Best of the Week: Why we investigated Jason Dooris; Gladwell’s theory of weak links in media; ComScore’s exit; the agonies of PR; Geoffrey Rush’s Tele lawsuit

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week. The Beastie Boys’ Solid Gold Hits is the soundtrack. And two new kittens in the house is the main distraction. (Popping home to write this on Friday afternoon, because it would be quieter than the office, has proven to be something of a naive idea.) This week - the story behind our investigation into Jason Dooris; why I (might) disagree with Malcolm Gladwell; when #metoo meets Australian libel laws; ComScore’s exit; and the frustrations of PR. Strongest and weakest links In my years as an editor, I was able to learn from a lot of different bosses and to see how things were done at a lot of different publishers. I can’t even remember who it was that gave me the mantra that’s stuck with me in the years since: your readers judge you by the best things and the worst things that you do. In other words, they’ll remember the big news story you broke, or the fascinating interview you published. And they’ll also remember that time you made a complete howler. (Perhaps like the time as the newly arrived editor of B&T magazine I spelled Quantas with a U. In a headline.) But the readers probably won’t even remember where they read most of the press release-based, commoditised stuff that most B2B titles, in most sectors, write. So that thought on your readers remembering only the best and worst is something I’ve often talked about (possibly to an annoying degree) to those who work with me now. So I was fascinated to hear a different perspective from Malcolm Gladwell when he spoke in Sydney this week. Arguably the world’s greatest writer on theories of human behaviour, he had another intriguing hypothesis. What if everything can be divided into situations where the weakest link defines the outcome, and situations that are all about the strongest link? In sport, he argued, soccer is a weakest link game. It’s a game usually won by a low score, and usually because of a mistake by a member of the losing team. So the important thing to do is to focus on ensuring that your weakest link is as good as possible. By contrast, he argued, basketball is a strongest link game. Successful teams have a couple of superstar players who can score at will. Focusing on getting the best possible superstar player is what will win games at basketball. He then turned to the media, arguing that his own magazine, The New Yorker, is an example of strongest link publishing. The magazine, he argued, publishes so much content every single week that nobody actually reads it all. So the two or three really great articles are what ends up defining the title. Like most Malcolm Gladwell hypotheses, it’s alluring. Is a magazine best improved by having two or three amazingly interesting articles, and not worrying too much about everything else? Or is it better to ensure every article is clearly written, has correct grammar, a nice image and a decent headline? But in the real world, when people buy a magazine, they want to read most of it. The New Yorker is something of an Outlier. (Yep, I’ve done that gag again.) My airport treat is generally The Economist. Having spent my 12 bucks, I’d expect to read it from cover to cover. I’ve got the December 2-8 issue, now a little out of date, sitting on my desk and I refuse to throw it out until I finish it. And while I might get a lot out of the best stuff, I’d still feel my expectations had been let down if I came upon a bad article. In publishing, I’d argue, it’s not enough to have a few great pieces. In addition, everything has to be good enough. In TV, Ten’s former programming boss David Mott used to talk about the era of “least objectionable” being over. By this he meant that viewers now have too many choices for programmers to hang on to an audience simply because their show isn’t as bad as whatever’s on the other channel. So, arguably, TV has made a transition from weakest link to strongest link - if Gladwell’s theory holds good. But the problem about that as a business model is that TV isn’t about winning certain timeslots with a blockbuster program - it’s about delivering advertisers consistent audiences in the right demographics. If you have a cracking show and a bunch of dross, they won’t stick around. You need, I think, a depth. But the joy of a Gladwell theory is that it takes some thinking about. I’ve a feeling this will be on my mind for a while as I think it over. Jason Dooris and the Atomic 212 awards machine I’ve applied the mantra about readers remembering the best and worst of what you do to Mumbrella’s own publishing strategy. One of the regular sources of the best of our journalism is Steve Jones. Steve joined us in 2014 and although he later went freelance, continues to contribute regularly. When there’s a big topic in our world that I feel is worthy of investigating, we’ll commission Steve to work on the story for as long as it takes. He’ll then go quiet for a few weeks before one day emailing to let me know that he’s nearly ready. When I get that message, looking at the story is like Christmas Day finally arriving. It’s usually followed by a slight elevation in stress levels as I contemplate just how many people are going to be annoyed when we publish it. If you did not read Steve’s investigation into [what went wrong with Isentia’s purchase of King Content](, which we published back in May, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Similarly, Steve’s [investigation into the activities of The Marketing Group](, published back in August, told an entertaining but murky tale of big business shenanigans spanning Australia, Singapore and Europe. But given the time and expense involved, you have to choose the subject carefully. And it can only be justified as a publishing strategy if you’re a believer in that theory that readers do remember the best and worst stuff. So when I asked Steve to start looking at Atomic 212 boss Jason Dooris back at the start of September, it had already been on my mind as a topic for some time. Jason is the only media agency boss who I’ve spent more time at the back of the room watching make awards judging presentations than I have face-to-face. Over the last year or two, I gradually came to the view that if Jason was presenting to one of our awards juries, it was a good idea for me to be in the room, so I could see at first hand how things unfold. For those not closely involved with awards, it’s probably worth recapping how we organise them. We begin by putting together juries for each category. Generally each jury will be involved in two or three categories, and we aim to find experts on the topic who are also free of conflicts of interest. As I mentioned earlier, I was lucky enough in my earlier career to see best practice at a bunch of different places, and to borrow from what I saw working. And one thing I saw work well during my time editing Media Week in the UK was a live judging round. So the formula we follow for the Mumbrella Awards is, after sending out entries to our juries for shortlisting, we move to the live judging. It’s a crazy day. We take over a floor of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney and put a different jury in each of their dozen or so boardrooms. Over the day, every 40 minutes, in each of the dozen rooms, different finalist teams arrive to be quizzed on their entries. Over the day, pretty much anybody who matters in the advertising industry is going to be there either as a presenting finalist or one of our 100 or so jurors. We run through a detailed briefing for the juries at the start of the day. And a key message is that they may have given the benefit of the doubt when they read the entries at the shortlisting stage. Now it’s their job to ask tough questions, and to only award trophies to those who have convinced them 100%. You can imagine the logistical difficulties of making sure the 140 or so presentations all take place smoothly and that everybody gets a fair crack. We even hire a couple of tech people ready to race to any room where there are problems hooking up presentations to the screens After watching the presentation and asking tough questions, the jurors debate an entry’s merit, before scoring as individuals. Meanwhile, for a couple of categories, we go even further. For creative agency of the year and media agency of the year, we send our jurors on the road, to visit the finalist agencies in person. Again, it’s a borrowed idea. It’s what we used to do in the Hospital Doctor of the Year Awards back in the UK. But my view is that giving a jury the chance to walk in through the door of an agency and get a sense of the culture gives them a better insight, and a better chance to select the right winner. In the case of creative agency of the year, where Colenso BBDO Auckland is usually a finalist, it means flying the jury to Auckland, and putting them up overnight. For media agency of the year and creative agency of the year, the cost of the judging is more than the entry fees and table sales revenue for the category. But it’s worth it, if we want the industry to believe in the value of the award. Our event team were kind enough to pull up some data for me on Friday. It turns out that last year we spent $42,527.80 on the judging process. Not the awards night - just the judging process. And that’s excluding our own staff costs. So it’s fair to say that we take the process seriously. Which brings us to Mumbrella Awards judging day, back in May. We were slightly fortunate in timings. The AdNews Awards had run a few weeks before, with Atomic 212 a winner. In the AdNews writeup, based on the written entry from the agency, were a number of inaccurate claims about wins and work the agency said it had achieved. We were privy to an email chain in which OMD boss Aimee Buchanan asked AdNews editor Rosie Baker to correct the record. Baker politely declined. In the hours before the judging day, my colleague Alex Hayes, who was leading the judging process, made a series of check calls on the Atomic 212 entries, which had been shortlisted in a number of categories. Based on the new information Alex learned, we decided we needed to brief the juries who were looking at entries from Atomic 212 on some specific questions they might want to ask. They related to questions about whether they were confident Atomic 212 really had carried out the work the entry said it had, for the clients it said it had. We also briefed the juries on the circumstances in which they might consider it appropriate to disqualify an entry. (The threshold was that if, on the balance of probabilities, they felt they had been deliberately misled, they should vote for disqualification.) In fairness to Jason Dooris, he was stoic as he answered the same tough questions from the juries on just how the work he was presenting could be justified as having been done by Atomic 212. It must have been an exhausting day for him. In one boardroom the jury voted 4-3 to disqualify. Then a juror who’d been on the fence switched, and they remained on the shortlist 4-3. But in every case, after gaining a better understanding of Atomic’s role in the work than the impression given in the written entry, the juries scored the entries low. When the awards ceremony followed at the Star three or four weeks later, unlike at the AdNews Awards, it wasn’t Atomic’s night. I’d love to think that the extra layer of live judging would have got to the correct result either way. But in an industry built on the truth well told, we’ll never know for sure. So from that point, I was increasingly interested in the approach being taken to awards entries by Jason Dooris. Few agencies have won as much, as fast, as Atomic 212. The problem was, without having access to other awards program entries, it was hard to see whether there was a pattern. I heard on the grapevine that if I was able to see Jason Dooris’ winning entry for agency head of the year in the Hong Kong-based Campaign Asia Awards, I’d be interested in some of the claims. It wasn’t the sort of document a rival publisher would be likely to give us, not least if it raised questions about the credibility of its own judging process. I tried a few different ways of getting the document, without much success. It was helpful having an edition of Mumbrella in Singapore covering the region, which gives us a number of relationships we otherwise would not have. One day an anonymous envelope arrived from overseas. It contained a copy of Dooris’s entry. As soon as I opened it, I knew there was enough in it for me to commission Steve to start fact checking the Campaign Asia entry. Meanwhile, Atomic was shortlisted in Mumbrella Asia’s media agency of the year category, where we had introduced live judging for the first time. I’d been on the fence on whether to travel to Singapore or leave it to our local team. I decided it made sense to be in the room to see the presentation. I wouldn’t tell the jury how to score any entries, but I might be able to offer factual information. When I briefed all of the juries at the start of each morning in the meeting rooms on Singapore’s Robinson Road where the presentations were taking place over two days, I reminded them of the need for scepticism about all presenters. When it came to Atomic 212, Jason kicked off the case study by playing a well-crafted case study video. It was the story of Lucy the robot, a fantastic PR stunt in which the agency organised for a telepresence robot to join the queue for the new Apple iPhone, generating a huge amount of media coverage. But it felt like I’d been seeing this case study - and watching the work win awards (including previously at our CommsCon Awards) - for an eternity. The video mentioned the PR stunt was at the time of the launch of the Apple 6S. As the presentation continued, I went to Wikipedia to check the launch date of the iPhone in question - September 2015, well outside the dates being judged. I resolved to flag it with the jury before they scored the presentation. In the event, I didn’t need to - a juror spotted it too. When it came to the Q&A, he politely asked Dooris to explain why they’d just been shown the video. It was, Dooris, suggested, because back in March, the World Advertising Research Centre had published a list of the 100 best marketing campaigns of the previous 12 months and included Lucy on that list. Therefore, he argued, he was justified in showing the video because WARC had talked about it this year. The jury listened to the explanation politely. And scored accordingly. Back in Australia, Steve was continuing his research. He began calling every client listed on the Campaign Asia Awards entry and checking if they were indeed a substantive client. The number willing to go on the record and say that they were not began to add up. Eventually, midway through November, Steve took his questions to Dooris and they met face-to-face. It became a lengthy meeting as Dooris struggled to explain the contents of the document. The situation got even more awkward when Steve asked why Dooris listed Stuart Mitchell, not Barry O’Brien, as the agency’s chairman. Awkward because O’Brien sat in on the interview. It was all a misunderstanding, suggested Dooris. We started preparing to publish. Then a week or so ago, Dooris asked Steve for another meeting. He said he had more information about clients he wanted to give to us. Was it just some kind of delaying tactic to get his version of events out first, we wondered. Or was he trying to get on the front foot and hand back any awards that had not been won fairly before it all came out? We decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and set the follow-up interview for yesterday morning. Conscious that it might be an attempt to spin an alternative version of the story elsewhere, Steve continued to work on his draft anyway. The suspicion that it was a delaying tactic increased when an article appeared in AdNews announcing they were tightening their criteria in next year’s awards on the type of work agencies can claim as their own. With 24 hours to go until the follow-up meeting, and with some new questions we planned to ask, on Thursday morning we weren’t completely surprised when a statement from Dooris dropped first in AdNews, then a few minutes later in B&T. AdNews angled its story on Dooris denying allegations that the agency had made untrue awards claims. The article ended with AdNews stating that it was happy that Atomic’s wins in its awards were legit. I’d be interested to know if, with the benefit of the additional information since offered in Steve’s article, AdNews still thinks that. Meanwhile, B&T, which had the week before named Atomic as its independent agency of the year, reported that Dooris was “countering the murmurings” in the industry. Shortly before 3pm, we published. If you haven’t yet read Steve’s story - I thoroughly recommend it. [You can read it - and the 80+ comments it has already attracted - via this link](. Indeed, applying the rules of readers remembering the best and worst, if you only read one Mumbrella story this year, I’d make it that one. There’ll be more developments in the coming days, I suspect. And in the coming weeks, we’ll be thinking hard about whether there’s more we should do with our own awards. I keep wondering what outcome we’d have had last time round if alarm bells hadn’t already rung with Atomic’s AdNews Awards claims. One aspect I think we’ll consult the industry and our past jurors about is whether all winning entries should be published in full afterwards. The major downside to that would be that entrants might be unable to share certain pieces of confidential client information that they currently do. The upside being that it would focus the minds of all entrants on how they tell their stories if they know their rivals will be fact checking it down the track. I’ll let you know where we land on that one. #metoo vs Australian libel laws Friday afternoon saw a significant development in the swirling debate around allegations of harassment in the entertainment industry. Actor [Geoffrey Rush announced he was suing The Daily Telegraph over its front page splash a week before, relating to his conduct during his time with Sydney Theatre Company in King Lear](. I have no view on the veracity of the allegations (indeed, it was almost impossible to even tell from the story what the claims were). But the article came in the context of a series of revelations in the US which have seen the downfall of characters like producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and TV host Matt Lauer. When the #metoo trend went mainstream and women began to publicly tell their stories, I expected that Australia’s tougher libel laws would be an impediment to that trend locally. Then last week, the ABC and Fairfax revealed a well-researched and multi-sourced investigation into TV gardener Don Burke, raising expectations that there would be much more to follow. By contrast, the Tele article had much less information, and no on-the-record complainants. I suspect that Rush’s legal action will focus the minds of anyone in a newsroom currently contemplating publishing allegations about a public figure. As the Rebel Wilson libel case against Bauer Media demonstrated, for publications that fail to prove their claims, the consequences can be expensive. ComScore’s exit We appear to be finishing the year with globalisation of the media and marketing industry in something of a retreat. As I talked about a couple of weeks back, in the media space we’ve seen HuffPost end its local joint venture with Fairfax, and we’ve seen Mashable’s local presence remain on life support. However, I should correct the record on one point I made. In the same email I mentioned my view that The Guardian Australia, while having established itself as a powerful local presence, was losing a shedload of money. I’ve since seen some credible numbers to suggest that’s no longer the case. In the financial year before last, it indeed lost a shedload of money - seven figures. Last year, this loss reduced to a six figure number. And, if the media gods continue to be kind, the publication will break even in the current financial year. But the rollback has continued elsewhere. [The decision to shut down most of AdRoll’s local operation]( came as a huge shock to the local market - and the company’s staff - just over a week ago. AdRoll has a good product - we use it in our own marketing. And their staff felt like part of the fabric of the local digital ecology. Thursday night saw them go out with a bang on what I’m told by my colleagues was an epic Christmas party on the harbour. And then yesterday [we broke the news that ComScore is also pulling up the drawbridge in Australia](. In much of the rest of the world, ComScore is the default digital audience metric. Australia is an exception. While ComScore will continue to service local subscribers, effectively this means Australia is now a one-metric town, and Nielsen has won. When the IAB ran its original pitch for the local industry metric seven years ago, the expectation was that ComScore would struggle to break in on Nielsen’s turf. A bit like the unwritten rules of soccer are that England always lose in the semi-final to the Germans on penalties, the rules of IAB tenders always seemed to be that ComScore would lose to Nielsen. A comment on the article from Nic Halley yesterday may have been a tad harsh, but also familiar: “Shame to see this happen to great people with a solid product. Now we’re just left with Nielsen and their sales arm, the IAB”. The pain of being in PR And - nearly finally - it would be remiss of me discussing Best of the Week without talking about an article which captured the imagination of a LOT of public relations professionals this week - [“The slow, painful death of a press release in 22 days”](. We don’t often run anonymous pieces, but this one, which captured the agony of corporate signoffs in excruciating detail, justified it. Corporate Australia - and particularly tech companies - clearly has a big problem. We heard from staff at a variety of big companies, all convinced we were talking about their own employer. There’s a lot of PR pain out there. Thank you, by the way, for the kind words about last week’s email, particularly for the many tips on raising rescue cats. I can report that last Saturday’s trip to Blacktown Animal Holding Facility resulted in two delightful new members of the household. Sophia remains suspicious of the cat in the mirror while Loki is growing in confidence having successfully stalked his first fly last night. Meanwhile, in a somewhat out--of-character move, I’m hitting the road shortly to head down to Wollongong for my first parachute jump. Our news editor Paul Wallbank is on weekend duty and can be reached at paul@mumbrella.com.au, while I of course welcome hearing from you at tim@mumbrella.com.au Have a splendid weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](