The Weekend Mumbo: Breaking down the big hire you probably missed
Welcome to the Weekend Mumbo. Here you will find a short analysis piece on something compelling that happened during the week, followed by a small collection of the biggest stories Mumbrella covered and why they are worth the read.
Welcome to the Weekend Mumbo,
This piece originally appeared on Saturday morning as an email newsletter. If you want to get it it then rather than wait until Monday, there is a box at the bottom of this piece to sign up.
As for the biggest story of the week, here’s my take.
The most important hire you probably missed this week
On Monday, GroupM revealed that it had hired Tom Braybrook to head up the local launch of its Google-focused data and technology consulting business, Acceleration.
For context, this was the week’s 32nd most clicked story from our newsletter, and it wasn’t even the biggest story about a hire at GroupM. Matt Hofmeyer’s return to Wavemaker edged it in 24th spot.
For those who missed it, Braybrook arrives at GroupM from S4 Capital’s MediaMonks, where he was ANZ VP of Growth.
He spent two years at Sir Martin Sorrell’s flagship brand, joining from Google in 2021, where he was head of agencies and partners in New Zealand.
When I started writing, I was planning on looking at Google, and the pressures facing big tech this year after it became one of the latest to lay off a large number of staff.
The company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai announced it was letting go some 12,000 ‘Googlers’ in the US, with more to come in other markets, including Australia.
He took the opportunity to say it would use this shift to invest and focus more heavily on AI, a couple of days after Microsoft signalled a mega-US $10 billion investment into OpenAI, operators of the in-vogue ChatGPT tool.
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Where have we heard that number before? $10 billion seems to be the go-to number for big tech investment on the next big thing…
Does this signal a move by Microsoft to challenge Google in the battleground of search? Will we ever see a time where users most searched term is ‘Bing’, as Google is on Microsoft’s search engine? Maybe not…
But word is that Google are sweating so much about ChatGPT that its CEO invited retired founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page back to the table to spearhead its own AI tactics.
More on that another time.
The second big slice of news involving Google this week was that the Department of Justice is launching a second lawsuit against Google in the US, with eight states alongside it.
It is seeking to break up Google’s digital ad business, and there are conflicting opinions about the severity of this. Some believe Google is screwed while others say the company isn’t all that fussed, largely because it has been preparing for the assault for quite some time.
According to the ACCC (which also wants to break up Google’s digital ad business) an estimated 90% plus of all online ad impressions in Australia passed through at least one Google service in 2020.
Just listen to none other than Sorrell speak on the issue this week. He tries to play down Google’s dominance these days.
“I think it’s a bit like shutting the stable door just after the horse is bolted, in the sense that Google’s market share position has eroded. There are a lot of competitors out there, Meta, TikTok, and new entrants like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. All of them are building formidable advertising presences.
“It’s true they have a very significant position, but I don’t think they’ve abused it to the extent that the regulatory authorities are suggesting.”
It seems obvious that Sorrell would big up Google, when you consider his company’s recent acquisitions have largely been aimed at working hand-in-glove with the tech giant going forward.
Similarly to Civic Data’s Chris Brinkworth on Wednesday, Sorrell also said that having a strong tech sector is “fundamentally important to having a strong country”, something the Chinese government has realised.
“So eroding the position of the major tech companies, I think works to the disadvantage of any country.”
Back to Braybrook.
It’s understood that once his name was thrown into the conversation as to who would be the right person to launch Acceleration in the ANZ market, it was a bit of a ‘no-brainer’.
According to a senior source in the GroupM setup, Braybrook’s hire is “a very clear signal of where the group is headed into the future,” and of GroupM’s global and local intentions around diversification and its setup as a traditional media business.
He and GroupM’s local CEO, Aimee Buchanan, have worked together previously at OMD in the early 2010s, and he is the latest big name hire since her arrival just over a year ago.
Google introduced its new data clean room-like solution, PAIR, in October 2022, which will allow advertisers to interact with other publishers data in a privacy compliant way, plugging in your own first-party data, matched against other audiences.
Brinkworth said that going forward, agencies are going to have to skill up on using PAIR in order to keep interacting with DV360 (Google’s digital ad platform) going forward (needing to be a certified Google partner).
In terms of privacy, this is a positive step, and one that a source says is Google being more open than what it usually is with its traditional set of products.
The threat, they say, is that when agencies tell their clients they need to do this, the clients may say ‘should we not be doing a review of other companies that already do this’?, leading to a mass number of agency reviews.
S4 and MediaMonks have spent the past few years buying companies that are specifically geared around supporting Google’s stack. Companies such as 4 Mile Analytics in 2022, Australian firm Datalicious in 2021, described by the company as “a leading Google Marketing Platform, Google Cloud and Google Analytics partner in Asia Pacific”, and TheoremOne last year too.
With half of the technologies that agencies have used over the past two decades incorporating third party data into buying about to be stripped away, GroupM’s hire of Braybrook looks like it could be a stroke of genius. At the very least, a hire that could give it a running head start on much of the competition.
Of course, not all agencies are tied to one platform like DV360, however GroupM’s incoming mega merger between Essence and Mediacom (which sees it become the market’s second largest agency), has seen the former build its success over a close relationship with the platform.
Did that all sound complex? It is. I am still getting my head around this complex area, so if I’ve got something wrong or you fancy a chat, please do get in touch.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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