‘More to come’: Reacting to CHEP redundancies
On the latest episode of the Mumbrellacast, the Mumbrella team deep dived into news this week that the CHEP Network has been hit with redundancies.
On Tuesday, Mumbrella revealed that up to 40 staff were made redundant following the loss of its Telstra account, which saw the telco giant drop CHEP, as well as The Monkeys and DDB, in favour of a bespoke agency.
While The Monkeys declined to comment, Sheryl Marjoram, DDB CEO Sydney Group, told Mumbrella that “the scale of account held by DDB over the last few years means minimal impact will be felt in our business.”
Speaking on the latest Mumbrellacast, journalist Lauren McNamara said she believes the Telstra loss could result in more redundancies for the parties involved.
“I definitely think more will come,” McNamara said.
“The Monkeys, they’re a bit safer because they do have such large clients. You know, they’ve got TAB, Crown Resorts, Meat and Livestock Australia. I think they’re better equipped to manage this loss. But in saying that, I wouldn’t be surprised if we did see some from them in the near future.
“Same as DDB. As Sheryl said, their involvement the past few years have has been quite minimal compared to a decade ago where they were running pretty much every creative campaign for Telstra.
“[Redundancies] won’t be a shock, but obviously it would still be devastating.”
In some heartening news for CHEP, Mumbrella understands 60% of its employees working on the Telstra brand have been moved internally to other clients and offerings.
Mumbrella publisher Adam Lang applauded CHEP for being able to rehome some of its employees, given that account changes are a constant in the marketing industry.
“For every win, where people are very excited, they’ve worked hard to pitch and win that business… that’s exciting. But on the other side of the equation is those that have lost the business,” Lang said.
He continued: “[CHEP] know they win, they know that they can lose. Some clients grow, some don’t. And so that they have to adapt their business model. to cope with this and to still thrive, and I hope they can.”
Listen to the full Mumbrellacast here.
“bespoke agency”. On my reckoning this is about the third time in the last 20 years that Telstra have tried this. It doesn’t work, but there must be some appeal – to CMO ego, perhaps?
User ID not verified.