing, Naomi Gorringe; Atomic 212's chief strategy officer, Asier Carazo; and Mondelez International's vice president, marketing ANZ, Ben Wicks — talk about the opportunities and challenges around the encroachment of AI, how to capitalise on a viral moment, the gaps in diversity hiring, and the perils of attracting younger generations to an unsteady industry.

7 January 2026 This week’s Mumbrellacast is a live recording from our Compass Brisbane event, where a panel of media and marketing insiders speak about the compounding challenges — and opportunities — in the industry. The panel — Andrew Kolb, head of strategy at VML; Kirsty Lucas, senior vice president of marketing and partnerships at Brisbane Airport; Remy Brassac, co-founder of Rumble and Rumbletown Ventures; Kelly Healy, general manager of News Corp Australia; and Eliott Bledsoe, arts marketing consultant — discussed doing more with less, the negative impact AI will (and is) having on journalism's future, the advertising industry's undervaluation, and how the upcoming Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games will be the sector's "north star".

31 December 2025 This week’s Mumbrellacast is a live recording from our Compass Sydney event, where a panel of media and marketing insiders talk about a tough 2025 – and look ahead with optimism. The panel — Christina Aventi, chief strategy officer at BMF; Bel Harper, chief product and marketing officer at Ooh Media; Anita Ayres, head of brand and marketing at Teachers Mutual Bank; and Clare Pickens, chief executive officer at Leo Burnett — discussed the toughest challenges they faced in the year, how "value-based compensation" should be quantified now that AI is destroying hour-based billing, the controversial conversations the industry should be having, and reasons to remain optimistic (there's even a poem recommendation).