Relationship issues in agencyland and the case of the disappearing media jobs

Welcome to a special relationship issue of the Mumbrellacast, where we look at the delicate dance between creative agencies and clients, and the harried, hurried waltz between media agencies and media salespeople.

BMF and Westpac announced their divorce this week after just one year. Both are claiming they initiated the breakup, due in no small part to Mumbrella's own investigations into the matter. BMF fired the first shot, as far as we can tell, but isn't it rather unusual for an agency to fire a client? We discuss.

A nicely timed study from marketing consultancy We Grow came out this week, examining the fragile relationships between those who buy the ads and those who sell the ads.

Small talk is out of fashion these days, it seems, with each meeting needing to have a clear, concise point -- and hopefully nouns used as verbs and vice versa. There is increasingly no tolerance for salespeople reaching out just to reach out, meetings with no clear agenda, and God help the media seller who tries to book a boozy lunch without any concrete pitch. It's a pressure cooker situation, the agencies say, and salespeople who fail to understand this are doomed to annoy agencies into eternity. But aren't relationships built mostly on pointless chit-chat? There's a massive disconnect here, and we delve into it.

Within 24 hours this week, Snap, BBC, and Disney announced around 4,000 job losses between them, with AI being blamed for a lot of the redundancies. But is that just an easy excuse to get rid of staff, and save some money during a period of declining traditional media, soft advertising spend, and mass uncertainty around what technology will bring next?

And we wrap up this week's podcast by asking the question: Why in the world is News Corp launching an 87-year-old fashion title into the Australian marketplace? The mobile-first, social-first play seems at odds with a classic glossy magazine brand, but there may be method in the madness -- especially given the Myer partnership and the e-commerce side of things.

And just for the hell of it, we close with an impromptu magazine-based pop quiz.

Happy listening!

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Podcast edit by Abe’s Audio.