Mumbrellacast

Fresh from a well-received Upfront presentation, Seven Media Group CEO Rohan Lund and chief revenue officer Natalie Harvey talked to Mumbrella's Tim Burrowes for a wide ranging conversation about their plans for 2027, the new brand and resetting the company culture with no tolerance for bad behaviour. They also addressed the question of further industry consolidation, whether the TV companies coul...

Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, where Seven and ABC announce the latest intellectual property for Meta to steal. In this episode, we discuss Meta's insane terms and conditions that were seemingly written by Dr. Evil; ABC invites the media to the old Q&A studio to announce how much drama they have commissioned this year (still no Recovery reboot); and Seven decides on a new/old name for the c...

Welcome to the latest Mumbrellacast, live streamed from the Pentagon to your pocket. The Mumbrella team has been on a bit of a conference crawl this week, our necks weighed down with lanyards, clothing covered in ID badges, coffee cups disposed of thoughtfully. Eleanor Dickinson reports back from the WPP Media Futures Event and the HumAIn conference, where she was schooled on how agentic AI is cha...

In today's episode of The Unmakers, Tim Burrowes speaks to Barney Chunn, the co-founder of a new PR tech start-up, Drumbeat, which uses AI to better target and pitch stories to journalists. "Drumbeat is a PR and comms platform for high-growth businesses," Chunn explains. It helps organisations "find and define your stories, connect them with the most appropriate, journalists and media partners, an...

Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, now sent to you from a dodgy Gmail address. This week's hot topic is scam job recruiters, who are reaching out to members of the marketing and media world with employment opportunities too good to be true. The scammers do this through AI-assisted emails that scrape your biographical details and work history and pepper these throughout a personally addressed in...

This week, the Heated Debate returns with a question for the newshounds: should Australian media stand with the ABC and other banned outlets by boycotting One Nation press events? Reporter Zac Nikolovski and good friend of the Mumbrellacast Lauren Joyce enter a two-party contest of their own. Zac argues the affirmative, warning that allowing politicians to exclude journalists over critical coverag...

More than six months after KIIS lost its Melbourne breakfast show with the Kyle and Jackie O implosion, ARN has announced the full-time replacement:  Ash London, Isaac Smith and Elliot Garnaut. Tim Burrowes and Irene Hulme ponder whether the trio have what it takes to get out of the hole Kyle and Jackie O left behind.

Welcome to the Mumbrellacast, the only podcast to win the Pulitzer, the Nobel Peace Prize, and a bronze Logie. This week, Nine has lost two of its biggest decision-makers in the space of 12-or-so hours. On Thursday morning, Nine's TV boss Amanda Laing, who headed up Nine's recently integrated television, streaming television, and streaming subscription television division (TV boss, in other words)...

Sinead Boucher is the owner of Stuff, one of New Zealand's biggest media companies, and in this interview with Mumbrella editorial director Hal Crawford she recounts her journey from the newsdesk to the boardroom. Revelations in the discussion include details of the 2020 phone call from then-Nine CEO Hugh Marks that informed Boucher he was going to shut down her company. At that time, Nine owned S...

This morning, Ive Group has made an offer to buy publicly-listed out-of-home company Motio. The deal values Motio at around $20 million — 15% over their closing market cap — and finds Ive Group expanding from the world of printing and marketing into the ever-growing out-of-home market. In a release to the ASX, Ive Group said the acquisition would allow it to build out its retail marketing and medi...

Welcome to this week's Mumbrellacast, recorded one syllable at a time and then painstakingly stitched together. Australian publishers and creators may have to actively block AI companies from scraping, stealing, and modifying their content, under two rather ill-conceived government proposals regarding AI and copyright. Do we really value data centres over copyright protection? With these ideas cur...

Today's Mumbrellacast has a slightly different format to usual. It features a conversation between Tim Burrowes and Josh Simons, the CEO of Vinyl Group. It's fair to say the two have had differences of opinion and have both written about them publicly. Simons suggested the pair try to find some common ground and this discussion unfolded in Mumbrella's office on Wednesday. This conversation was upl...

This week on the Mumbrellacast, the MFW point their brooms at Dave Hughes, and we struggle to find a legitimate reason for the protesting - at least, not one that has anything to do with Hughesy. M&C Saatchi's local management takeover, announced just six weeks ago, has collapsed, and it seems that the entire Australian business may be done. This is a rapidly evolving story - read the latest on Mu...

Irene Hulme and Tim Burrowes cover the news and the first questions that come to mind. Specifically, was this the plan all along, and now that Seven is firmly in control, what are the implications for the radio side of the business?

The sunshine returned to Sydney just in time for the start of upfronts season, with SBS, Foxtel, and News Corp all proudly displaying their various wares to media buyers during the week. The biggest news from SBS was confirmation that it had secured the FIFA World Cup for 2030, and locked down the Tour de France until that year as well. We also discuss its partnership with Ooh Media, and speculate...

Tim Burrowes and Irene Hulme take a deep dive into the legal morass of the ARN/Jackie Henderson lawsuit with lawyer Michael Byrnes. Byrnes, a partner at Swaab, explains ARN's newly revealed requirement to disclose any records of meetings between themselves and the activist group Mad Fucking Witches. Matters in the case are progressing rapidly - Kyle Sandilands was served a subpoena on air on Wedne...

In this interview edition of the Mumbrellacast, timed for release with News Corp's upfronts events, executive chair Michael Miller sits down with Mumbrella editorial director Hal Crawford to discuss the News Bargaining Incentive, doing deals with AI labs, and whether News' Australian mastheads have hit a subscription plateau.  "I'm not going to preempt negotiations that haven't even started," Mill...

The first breaking news episode for Mumbrella. Tim Burrowes, Nathan Jolly and Irene Hulme unpack Survey 5 including a history making result, and a genuine debate over whether ARN Sydney had a good day or a bad one. More breaking news episodes are coming. Subscribe to Mumbrellacast and get each one in your feed the moment it drops.

A fourth major player has entered Australia’s competitive media monitoring industry with today’s arrival of John Croll’s Truescope. Croll previously led the ASX giant Isentia, taking it through a 2010 sale to Quadrant Private Equity and 2014 ASX float. Isentia – which rebranded from Media Monitors in in 2012 – peaked with a near-$1bn market capitalisation before the misfiring acquisition...

Welcome to the Mumbrellacast, where television assets might be written down, but they are never written off. This week, Nine presented a set of truly baffling financial results that didn't include its former radio division, Pedestrian or Domain, and pretended it had owned outdoor company QMS since the start of FY25 instead of for three months at the end of FY26. It also wrote down its television a...

Welcome to the latest Mumbrellacast, scandal-free since 2023 (unless we missed something in the T&Cs). The biggest non-war, non-AI news at the moment is the Sydney Swans player controversy. We don't dwell on the details -- mainly because it is a developing story -- but instead look at what this scandal (and others like it) means for team and player sponsorships in sport in the future. With million...

Welcome to the latest episode of the Mumbrellacast, voted Australia's favourite sound. This week, we open by dissecting the last-minute changes to the News Bargaining Incentive, which made its long-awaited parliamentary debut today. It seems that former minister Peter Garrett unwittingly helped inform the bill, with his Midnight Oil lyric: "the rich get richer, the poor get the picture", as the bi...

Welcome to the latest Mumbrellacast, not yet streaming live on Kick. And while we're on the topic of smooth segues, Melbourne-born, globally loved video game streaming platform Kick announced this week it will wade into the lucrative world of advertising. Given that Kick was built from the profits made from online casino Stake, which Kick's co-founders also launched, they seemingly understand the...

A key moment in Christian O'Connell's new book Unscript happened backstage at last year's ARN Upfront event in Sydney. As he explains in this podcast interview with Mumbrella's Tim Burrowes, it was a high pressure situation. O'Connell had decided to present to the audience without the safety net of the autocue. To increase the pressure, he was about to welcome to the stage the two people whose tim...

Harvey Norman and Latitude Financial cop a $55m fine for misleading advertising Mutinex co-founder Henry Innis raises the alarm about how advertising measurement is influenced by who funds it. And we look  back on the Mumbrella Awards. Where did it all go right for Howatson+Company?