Best of the Year: Bursting bubbles, PR disasters; The tech apocalypse; LinkedIn’s second coming; and the ABC’s inevitable New Year’s Eve debacle

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, written with the idyllic soundtrack of ABC Grandstand, accompanied by the distraction of occasional sprints into the loungeroom to watch replays of the big shots. Jeez, I love The Ashes. And given that absolutely nothing of consequence occurred within the marketing world this week, it’s a good chance to look back on the whole of 2017. It was the year Facebook’s honeymoon period finally ended If there was a year that the mood music from Facebook (and indeed it’s slightly less evil digital twin Google) changed, then it was 2017. Gone was the arrogant tone that at times summed up the platform as it tried to tackle the perception that it had been taking advertisers for granted (and possibly for a ride). As question after question began to emerge about its internal metrics, Facebook began to recognise that it needed to open up to third party verification if advertisers were going to go on trusting it. Meanwhile, in the US, the scale of Russian election interference emerged. What once felt like a crackpot conspiracy theory quickly became a likelihood: Facebook had been successfully subverted to potentially change the outcome of the US election. The result of this will probably be much closer governmental regulation of Facebook, and perhaps Google too, as utilities. Recognition of this political drumbeat by the big players is just one reason why they tried so hard to year to win friends. It was the year the influencer bubble deflated For all the talk of influencers being about authenticity, the opposite was too often true. As brands raced to throw money at influencers, many of them in turn raced to buy fake followers. Rarely in marketing has the gap between advertising spend and evidence of return on investment been so large. I’m yet to see a convincing case study of an influencer campaign that delivered at scale on a solid metric like actual sales. As a result, brands that experimented with influencers have begun to pull back. I suspect that’s part of the reason influencer representation agency The Remarkables (led by the charismatic Lorraine Murphy) pivoted towards strategy, and why influencer platform Tribe (led by the charismatic Jules Lund) is going to need to pivot towards a different, more scalable business model. It was the year Ten slipped through Lachlan Murdoch’s fingers Back in March, I found the jigsaw pieces slot into place as I spent a weekend poring over Ten’s ASX declarations. The network was in bigger trading trouble than anyone in the outside world recognised. And while [I was the first to call it on Ten’s troubles](, I missed the outcome. My guess was that Lachlan Murdoch was going to seize control and fold the network into the News Corp empire. Meanwhile CBS, long an investor in Ten’s digital channel Eleven and program supplier, was hiding in plain sight. Murdoch’ actions, in concert with fellow Ten shareholder Bruce Gordon, in tipping the network into administration proved to be the wrong strategy. The move reduced their influence over the outcome, and they were outbid by CBS. It was the year the reach of Rupert Murdoch peaked Indeed, the year ended with the News Corp and 21st Century Fox empire looking completely different to how it began. Rupert Murdoch agreed to sell most of his entertainment assets, including Fox Studios and the US version of Fox Sports, along with the company’s stake in UK subscription service BSkyB, to Disney Co. The move will see News Corp go back to being a (highly influential) news company, powered by its newspaper mastheads, plus Fox News and Sky News. But it looks likely to leave the entertainment and sport business. The proposed local deal to merge Fox Sports Australia into Foxtel, which News Corp owns jointly with Telstra, looks likely to be collateral damage. And continuing ownership of Foxtel no longer looks strategic. It was the year the media ownership laws changed… and nothing happened The biggest anti-climax of the year was what happened after the media ownership laws changed. After years of lobbying, the government successfully repealed the rules banning ownership of TV stations that reach more than 75% of the population, and limiting ownership of TV, radio and newspaper assets two two-out-of-three in any given city. But the widely anticipated media consolidation did not follow, with little appetite for big deals to own traditional media. Indeed the two biggest transactions of the year - CBS’s acquisition of Ten and Fairfax’s part float on the ASX of real estate offering Domain - would both have been permitted anyway. As has often been the case, it left me wondering exactly what the point of communications minister Mitch Fifield actually is. It was the year the consultancies parked their tanks on adland’s lawn After years of throat-clearing about the potential for the big four consultancies to threaten agencies’ business models, the moment finally arrived in May when Accenture paid a blockbuster $63m to buy Australia’s best creative agency, The Monkeys. For the Monkeys it avoided the culture-killing exit a purchase by a traditional communications holding group would have led to. On a smaller scale, PwC invested in Melbourne startup Thinkerbell as it worked to maintain first mover advantage in the space - established through its long running annual Media & Entertainment Outlook Report - over its big four rivals, and more recently the perfect hire of Russel Howcroft to lead its CMO advisory service. And Deloitte raided McCann for four of the Melbourne agency’s top staff, in a coordinated move which I wonder if we’ve heard the last of in terms of contractual issues. And, KPMG continues its own manoeuvres, last month announcing its own CMO advisory team. All these moves by the consultancies are both aggressive in terms of pushing into strategic advie that agencies have often struggled to get clients to pay for properly, but also defensive, as they seek to develop new services beyond accountancy. It was the year the #MeToo reckoning skipped the Australian media and marketing industry While #MeToo was arguably the phrase of the year, the reckoning unleashed in the US on the world of entertainment and media by the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, barely touched Australia. Tough libel laws created a high barrier to publication, with the Fairfax and ABC investigation of Don Burke the only notable exception. The Daily Tele’s race to publish under-researched and vague allegations about Geoffrey Rush triggered a defamation suit which is likely to make publishers’ lawyers even more nervous about printing further revelations. Australian agency culture has often been a hostile place for women, particularly in creative departments. But because of the local libel laws it’s hard to see where the naming of names and accounting for actions will begin, unless allegations are made under privilege in court or parliament. It was the year Alex Malley’s egotistical content marketing cult ended Back in June, [the reign of Alex Malley as CEO of accountancy body CPA Australia finally came to an end]( after he spend millions and millions of dollars on promoting himself as an inspirational figure. It was the most ever spent in the country on content marketing and in the end a total waste of money. Credit belonged to campaigning by the AFR’s Rear Window columnist Joe Aston who was first to point out that the emperor was stark bollock naked. Add to that the axing of Isentia’s King Content content marketing arm, and it was a bad year for the discipline in Australia. It was the year that cheats prospered Our last big investigation of the year was into [the many exaggerated claims made in awards submissions by Atomic 212 boss Jason Dooris](. Before we’d even published the evidence, AdNews and Campaign Asia declared that they felt no further action was required about the awards they had given the agency. I hope that having now seen the depth of the evidence, they are quietly reviewing this stance and will do the right thing... It was the year of the media and tech apocalypse (kinda) In September, I sat in on a couple of sessions at Advertising Week in New York where I was struck by the complacency of the execs on stage. One was a panel discussion on whether the consultancies would threaten agency business models (“no”, they definitively concluded). And the other was whether there was an ad tech apocalypse coming. Again, the answer was no. But what we have seen this year is something of a correction as suppliers merge (think RadiumOne and RhythmOne); or drastically scale back local operations (think AdRoll and ComScore). Globally, on the media side we’ve seen BuzzFeed, Vice and The Guardian amongst those making staff cuts. And locally, we’ve seen Huffington Post pretty much end its Australian ambitions, streaming service Pandora close and Mashable lose its way. In large part, that’s the nature of any developing space. There are winners and losers, and venture capital always creates over-investment which later gets corrected. What makes this year an exception - arguably the most significant since the dotcom crash of 2001 - is the sheer number of people who took jobs in what they thought were growth areas and then found themselves unemployed at the end of the year. None of it was helped by the growing crisis in every stage of the programmatic advertising chain. Media agencies also still have a bill to pay on this one too, I suspect. It was the year of the United Airlines and Pepsi PR disasters Not every year provides a case study in a full blown corporate PR disaster. Yet in the space of a week, April provided us with two for the ages. First there was the disastrous Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner and seemingly appropriating the Black Lives Matter movement. The only way the campaign united the world was in hatred of the ad. The single lesson: don’t let small creative teams - particularly inhouse - launch an ad without getting proper PR input beforehand. Then there was the clumsy response of United Airlines to a video of a passenger being beaten up after he objected to being offloaded because the flight was overbooked. It was the best lesson we’ve ever seen in why it’s important to apologise quickly and sincerely if you want to move one. (Take note, the brainiacs behind the Triple M “Ozzest 100”.) It was the year Michelle Guthrie made her mark on the ABC Michelle Guthrie’s first full year running the national broadcaster saw its biggest changes in a decade unleashed. Radio schedules were ripped up, as were management structures with a move prioritising genre over platform. For good or bad? I think it’s too early to say. It was the year the Australian magazine industry left the mainstream This time last year, Bauer Media, News Life Media and Pacific Magazines carried out a brutal hit-and-run on the Audited Media Association of Australia, pulling out of print audits in a choreographed move that should have seen them answering tough questions from the ACCC. It was a move triggered by the long term drip-drip of quarterly sets of bad news about circulation numbers. But the withdrawal was unimaginative and sent a hugely negative signal that did nothing to build confidence in the troubled sector. With - in the main - woeful digital strategies, the magazine mastheads no longer offer agencies and advertisers sufficient reason to consider them. It was the year newspapers saw they had a future By contrast, the news mastheads are starting to show signs of confidence, particularly at the premium end. Locally that’s being led by The Australian, although I’ll be looking at Fairfax Media’s half yearly results release in February for how The Age and the SMH are travelling on the subs front. And of course, Trump’s rise drove subscriptions to the likes of the New York Times to new heights in 2017. The newspaper deathclock seems to have stopped at a minute to midnight. It was the year LinkedIn overtook Twitter for relevance As a once huge fan, it saddened me to see Twitter’s slow fade throughout 2017. When it comes to professional content, LinkedIn is now a better discovery engine for me than Twitter, or even Facebook. As it happens, Mumbrella now gets more traffic from LinkedIn than Twitter too. But Twitter’s potential salvation lies in the lessons of LinkedIn. The network has stayed true to a specific, (in this case, career-related) purpose and since the Microsoft acquisition, has invested heavily in delivering a good user experience. So with the right investment, and a clear strategy (conversations around entertainment content? Disney would be a good future owner wouldn’t it?) Twitter could yet be saved. And finally, for me, 2017 was the year where I returned to regular long form writing with this weekly email. It’s been a pleasure and a conversation I look forward to continuing in 2018. Meanwhile, I’m covering the newsdesk over the rest of the holiday - which no doubt will include writing the annual story about people being unhappy with how the ABC covered the fireworks. I’ll be monitoring Twitter for that, I guess. Do feel to drop me a line at tim@mumbrella.com.au. And happy new year to you. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](