Why Australia’s media and advertisers should prioritise working together better
A decade ago, media partnerships were the heartbeat of immersive and engaging advertising. When a brand, their agency and a media owner united around a smart idea, they could capture the nation’s attention. Collaboration wasn’t just encouraged, it was a competitive advantage.
Luke Spano, founder and CEO of Avid Collective, explores what happened to the media partnership – and what can be done to fix this.
The author Luke Spano
Today, with attention scarcer than ever, media partnerships should be more valuable than ever. But the truth is, they’re ‘too hard’ to bring to life. The media partnerships ecosystem is fragmented, inefficient, and slowing everyone down.
WeGrow’s latest Publisher Pulse found only 3 % of publishers think agencies get full value from partnerships, and every agency leader knows why: it takes too much time and energy to successfully brief and deliver these campaigns.
So how have we ended up with an ecosystem that shies away from collaboration?
The massive cost of a fragmented market
Every media owner and agency has its own processes, templates, naming conventions and definitions of what a “partnership” or “integration” means.
The result? Every campaign becomes a bespoke remix of each other’s workflows, hundreds of hours lost translating between systems that don’t speak the same language.
Time that should go into strategy and storytelling gets spent in endless email loops, chasing assets, and updating spreadsheets
The cost isn’t just operational. It’s human. Creativity slows and no one feels like they’re doing their best work anymore.
The dirty secret of our industry is that every media owner and agency treats their unique ways of working as a competitive edge, but the strain this puts on collaboration is actively killing the category.
Individuality is valuable in most domains, but growing the category means building systems that make collaboration scalable, not painful.
How we got stuck here
The category isn’t broken beyond repair, it’s just outdated.
While programmatic, planning, and measurement have evolved for scale; partnerships never got their rebuild.
The category is still held together by emails, duplicated documents and spreadsheets, each one adding a small tax on the value a partnership should create. Somewhere along the way, process replaced progress.
Ultimately we never rebuilt the part of the category that relies on collaboration, and that failure hasn’t just slowed us down. It’s changed where the money goes.
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Why this really matters
We as an industry are wasting our potential by commonly buying what’s easiest, not what’s most effective. Caused by there being more to do and less people to do it, we simply must default to simple ads over powerful partnerships as they’re typically the only thing we have time for.
Great ideas die in inboxes as teams burn hours on co-ordination instead of creation. Brands miss engaging audiences that could’ve been deeply immersed in their stories and values.
For media owners, that means slower turnaround, smaller deal sizes, and untapped revenue. For agencies and advertisers, it means missed opportunities to diversify away from the same five platforms that already dominate too much of their media mix. For the humans in the day-to-day, it means frustration, fatigue, and less pride in the work.
If our job as an industry is about executing campaigns to drive influence and our ways of executing are getting in the way of optimal outcomes, then we’ve got a large problem worth solving.
The opportunity we’re ignoring
While we’ve been trying to make spreadsheets work harder, platform spend has exploded. Meta, Google, YouTube, and now TikTok have collectively grown their ad revenue in Australia by more than 400 percent. Meanwhile, partnerships have been left fighting for a smaller slice of the pie.
GroupM’s global CEO recently said, “I don’t think advertising is very good today.”
A big statement from one of our industry leaders, but he’s right. Advertisers and agencies know they’re overspending on big tech, with every new measurement tool highlighting the same imbalance, and the growing need for a more diversified media mix back into premium, people based environments.
This is the frustrating part. Partnerships work. They build trust, drive results and connect brands to audiences in ways the platforms can’t. But when every campaign takes months to align, it’s easy to see why spend defaults to what’s easiest.
This is where the massive opportunity lies. If collaboration becomes simple, it levels the playing field with other categories, making it just as easy for advertisers to invest in impactful, premium environments as it is to buy from the platforms.
At Avid, we have spent years working with media owners, agencies, and brands, seeing first-hand how much creative energy gets lost to process, but also the value created when campaigns come to life smoothly.
For this to be done at scale, we believe there is a better way.
Addressing the problem
Partnerships need to be easy to buy, deliver, and measure. That requires shared infrastructure, through purpose built tech, with connected workflows that allows for everyone’s unique offering to come to life. A foundation the industry has talked about for years but never built. One that unifies our ways of working without erasing individuality.
Standardising the how doesn’t mean losing what makes each media owner individual; it means their unique value shows up in the work, not in the workflow. This is not about automating creativity; it is about freeing it.
Imagine if agencies, brands, and media owners could collaborate through built for purpose connected systems and platforms, instead of disconnected processes and manual tools. Imagine if ideas could move at the same speed as culture again.
That’s the kind of industry we should all be working towards.
Where we go from here
The future of Australian media won’t belong to whoever shouts the loudest or automates the fastest. It will belong to those who finally make collaboration work.
If you’re ready to be part of something that reshapes how Australian media works together, join us in the discussion by sharing with us your thoughts and perspective.
We’re also going to be continuing this conversation at Mumbrella Publish next Tuesday 28 October, facilitating a round table on the topic: Why Australian media must unify and what it will take. Please join us in furthering the conversation.
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