Mumbrella live blog: Friday, March 21
Welcome to Mumbrella’s live blog, a rolling diary of the latest happenings in marketing and media. Refresh the page for the latest updates.
Top stories:
- Red Agency biggest winners at CommsCon Awards 2014
- MediaCom global CEO confirms agency pulled out of Pac Brands pitch as it is ‘unprofitable’
- Feature: Q&A with Steve Allan, CEO MediaCom
- Fairfax loses head of strategic initiatives to CBA
- Seven hails press freedom after winning tobacco ruling
- TV ratings: The Man with the Biggest Testicles more appealing than Ten’s dance show
- PR bosses: Recruitment agencies and poorly trained grads a problem
5:45pm – Seven has denied it has held talks about buying Fairfax, but believes News Corp is looking to buy Ten according to court documents today.
5:03pm – Did someone let the work experience guy at the West Australia Twitter account? If so, great work.
Hat tip: via Reddit/r/Australia
3.45pm – Agency North’s CommsCon trophy for the Museum ofBrisbane relaunch has made it back to Queensland.
2:25pm – Remember to check out our FYI section, today we have a story on King Content appointing former KellyOCG Global Head of Marketing Todd Wheatland to the newly created role of head of strategy and AMSRO launching a new trustmark to ensure standards across various areas such as privacy, ethics and quality.
1:42pm – The woman who drove through Fairfax’s paywall strategy Tracy Lee is moving to the Commonwealth Bank, with no replacement lined up yet.
1:14pm – It turns out rumours the US may have issues reporting on things outside their own country might be true. News.com.au has a very entertaining list of the “mistakes” made so far by our cousins reporting the Malaysian Airlines search, including renaming our PM John Abbott.
12:46pm – Here’s a few snaps from last night’s CommsCon Awards, a gallery of photos will be available on Facebook later this afternoon.
12:41pm – Rove McManus has landed a gig hosting the US adaptation of Slide Show which is being produced by Anchorman actor Steve Carell, reports smh.com.au. It will show on the Fox Network. The show was of course axed by Seven late last year despite fairly decent ratings.
12:03pm – There’s a fascinating yarn courtesy of our colleague Robin Hicks in Asia, who interviewed MediaCom’s global CEO Steve Allan at the Festival of Media Asia. Allan confirmed the Aussie office pulled out of the Pacific Brands pitch because it is “unprofitable business”, and had some very interesting words for other clients who make staff suffer “abuse”.
Take five minutes to read his full thoughts, there’s an interesting debate to be had.
11:22am – The ratings are in and the audience has spoken. The Man With The Giant Testicles was of more interest than So You Think You Can Dance according to the preliminary overnight metro ratings. So You Think You Can Dance was fourth in its timeslot with 318,000 viewers, despite Ten moving it to the less competitive timeslot of Thursday nights.
10:52am – Joe Hildebrand was his usual witty self hosting last night’s CommsCon Awards, and made a pretty interesting and controversial opening address about the, at times testy relationship, between journalists and PRs. He’s since turned it into a column for The Daily Telegraph, and added this comment at the end: “This is an edited—and indeed polished—version of the speech I gave to the 2014 CommsCon awards on Thursday night where a good time was had by all, with the possible exception of the lady who yelled at me in the lift afterwards for insulting public relations professionals.”
But who is the mystery PR professional upset by Joe?
10:35am – So last night’s CommsCon Awards was dominated by The Red Agency, which picked up four gongs including the Grand Prix and agency boss James Wright picking up the best agency leader. You can see the full list of winners here.
Pic source @PEPR_Publicity/Twitter
9:41am – Ratings are coming in this morning and it’s not good news for So You Think You Can Dance, which has failed to grow its audiences on it’s Thursday night debut, getting 318,000 viewers. Full ratings story will be in shortly.
9:38am – More Apple bashing courtesy of Samsung.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nFe_SWcq4Q
9.00am – Today is Twitter’s eighth birthday and they’ve launched a website to help you find your first tweet. It’s a bit of fun.
8.55am – Welcome to Friday all. For those wondering the CommsCon Awards were a big success and we’ll have a full update on all the winners shortly. We’ll also be bringing you a full wrap of some of the other Commcon events from yesterday on the site later this morning.
