John Croll resigns as CEO of Isentia
The boss of Australia’s biggest media monitoring company Isentia has announced his resignation.
The departure of John Croll comes a year after the company wrote off its disastrous $35m+ investment in branded content agency King Content.
In a statement posted to the ASX, Croll said: “After almost 20 years as CEO, I believe it is time for a change. I have been incredibly privileged to lead the talented and dedicated team at Isentia.
Wishing John Croll the best in his new endeavours. Personally, I have worked with John since I worked for Media Monitors as a student at Sydney University in the early 1980s. It was fantastic experience as a young aspiring journalist, monitoring the radio and TV news channels four nights a week. Now, we have more recently run stories with Isentia’s CTO Andrea Walsh on our site WomenLoveTech.com promoting women in STEM. Andrea was also interviewed by Sarah Harris for our Game Changers series on GameChangers.com.au.
I have watched John grow his small family business to what it is today. When you look at John’s career, you need to look at the entire picture and it’s commendable what he has achieved. He is a man of charm and integrity.
John, good luck with your next career move.
How do you walk away from a $35 million+ loss without legal consequences?
$35 million write down, not loss. There’s a distinction.
One bad mistake re King Content – bad buy, could see it a mile off
Given the entire history of the business, for the CEO to feel pressured to resign over a single mistake is the issue with Australia’s conservative leadership understanding. CEO’s are not infallible and mistakes need to be made, a CEO who can’t take risks is impotent, these of course are always easy to see in hindsight. Jack Welch blew up a factory and went on to become a brilliant leader, letting one learn from a mistake is more valuable to keep in your business, otherwise you lose that person’s new found lessons and wisdom and replace them with someone just as likely to make a mistake – no one is going to be perfect over 20 years.
However, if he truly left on his own accord regardless of the reason then good luck to him.
All you marketing types focusing on King Content when it was never more than 10% of the business. The real demise started 10 to 15 years ago when they were spending money on all kinds of rubbish like a Chinese print monitoring system and a bunch of two bit companies when they should have been spending every spare cent on developing their internet monitoring, which they still can’t do, even now! They were even slower to adapt than News and Fairfax, which is saying something. Isentia was never well run, it was just well presented to a deeply undiscerning market, which finally saw past the porcine lipstick.
As a CEO of a publicly listed company if you overpay for any business – whether it’s selling content or baked beans – there will be consequences. It’s just about basic due diligence really.