Mumbrellacast: ACMA cops it in Canberra, and inside WPP’s restructure
Sarah Hanson-Young gave the ACMA bosses a shellacking at the Senate estimates this week
Welcome to this week’s Mumbrellacast, where we are all very happy we don’t have to face Sarah Hanson-Young at the Senate estimates this week.
Unfortunately for Nerida O”Loughlin, the chair of media watchdog the Australian Communications and Media Authority, she wasn’t quite so lucky, and — as we discuss — she copped an absolute spray from Hanson-Young regarding ACMA’s lack of regulation over the continued broadcasting code breaches from the Kyle and Jackie O show.
We discuss why it is that the show can so regularly skirt the rules without punishment, and whether the new provisions in the code, coupled with a proposed license condition that would ban any on-air sex-talk, can finally force the duo to toe the line. Spoiler: We doubt it!
Also this week, the Financial Times in the UK broke the news that global holdco WPP is merging its creative agencies Ogilvy, AKQA and VML into a single structure under the name WPP Creative. We unpack what this means and why they would do such a thing.
And while we’re asking ‘why would they do such a thing?’, one of New Zealand’s biggest advertisers — big box discount retailer The Warehouse — has announced it will pause all advertising for an eight-week period, with plans to spend the two-month blackout period “testing and learning whether the dollars we spend on advertising are making a difference for our customers, or whether we could do something better with that money.”
It’s a bold move, and given it comes in a week when they announced 270 redundancies, it seems less an experimental ploy and more a five-alarm fire situation.
Finally, Hal Crawford spoke to The Guardian Australia’s Liz Wynn, who discussed the publication’s recent move to require its most dedicated users to log-in to the site in order to get access. It’s a cautious move, but still likely to be derided in some corners, despite a growing number of its competitors requiring users to pay a subscription to access their news.
Get the latest episode every Wednesday.
