Mumbrellacast

Mumbrella

Every week the team at Mumbrella cover the latest news in the Australian media, marketing and advertising industries along with interviews with key people in the industry. Featuring a rotating panel of hosts from the Mumbrella team, this podcast is essential listening for anyone working under Australia's media and marketing umbrella.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Mumbrellacast: Can ARN legally boot Kyle? Should Vinyl have bought Val Morgan Digital?

    Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, featuring zero serious misconduct breaches -- aside from references to both Alan Bond and Donald Rumsfeld, of course. It's been quite the week in radio-land, with ARN using the dump button on Kyle Sandilands for "serious misconduct" which is, of course, legalese for "teasing his co-host for believing in star charts". We smashed the glass and issued an emergency podcast on Tuesday evening shortly after ARN dropped the bombshell that the Kyle and Jackie O show is no more -- you can listen to that here -- but today we investigate what is likely to be a long and drawn out legal battle between Sandilands and his former station. Victoria-Jane Otavski from Blackbay Lawyers unpacks all the legal elements for us, and looks at whether or not the network actually has a case for alleging serious misconduct in breach of his contract. As she asks, how can someone remedy a behavioural breach that's already happened -- without using some serious time-space misconduct. This week Mumbrella broke the story that Australian content platform Envato was sacking up to a third of its workers. Envato has flown under the radar for many, but for certain creatives it provides songs, sounds, stock imagery, and photography -- paying billions out to the creatives who made the original pieces, while providing a rich content library to those who need it. It was bought by Shutterstock last year for a whopping US$245m, so this is a major Australian start-up success story gone slightly pear-shaped. We look at why it needed to make such a drastic downsizing, and whether or not AI has reared its mechanical head (spoiler: it has). Finally, we look at Vinyl Group's acquisition of Val Morgan Digital, which will see the media company add Buzzfeed, Ladbible, Popsugar, Vox Media, and Choctop Monthly to its growing stable of brands (fair enough, I made up Choctop Monthly). We wonder aloud whether the $7m (plus $3.5m in Vinyl stock) was too much to pay, or if this is all part of the masterplan to build a media stable to fuel the company's music tech dreams? Happy listening! Get the latest episode every Wednesday. Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.

    32 min
  2. 2 DAYS AGO

    The Unmakers: The startup out to eliminate time sheets

    "What I uncovered as I tried to get my team set up time sheeting ...  was that not only are they incredibly frustrating for the people doing them, and the people chasing them, but the data that comes back from them is not very accurate." That's Freddie Mckenzie, co-founder of Manifest, a startup using AI to automatically construct timesheets at agencies. Mckenzie, speaking with Tim Burrowes in the latest episode of Mumbrella's Unmaker Series podcast, says he's well aware that many in the industry think billable hours is a broken model: but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.  "The agency model and the whole industry runs on time: time's a really important component at the moment. It's becoming less important as we go into the future, but ultimately it's a service-based industry ... [and time remains important for] understanding your costs, understanding your resourcing, understanding your team, and understanding your business." Manifest began as an internal tool ("Shutterspeed") built inside Mackenzie's Auckland production company Vivid Creative (now Chameleon). The system uses machine learning to automate time sheet tracking, and Mckenzie says that pricing model will initially be based on standard per-seat SaaS models. McKenzie told Burrowes that while some people may have privacy concerns about the software, it was probably worth it even on an individual basis because for many agency people, timesheeting is the worst part of their job. Manifest is not a simple timesheeting stand-in: it's designed to give managers a better understanding of their own operations.  "Charging based on time is definitely becoming obsolete really fast -- it de-incentivizes agencies to use AI tooling because it's supposed to make us faster."  "What Manifest is designed to do is help you understand how outputs are created and how value is created inside the agency," he says.

    32 min
  3. 19 FEB

    Is the Australian Podcast Ranker still fit for purpose?

    Apple has shaken the world of podcasting again this week (let's not forget the "pod" part of the word comes from the iPod) with the announcement that it is adding videos to its podcasting platform, with an option for listeners to toggle between video and audio-only. Youtube is the top platform for podcasts in the world, and Spotify has been focusing on video-led podcasts of late. Yet, CRA's Podcast Ranker -- the"only official measurement system" for podcasts -- doesn't count video plays in its count, meaning it's leaving a lot of the audience out of the equation. Eleanor Dickinson wrote about this topic, speaking to Karl Stefanovic's podcast producer Keshnee Kemp and Spotify ANZ head of podcast Prithi Dey. We discuss the topic further on the show. Also discussed is Joe Aston's investigative commentary publication Rampart which, he disclosed to Tim, is making “multiples” of $500,000 in revenue after its first year, and was profitable by month two. It's an example of a thriving media company in a market that has seen so many others fail of late. (You can listen to that full interview here.) Is it good business sense for a business publication to sue its own subscribers? That's what Todd Scott, the owner and publisher of New Zealand premium finance masthead NBR is doing, taking some of its biggest customers to court if they don't ensure their employees all have their own logins. Scott reckons he's make “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from publicly shaming these companies -- so it appears to be good business sense, indeed. And finally, Tim chats to newly minted Ooh Media CEO James Taylor about whether his out-of-home business is being undervalued by the market.

    32 min

About

Every week the team at Mumbrella cover the latest news in the Australian media, marketing and advertising industries along with interviews with key people in the industry. Featuring a rotating panel of hosts from the Mumbrella team, this podcast is essential listening for anyone working under Australia's media and marketing umbrella.

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