Tough T&Cs, dodgy media buying, Swans or ugly ducklings?

Our Executive Director of Media and Data, Ben Willee talks to Abe Udy on the Mumbrellacast about sponsorship implications arising from the Sydney Swans scandal, Agency T&Cs on digital asset ownership and is it a race to the bottom for Media buying.

Listen to Ben speak here;

Listen to the post cast here:

Tough T&Cs, dodgy media buying, Swans or ugly ducklings?

Or read the transcript here:

Abe Udy (Host)

Welcome to the Mumbrellacast today. What does the Sydney Swans scandal mean for team and player sponsorships in the future? Do marketers actually own any of the digital assets they build with an agency? Dodgy discounting in the media buying world. And what does Australia sound like? I’m Abe Udy and I’m joined by Eleanor Dickinson

Eleanor Dickinson

Hi Abe

Abe Udy (Host)

Nathan

Nathan Jolly

Hey Abe

Abe Udy (Host)

And podcast perennial Ben Willee.

Ben Willee

G’day Abe, great to be here.

Abe Udy (Host)

This week the Sydney Swans are embroiled in a scandal. Five of its players have been stood down amidst a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault. The wider story, though, for the media and marketing world, is how this will impact the future sponsorship of sports figures.

Ben, you’re a Melbourne guy, which surely means you’re into the AFL. How badly will these hurt the club and the league from a sponsorship point of view?

Ben Willee

Well Abe, you’ll have to be careful and I apologise as I might keep you keep busy in the edit suite because I could go on about this one for hours, and Tim might need to get the lawyers on standby.

But as you are no doubt aware, the AFL is a religion here in the southern states. And this has been enormous news, not just from mainstream media, but also in forums and dodgy chat groups all over town making some very, very salacious allegations. But it’s also been a big news for communications professionals from the AFL, the Sydney Swans and their sponsors.

And these communications professionals have been busier than a Ukrainian drone manufacturer. Let’s give it some context. When it comes to sponsoring sport, the Sydney Swans aren’t just selling signage on a boundary fence or some jumper logos. They’re selling values, they’re selling community and association and sponsors will pay a premium for that.

So sponsorship is essentially paying huge amounts of money to borrow someone else’s reputation. The problem is you don’t get to choose which bits of the reputation you borrow. So really, if you’re going to sponsor a team, you should think about it as a long term game. And really, that’s where this gets interesting, because how the parties have behaved in the short term will affect their reputation in the long term.

And what we’ve seen here is that, you know, I would argue they’ve done the right thing in the short term. I mean, the Sydney Swans have stood down the players involved, even though that means the side’s finals hopes are probably completely dashed now. Not to mention the AFL, this is the last thing they need after the Luke Sayers scandal.

The Geelong concussion scandal. I mean, they say bad things come in threes, but in the AFL, they probably known as Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Nathan Jolly

So do you think this will make brands think twice before going in on these athlete led campaigns, whether it’s an asset like sponsoring an athlete or a team, will things like this make them reconsider in the future?

And will that take away, let’s say, the lesser funded teams like the Olympians, for example, who rely upon sponsorships?

Eleanor Dickinson

Look, I mean, I’m the slightly more cynical party here because I feel definitely in the past, I feel like some sports stars, we as a community have been very forgiving of them for transgressions. There was one I’m not going to name him, but there was a British footballer, a soccer player, I met about ten years ago, and yet publicly, his image is fairly rehabilitated.

Now that I haven’t been able to find any sponsorships with them. So I’m a little bit cynical on this front, but at the same time, we are looking at a post MeToo world, and I think Ben will be able to comment on this much better than me. But I suspect there is a lot more caution with regards to brand safety in this world.

Ben Willee

There always is. You’re absolutely right Eleanor, there always is a lot of caution when moving into this world. And there’s a million clauses in these contracts that say if you do X, Y, and Z mostly broadly under the heading of bringing themselves or the game into disrepute, that you can extract yourself from those contracts without penalty. But at that point the damage has been done.

So, yes, I mean, you wouldn’t want to be an AFL club, sponsorship salesperson right now because there’ll be a lot of people out there saying, well, is this happened in the past? It’s just happened again. And when you give young men huge amounts of money and adulation, they usually make stupid decisions.

Nathan Jolly

Yeah, and something that might not also be too apparent to Melbourne listeners is that Sydney Swans has a very unique position in the Sydney kind of sporting fan landscape.

It’s got quite a progressive fan base. It’s like inner West hipsters. It’s people who perhaps aren’t the traditional footy fans like it. It’s almost like, you know, being into alternative music as opposed to pop music. That’s kind of how it feels like in Sydney. So I think like a scandal such as this, while we don’t know the specifics, but something in this world might land a lot worse than it would have done if it was a rugby league team from Sydney, dare I say?

Ben Willee

Yeah. Look, you’re probably right, Nathan. And I think the good news is, and Eleanor alluded to it is, is that people have a short memory for these sorts of things. And sports stars can be very easily rehabilitated, especially when they perform well out on the field or the pitch. So the brands are very quick to leave and very loudly leave, but they will quietly, come back into the sport, almost as quickly as they’ve gone, I suspect.

Abe Udy (Host)

And just quickly, before we move on, we need to make it clear that umbrella does not allege that any of the named players were involved in the alleged sexual assault, or have committed any criminal wrongdoing, only that they have been named in connection with the club’s investigation. Up next. Do you own the assets you paid an agency to build for you?

Abe Udy (Host)

So, Eleanor, you said you have a question you want to ask.

Eleanor Dickinson

A deeply burning question, yes. I am interested to know all of you. What was the last set of terms and conditions that any of you read and read them carefully and completely before accepting them?

Nathan Jolly

Maybe my first Hotmail account, because it was novel.

Eleanor Dickinson

And because it was like one too, terms and conditions.

Abe Udy (Host)

Yeah, I like to skim them, but it’s generally only a very quick skim read, trusting that the legal people have got my back, I guess.

Ben Willee

Well, I wouldn’t say T&Cs, says Eleanor, but I do read a lot of contracts in my job working in an agency. So, I can say, actually, this week I’ve been reading one.

Eleanor Dickinson

Well, you may be interested in the story that I put together this week. Ben, I have been digging into some of the fine print of what you actually own when you’re a marketer working with an agency, and you might think, well, I’m the client, I own all of it. It turns out in some cases it’s actually not a right lot.

So I managed to dig out a few different publicly available terms and conditions from a few Australian digital agencies. And honest to God, one of them I think ran 40 pages. One was 20 pages. They were ridiculous. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. And interestingly, buried in the 10,000 word terms and conditions are provisions about who actually owns things like your landing page, your backlinks, your creative assets, and even your access to your advertising accounts.

And it’s not always the client.

Abe Udy (Host)

Is that because they’re saying the creative has the creative copyright over the ideas?

Eleanor Dickinson

Exactly, yes. And if you are the client, in a couple of cases, you have to pay to license it back off the agency.

Ben Willee

Yeah, I read this story. Eleanor and I almost fell off my chair. And I actually went a bit deeper and read a couple of the contracts that you refer to, and they’re not good.

And I will start by saying that’s not how we operate at Spinach. But what’s fascinating about this is if your retention strategy involves making it really painful for clients to leave your business, you haven’t built client loyalty. You’ve built probably the advertising equivalent of Hotel California. And I think this falls solely into the into the lap of clients.

I mean, how hard is it to upload a contract or post a link on ChatGPT or Claude or something similar? And you know, they will always give you a point of view. And, I actually did that in this case. And their point of view was pretty scathing about some of those contracts. And most reputable agencies would say to a client, once you have paid us for that particular work, you own the asset and you own the IP.

And that’s a distinction. You obviously have to pay for it, but then you own it. It’s very unusual for an agency to own something, an asset and then license it back to a client. Yeah I found that very, very strange.

Abe Udy (Host)

I would agree with that. Without naming names Eleanor, are they kind of like cowboy agencies? Are they fairly, are they minnows?

Eleanor Dickinson

They’re definitely not household names. And the ones referenced in the piece, I can also hand on heart say that they are part of this. But when I spoke to Josh Berg of Hedgehog Marketing, whose whole deal is to help clients set all this stuff up themselves so they don’t need an agency. His point was, if that you’re a really good agency, you’re doing really good work for your clients and you have a really strong relationship with them.

You don’t need the Hotel California effect. My impression is it’s a bit of a burden and churn rate. Get clients on board fast, don’t treat them very well from the sounds of it, and just make it really painful for them to leave. And as Josh also pointed out in my interview with him, you give them a sour taste of what the rest of the industry appears to be, and it’s definitely not the case.

Ben Willee

Yeah, I agree the client should own the data, the accounts and the history and agencies should keep clients because they’re good at their jobs, not because they’ve hidden the spare key.

Abe Udy (Host)

Up next, dodgy discounts in media buying.

Okay, this is another of your investigations this week. You’ve been busy. Eleanor, tell us about dodgy discounts in media buying. What’s up?

Eleanor Dickinson

Well, this actually all started and not this week. Thankfully, a few weeks ago I actually ran into Darren Woolley of Trinity P3 at Central Station, and we just started talking in passing about a lot of conversations he’s been having with media owners.

And they’re not very, not very happy media owners. What they are saying en masse for the past six months or so is that when media agencies are winning clients, they are promising them incredibly, incredibly cheap rates, and then they are coming to the media owners and saying to them, this is what we had to do to win the business.

Can you make this work?

Ben Willee

Yeah, well, this problem has been around since Adam was a boy, unfortunately. And it really is a bent as a three-buck note. And apologies again, Abe. This might require some work in the edit suite as well, but I will try and choose my words carefully. And look, the part of the problem here is that procurement often treats agency pricing, like body fat.

And the assumption is that less must always be healthier. And eventually you reach a point where you’ve stopped making the patient leaner and started killing them. And, you know, when we say killing them, we mean killing brands. And price is one variable. And for media agency people that have been around for five minutes, it’s a variable that’s very easy to manipulate.

So, procurement have to understand that media pricing is not like buying toilet paper. It’s a complicated multi dimensional thing. So, the focus on price is dangerous for the industry, but it’s also really dangerous for media owners. And because often an agency will just say righteo, we’re promising you a discount of 99.9%, off the rate card and then they lean on the media owner to deliver that. And that’s not good for Australian businesses and it’s not good for the agency or the client. So I think, there are some real challenges in this space. And we as an industry have to be able to stand up to clients and say, hey, look, this is just complete and utter BS.

And do you want good outputs or do you want, one ply toilet paper as cheap as we can sell it to you.

Abe Udy (Host)

So is there anything that can be done? I mean, is this actually a race to the bottom?

Ben Willee

I would say at the moment, it definitely is a race to the bottom. And at some point a media owner will say no. And again, I choose my words carefully here, it is rumoured that happened in recent times, and a media agency then had to go back to their client and say, well, I’m sorry, we can’t deliver what they promised. And then the client then has to make a decision and say, do we go through that pitch process again?

What are the remedies we have? And it becomes very, very messy. So I think the key message here for everyone is, be careful of people promising you things that seem too good to be true.

Eleanor Dickinson

Yeah, you are absolutely right, Ben. I had exactly the same conversation with Darren. You’re all left with three options. Basically, if you are a client, you’ve made this ridiculous deal with an agency and they can’t deliver it.

You can go back to pitch, as you said, which as anybody who’s been through that process knows, it’s long, it’s painful, and it’s very expensive. You can take them to court. But what client wants to do that and have to admit publicly that they fucked up, fucked up their relationship with their agency. So as Darren pointed out, most of them, what they do is they knuckle down for the duration of the contract and hopefully learn from it.

But unfortunately, as Darren says, not many of them are because it keeps happening.

Ben Willee

Yeah and I think there’s a deeper problem here is that procurement are perhaps too powerful in a lot of these client organisations. And, you know, their influence is greater than actually what the marketers want and that forces marketers into making decisions or putting too much weight on decisions that aren’t necessarily in their best interest.

I mean, it’s pretty ironic, isn’t it? But I mean, you can’t demand champagne thinking on tap water prices and then be surprised when you know someone else pays the bar tab.

Eleanor Dickinson

I do love your use of idioms, Ban. And, just to round up, look, I want to stress that there are some media owners I spoke to about this who do think this is actually just cyclical.

It’s an economic downturn at the moment. This is what happens every time there is an economic downturn. But there are others who have said they feel like it is a spiral. And if everybody keeps pushing prices down, where ultimately is the bottom and what happens when we actually reach it if we do? And I think one thing everybody was in agreement on is that there are no winners in the end.

Abe Udy (Host)

Up next, what does Australia sound like?

Abe Udy (Host)

I write a story close to my heart, Austrade tasked Sonic Branding Agency, Smith and Weston, with a rather difficult brief to capture the spirit of our nation with one quick audio sting. I haven’t yet heard it. I’m fascinated to hear where they’ve arrived. Let’s have a listen to how they created the sound of Australia.

Voice Over

The Austrade Sonic logo is built from three distinct layers.

First, the unmistakable call of the Australian Whip Bird combined with treated sounds from the natural environment.

Next, the human voice, a female vocalist, echoes the shape of the Whip Bird call, layered with subtle hums and lower register vocals to give the sound depth and warmth.

Finally, a crafted synthetic chord blending synthesiser, violin and cello.

Nature, voice, music, three unique layers that come together to create the complete Austrade Sonic Logo.

Eleanor Dickinson

There was a bit that took me right back to six year old me going to Barnsley Baths, and that was a sound that meant the wave machine was about to come on.

Abe Udy (Host)

So what do we think? Is that what Australia sounds like? Nath?

Nathan Jolly

Well, I spoke to Nick West from Smith and Weston when I was preparing a story about that sound, which is on mumble at the moment, and he said that they they had like ten different ideas that they came up with.

They then went through two rounds with Austrade with their own sonic people to whittle it down to three, and then they tested it with seven different countries, including Australia and 5000 people, to see which one tested the best. And the way they did it wasn’t based on like self-reporting, it was based on this. An American lab did it based on, for want of a better term, your gut reaction to the sounds rather than you just go I like sound ‘B”. They did their gut reaction test, and interestingly enough, that one was the most the one that in every single country but America, that one tested the best by far, and the other two sounds had didgeridoo in them as well, and they just didn’t test well. So I thought that was very interesting because first thing you think if you are thinking about a Sonic brand, especially for Austrade, where they’re aiming overseas, is you’ve got to get some didgeridoo in.

Eleanor Dickinson

That was my first thought there. I was like, wait, where’s the didgeridoo?

Nathan Jolly

Yeah, apparently didn’t test well.

Abe Udy (Host)

It reminds me of the Grand Designs, various Grand Designs themes. Have you heard those, the New Zealand versus Australian versus the original? The little subtlety that they do for each one that sounds like the country.

Nathan Jolly

Yeah. It’s a very interesting task isn’t it.

Ben Willee

Look, it is and I reckon the key issue here is, is not whether we like it, or whether it sounds Australian enough, it’s whether people outside the Austrade marketing department, so their target audience, hears it often enough to know what it means. And you think about that Netflix ‘da-dum’, you know the first time you heard it, it didn’t mean anything.

And now you’ve heard it a billion times, it means something to you. So there’s actually a formula here which is distinctive, distinctiveness multiplied by consistency multiplied by frequency of message, equals recognition. So, the making of the logo is the easy bit. But it can be very expensive because, consistency in frequency on a big target audience is, you know, can be really expensive.

So if we don’t use it relentlessly, we’ve just made an expensive doorbell.

Eleanor Dickinson

I was going to say, but not simplicity, because the sounds I think of that are really distinctive, like the ‘da-dum’ from Netflix and HBO, which I’m not going to mimic, but they’re very simple and and they’re so memorable. I don’t know, maybe I need to listen to this little smushed thing a few more times, and maybe I will remember it because I’ve already forgotten it apart from the Whip Bird.

Abe Udy (Host)

It did feel a little bit overthought at the risk of being a party pooper. But Ben, you make an interesting point that that frequency and consistency, you hear that Netflix sound all the time, but if you didn’t hear it all the time, would it mean as much as it does?

Nathan Jolly

It’s actually taken from season one of House of Cards as well that little Netflix thing. It’s, what’s his name? Kevin Spacey rapping his ring on the desk. And then the sound is literally the sound that trailed down of that scene into the next one.

Eleanor Dickinson

You should put that on Mumbrella trivia for when Hal and Tim are back.

Nathan Jolly

That’s true. Yeah.

Ben Willee

But I also think of things like, Law and Order had a very distinctive ‘da-ding’ in key breaks in each of those episodes.

And, you know, just it just can take a lot of time and effort for us to, to notice them, notice they’re distinctive and for them to go in the right place. So I don’t know it, who is Austrade’s target audience? Is it, you know, the rest of the world, couple of billion people, is that all?

Nathan Jolly

Yeah, it is the rest of the world, which is quite interesting because when I was speaking to Nick, he made the differentiation that it’s not what Australia sounds like to Australians, it’s what it sounds like to the rest of the world, or at least what it can sound like to the rest of the world.

Abe Udy (Host)

Yeah, that’s a good point. So what we think is irrelevant. Really?

Ben Willee

Well, largely irrelevant. I mean, if you think back to some of our most successful Brand Australia campaigns, Paul Hogan said for many years, throw another shrimp on the barbie. And I don’t think any of us have ever heard that actually said it in Australia, but it did a lot for Australian tourism.

So, yeah, it’s a tricky space and I wish them the best of luck. So I’ve had my own go at making a sting that represents the entire country. So if you’d like to play that please Abe, we can compare and contrast.

Audio sting

Sound mix of Australian music, Television and Movie audio

Ben Willee

Oh, I love it, I love it.

Abe Udy (Host)

You got Home and Away in there, don’t give up your day job Nath.

Nathan Jolly

So don’t email it to Austrade and go. Is it too late?

Abe Udy (Host)

I don’t know if you get that passed. AC DC’s copyright lawyers.

Nathan Jolly

That’s true. I tried to get Harold Bishop’s tuba playing in there as well and couldn’t, couldn’t quite get it in there.

Abe Udy (Host)

Well, on that note, as we think about what Australia sounds like, that’s it from me, Abe Udy from Abe’s Audio. And thanks to Eleanor.

Eleanor Dickinson

Thanks Abe.

Abe Udy (Host)

Nathan.

Nathan Jolly

Thank you Abe.

Abe Udy (Host)

And Ben.

Ben Willee

Thanks very much for having me Abe.