Kingsmill and Bateman leave Telstra following marketing shake-up, as network crashes again
Kingsmill: “It’s been a pretty intense life”
The shake-up at Telstra’s marketing department under Joe Pollard has continued with Inese Kingsmill and Andy Batemen both opting to leave the business after their roles were abolished.
Kingsmill and Bateman had been looking at opportunities within Telstra after the reshuffle which resulted in a single position overseeing brand created and a global search for the role, which is still underway.
Kingsmill told Mumbrella she had looked at a number of opportunities within Telstra but had decided to move on.
Has history been rewritten? Wasn’t Mark Collis the brains behind the transformation of the brand?
“Kingsmill said the highlight of her time at Telstra was the transformation of the brand under the leadership of former CEO David Thodey.”
“(Bateman’s) personal highlight was working on Telstra’s purpose and values with David Thodey.”
When the boss moves on, so do his disciples.
@ Anonymous.
I believe you are correct.
From what I recall…
Mark Collis did the work.
Mark Buckman took the glory (and I think fired Collis along the way?)
And now we have Bateman and Kingsmill worshiping at the feet of David Thodey.
As they say, ‘success has many fathers’.
They’ve both done nothing. To produce the dross that Telstra produces, with the budget at their disposal is nothing short of criminal. Too busy playing politics.
As for claiming ownership of the brand transformation. Dear me….
It’s a bit embarrassing when you have to grab at someone else’s mediocre ‘success’ to justify your tenure.
Even the janitor claims responsibility for that brand campaign.
Reality is, the brand campaign was merely the icing on the cake of a customer led ground up transformation led by Thodey, plus much smarter pricing and offer strategy. Actual marketing stuff.
Yeah look I think sometimes the raging self dillusion of some of today’s “marketers” needs to be called out just for the sake of humanity. Telstra won the past 5 years because 1. Sol invested $2b in the network 2. Dave owned the govt over the NBN negotiations / financials 3. Collis had the guts to rebrand in a way that legitimately gave people permission to like Telstra again (now it’s network was so palpably superior) 4. Buckman fired him so he could reposition it as his own win, and Inese went along for the ride 5. I guess Jo Pollard maybe found out there had been at least 4 major brand campaigns commissioned from 2012 to 2015 and not one of them made it to air, despite $3-4m being invested in actual production costs across these campaigns……..yes, your job here is done, but it’s probably not before time. And if claiming the brand valuation spike feels right to you then go ahead and grab it……who cares if $3-4m was blown along the way because there simply wasn’t the vision or conviction to back a single major idea in over four years……..thats corporate marketing at Telstra for you….!!!
It’s funny how people forget that Vodafone had so many problems with hundreds of thousands of customers leaving the network and at around the same time Telstra gained hundreds of thousands of customers.
I’m sure it was the compelling brand work that did it though…
Telstra marketing have seen staff leave en masse for over 4 years now.
It’s a wonder anyone wants to work there.
I have worked at Telstra Media and know how the marketing teams culture is just shy of dismal.
Then, I suppose it was a government owned brand for such a long time, to change the mentality & culture of a government run business (where employees demand the employer owes them) to a sharp commercial one (where employees are grateful) would be hard when everyone continues to disappear dead on 5pm after a sharp 9am start and a 60 minute lunch break.
Good luck Joe!
it’s a complete farce that marketing execs working for big established brands (whether Telstra, Disney, Coke etc) claim ANY credit for building and growing those brands
the hard work was done many decades ago and is sustained by the power of incumbency, sheer corporate size, enormous familiar customer bases and massive points of physical presence