Mumbrellacast: Is there still room for bravery in advertising?
(L-R): Kristina Green, Alice Manners, Mark Braddock, Luke Whelan, Tim Burrowes (moderator)
For this week’s Mumbrellacast, we have a live recording from the Perth edition of the Compass roadshow, where we heard from the cream of the Western Australian media and marketing community.
And although no sentient chat bots were invited on stage for the discussion, moderator Tim Burrowes nevertheless opened by asking our panellists how the world had changed in the three years since the introduction of ChatGPT, and where exactly they see it all going.
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Alice Manners, former CEO of IAB Australia, predicts that we won’t begin to see the true benefits of the technology until the next decade, while Mark Braddock, co-founder of Block Branding feels AI has given clarity to the true role of a creative, and cut through a lot of the busy work that was previously involved in artistic jobs.
Robot talk quickly segues into each panellist highlighting their favourite bits of advertising work of the year — even if some of the work didn’t strictly originate in 2025.
Ironically, two examples given by Luke Whelan, managing director at Social Meteor, were above-the-line campaigns by OpenAI for ChatGPT, and from Anthropic for Claude. Whelan said both campaigns were beautifully shot, beautifully scripted, well produced, well edited — and created by humans. As Whelan notes, what does it mean if the world’s leading AI companies are still using human creative for their marketing? (Warning: This isn’t the last time AI comes up during the panel.)
Campaigns from US apparel retailer Gap, rideshare company Didi, and Telstra are also brought up, which leads to a discussion about whether bravery still exists in the marketing world to the extent in which it should. Is pushing buttons and being reckless the same as bravery? What about innovation – is that brave? Does budget dictate bravery? Is the recent gambling campaign from the Western Australian government brave?
And being a WA-based panel, talk soon turns to the pending introduction of the Perth Bears into the NRL. Will it work out for the league’s newest team, or is the sports-mad city not yet ready to emotionally invest in another local team?
After talk turns to the outsized reliance on gambling advertising dollars in the media, and whether or not AI will wipe us all out, Tim asks our panellists to please give us all a few reasons to be optimistic. After all, we love a happy ending here at the Mumbrellacast.
Compass Perth took place at the The Globe on November 11, 2025 and was supported by News Australia and Abe’s Audio.
PANELLISTS:
- Kristina Green, chief marketing and growth officer at HIF
- Alice Manners, former chief executive officer of IAB
- Luke Whelan, managing director at Social Meteor
- Mark Braddock, co-founder and creative strategy director of Block Branding
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