Mamamia’s head of podcasts, Elissa Ratliff, has announced her departure from the media company.
Taking to LinkedIn on Thursday, Ratliff explained she will not be returning post-maternity leave.
Elissa Ratliff
“After 3.5 years as head of podcasts at Mamamia, building a brilliant team, launching over 20 new shows and growing the always on line up, I’ve made the hard decision not to return post maternity leave,” she said in the post.
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“My family and I are about to relocate out of Sydney and I’m embarking on a career change, returning to University to get some new skills. While I’m studying I’ll also be freelancing and working on projects big and small.”
According to her LinkedIn, she was due to return from maternity leave next month.
“Lize started with Mamamia as an intern almost a decade ago and after being one of the founding members of our Podcasts team eventually worked her way up into the head of podcasts role,” Mia Freedman, co-founder and chief creative officer, told Mumbrella.
“There she played a crucial role in growing Mamamia to Australia’s #1 pure podcast network and has become a close friend to many of us along the way, especially me. We couldn’t be more excited for her in this next chapter outside media.”
Ratliff joined Mamamia in 2012 as an intern, before moving into a role as a site producer after a year. She worked her way up to managing producer, podcasts by 2019. She had a short stint working at Seven West Media’s Pacific Magazines and ABC, before returning to the female media company in mid-2020 as head of podcasts.
Upon her return, Freedman said: “Today is a proud day for her family, her Mamamia family, and for every young woman with a dream to work in media. How lucky we are to have her leading such a capable team.”
The news comes shortly after the media company announced former Carat Australia chief strategist Danni Wright as its new head of strategy. In her new role, which she will begin on June 24, Wright will lead Mamamia’s strategic product and its content marketing agency Squad. Wright will also be part of the sales leadership team, working closely with content leadership and audience development teams to identify and create new content opportunities.
On Tuesday, it was also announced that current chief revenue officer, Natalie Harvey, will step into the chief executive role on June 1, taking over from co-founder and CEO Jason Lavigne who will shift into the role of executive chair. Harvey first joined Mamamia in January of this year from Seven West Media where she most recently worked as national sales director. She has also previously worked at UM Australia and Mediacom.
Harvey told Mumbrella that Ratliff will be dearly missed, but the media company will remain strong with her absence.
“While I know Elissa will be enormously missed, our industry-leading audio team led by podcasts content director Jessie-Lee Klass continues to go from strength to strength. With Mamamia Out Loud cemented as the country’s #1 news and pop culture podcast, two new show launches in the last month, and 358M lifetime downloads now under our belt, we’ve never been more excited about the future.”
Also this week, the company unveiled an AI-powered voice trained on hundreds of hours of Mamamia podcasts, named Sam, to gives brands “the best of both worlds” – the ability to trade programmatically, with the benefits of a familiar podcast voice.