Best of the Week: Awkward questions, clever answers and the war over the ABC

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, on the best of all possible days - the day when the stress of Mumbrella360 disappears in the rearview mirror, while a month of World Cup football fills the windscreen. Today’s soundtrack: Oasis, live at Maine Road 1996. It’s that sort of day. This week: Agency cultures; digital debates; women in radio; and the ABC becomes an election battleground Hello So I’m not entirely sure how this week’s email will go. I often don’t really know what I think about something until I write it down, and tease out the argument. And I’m yet to fully process the blur of sessions and speakers and booze and business cards that made up the last few days of Mumbrella360. It’s been a helluva week. I got to ask Michael Miller whether News Corp is too powerful, and Adam Ferrier if he’s annoying to work with (Mumbrellacast spoiler: he admits he is). I coaxed a raw story from IAG’s Brent Smart about the worst day of his career; had Nick Garrett offer up some hard truths about the state of creativity in Australia, and got to ask a cheeky question or two of WPP’s Kieran Moore. But best of all, I came away feeling positive about the people and prospects of marketing in Australia. So I suspect today’s note will form something of stream of consciousness based on how the conference unfolded for me. Morning glory Which takes me to Wednesday morning, and our Swedish guests Petronella Panerus and Magnus Jakobsson, as debilitated by jet lag as anyone I’ve met, somehow pulling it together when they stepped onto the stage. And wow, Akestam Holst are an inspiring agency. They executed a plan that took them from Sweden’s fifth best agency to being named international agency of the year. And if there was a secret sauce, it was in building a culture where the staff get to go home on time and have a life outside of work. With discipline, it’s possible to have global standards and still turn the office lights out at 6pm. I doubt there are many big agencies in Australia that can claim to do that. Yet it sounds like Akestam Holst also has a confronting (or accountable may be a better word) culture where there’s little place to hide professionally, with [an unusual openness around the creative process](. If I’d been wearing my Fitbit, I’d have clocked a fair few miles as I tried to see at least some of every session across the three floors of the Hilton. With six simultaneous streams at some points, that was a lot of ground to cover. By 9.30am on Wednesday, I was already torn. On the big stage, Elizabeth Serotte, the marketer behind the zeitgeist-grabbing Fearless Girl statue, was explaining how it was done. One floor up, the great and the good of the digital world were gathering for one of the sessions I was more nervous about, [the IAB’s media manifesto](. Getting something coherent out of the session in just an hour - particularly after the boss Vijay Sonlanki got booted out a few days earlier - made me nervous Each of the work tables at the back of the room was packed, with many familiar, and senior, industry faces contributing to the simultaneous debates. One floor down, it was the first lockout of the conference, for BMF’s Shit Real Leaders say panel. Like a fair few others, I’ll have to wait until the video of the session is released to find out what the panel had to say. I couldn’t get in. What I do know is that PWC’s Russel Howcroft has now joined Mark Ritson as someone who has drawn a standing room only crowd for two years running. [Owning your failures]( - which was one of his key leadership messages - is a good lesson though. Across the corridor, BuzzFeed’s Edwin Wong was just wrapping up his presentation on how young adults develop their feelings towards brands as they grow up as I got to the door. I bumped into a CMO who was just heading out. “That was real thought leadership,” he told me. Another one for the video catch-up, I think. Some might say Then it was back to the speaker lounge, where a stellar cast of female radio hosts were breaking the ice before going on stage. As word reached us that WSFM’s Amanda Keller was pulling up downstairs, an awkward thought occured. It would be a good idea to do something about the Kyle & Jackie O branded water bottles sitting on their table. A quick switcheroo, and Jonesy & Amanda was the branded bottle of choice. Once on stage, I was particularly struck by the honesty of Kate Ritchie’s approach, as she talked about her own struggles to avoid slipping into the cliched radio role of being the woman ticking off the boys for being naughty. Every panellist was nodding along even though nobody quite dared to mention the dynamic between Kyle Sandilands and Jackie Henderson. There was more authenticity from Fifi Box as she talked about the need to fight off the yips in sharing personal stories with listeners, knowing everything is going to be taken out of context by the likes of The Daily Mail. Meanwhile, across the conference I was detecting a signal that marketers are more interested in the granular over the shiny at the moment. The sessions that were busiest were the detail-focused ones, stuff that would once have been seen as a little nerdy. Less in vogue was futurology. A VR session that a year or two ago might have been packed wasn’t, while it was standing room only for a discussion on the pitfalls of attribution modelling and another on addressable TV. However, AI was the topic that bucked the anti-futurology trend. The conversations about AI suggested that it’s impact on marketing is being accepted not only as inevitable, but here. Don’t look back in anger As an aside, you may remember that in last Saturday’s Best of the Week, I discussed the clash between the promise and reality of virtual assistants. Shortly after sending the email, I tried to demonstrate my disdain for Siri, only to discover that she’d had an overnight upgrade. Giving her a too-tricky-to-succeed natural language challenge, I told her “Siri, I want to have breakfast at a cafe near me that sells bagels”. To my surprise, Siri understood the question, and spat back a fine sounding recommendation for a cafe less than ten minutes away, that we hadn’t heard of. Perfect. Until we got there and discovered the reason we hadn’t heard of it was because it had closed four years before. So amazing was the symbolism of the seamlessly delivered combination of technological triumph and factual failure, that I wasn’t even mad. Anyway, while AI was undoubtedly the number one topic (and I missed the moment when PHD did a live chip implant on stage because I was preparing my panel for the Mumbrella Wheel of Truth) there were also healthy audiences for all of our sessions covering behavioural economics. While not a new concept, it again feels like a marketing discipline that is enjoying a second coming. Meanwhile, I was also picking up a changing drumbeat around data. The appetite in previous years has been to hear about how to suck in as much data as possible, and use it to glean as much information as possible about the customer. Remember those few short months ago when Big Data seemed like a good thing? This week, it felt like there was a nervousness about the brand risk of blindly pursuing big data for the sake of it. The ghost of Cambridge Analytica loomed large. Among those to exhume that Facebook data ghost (if one can exhume a ghost) was [News Corp’s Michael Miller, who I interviewed on stage on Thursday morning](. It felt like an honest conversation. I was able to ask Miller whatever I wanted, with no topics ruled out. And he made an effort to engage on it all. By the time I came off stage from this encounter, I was beginning to wonder whether the fact that the Hilton’s baristas had memorised my order was a sign that I was a tad over-caffeinated. Champagne supernova And suddenly… the conference was almost over for another year and we were settling into our tub chairs, with a glass of champagne in hand, for our final session, the Mumbrella Wheel of Truth. If you weren’t there, please do give it a listen on [this week’s Mumbrellacast](. Perhaps it was the deliberately cheesy format of the spinning wheel to decide the question, or maybe it was the time of day, but my five panelists opened up and shared some hard truths about the industry and their own challenges. I think the audiences liked them all a little more after hearing them share. For me it was one of the most fun sessions I’ve been involved in during the eight years we’ve done Mumbrella360. And before I knew it, we were done. My introvertion kicked in, and I sipped champagne in a back office with a couple of colleagues while the end-of-conference drinks raged on the expo floor. Thank god, I wouldn’t have to think about Mumbrella360 for a while. Until I woke up early on Friday morning with a great idea for next time... The masterplan Meanwhile, there’s also been plenty going on out in the real world. First, the US regulators have allowed telco giant AT&T to buy media giant Time Warner. While it doesn’t necessarily mean much directly for Australia, it sets more dominoes toppling. Either Disney or Comcast are now likely to be able to buy the bits of 21st Century Fox they want, at top dollar- above $65bn. Again that won’t immediately impact Australia, in that most of the local Murdoch interests are focused in sister company News Corp which isn’t on the block. But the bits of 21st Century Fox - known as New Fox - that remain will be highly complimentary with the Australian News Corp assets - news and sport. We could see the two arms of the empire come back together. If so, I suspect that one outcome of this could be a News Corp that is bigger than before, led by a Murdoch family wealthier than ever before. There’s [a piece worth reading on Digiday this morning](. It makes the point that the AT&T and Time Warner deal will kick start addressable TV in the US. Adoption of addressable TV there - even if it’s only loose ad-targeting by location or gender - will create global momentum that will cross the Pacific. Whatever And one final important topic went past this week: On Sunday [Labor pledged to revoke the ABC cuts imposed by the Coalition](. Funding of the ABC has the potential to be a major election battleground. Arguably the most beloved of the public institutions, this fondness crosses party voting lines. The Coalition’s revenge cuts announced back in the Budget are not something many voters would have wanted - even if it simply puts the ABC back on the same level playing field as other media organisations which have been forced to make their own reductions. And of course, some of this is self-inflicted. When it comes to online publishing, the ABC management have found themselves forced to defend work that wouldn’t have been published with stronger editing in the first place. The notorious Emma Alberici tax cuts piece that confused revenue with profit should never have made it online to start with. Yet the Coalition will end up regretting its $84m tantrum if it loses floating voters as a result. The challenge for ABC management if the organisation does became a pawn in the election is to not be perceived to take sides. Perceptions that the staff lean left is half the reason it’s in its current position anyway. Roll with it And finally, a developing story to watch this weekend. It sounds like Optus has a new streaming debacle on its hands with its World Cup streaming. We’ll see how they go with the technology in the coming days. Football fans can be an unforgiving bunch when denied their team. Rock n Roll star Should you have stories for us this weekend, my colleague Abigail Dawson - abigail@mumbrella.com.au has custody of the newsdesk. As always, I welcome hearing from you at tim@mumbrella.com.au . Apart from watching the Socceroos take on the French tonight (luckily it’s on SBS), I’ve nothing more strenuous planned this weekend than picking up my post-Mumbrella360 gift to myself of the new Bruce Springsteen vinyl box set. Warringah Mall, here I come. Have a great weekend. Toodlepip. Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia [Unsubscribe](| [Manage Subscriptions]( [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](