Why we’re closing Mumbrella Asia
Mumbrella Asia will cease publishing in the next few days. Mumbrella content director Tim Burrowes explains why
We’ve made a reluctant call.
We’re closing Mumbrella Asia.
It was a tough decision because people’s careers and livelihoods are involved. And the failure does not belong to those people.
It was a tough decision because we’ve just run a successful event. In November, Mumbrella360 had a program we’d have been proud of in any market in the world.
It was a tough decision because we’ve amassed a decent audience. We just delivered our 10 millionth page view. And we’ve now got more than 25,000 subscribers to the daily email.
And it was a tough decision because many of our commercial supporters became friends, and it feels like we’re letting them down after they backed us.
But as a business decision, it wasn’t tough. Indeed, it was probably a call we should have made earlier.
In the six-and-a-half years we’ve run Mumbrella Asia, we’ve never had a profitable year. Traffic has grown and revenues have grown, but we’ve never come close to breaking even.
This year, despite the (relative) commercial success of this month’s Mumbrella360 Asia we’re on course to lose another six-figure sum on our Singapore operation.
So we’ll be publishing for just a few more days.
One thing about this makes me proud: failure has always been in Mumbrella’s DNA. It’s how we have learned enough to create our successes.
There have been times where we’ve failed with a particular project and I’ve been left asking myself whether it was our strategy that was wrong, or how we executed.
This time we know.
The team did their job really well. The issue was the strategy we set for them.
Over the years, we got the strategy wrong in a couple of ways. One was around business model, and another around our – as the business jargon goes – addressable market. The two things are intertwined.
When we launched Mumbrella Asia in April 2013, it was our second market after Australia.
It seemed like an attractive proposition. Not only would we be the only Australian marketing trade press publication with a foothold in Asia, but the Australian news operation would give us a benefit over our local rivals who didn’t have anyone on the ground back in Oz.
We launched on April 22, 2013, with an initial crew of two – an editor in Hong Kong and salesman in Singapore.
Our first editor of Mumbrella Asia was Robin Hicks, who’d previously been our Melbourne editor and had also worked on local Asian trade media publications earlier in his career.
After a few months, we made the reluctant (on Robin’s part) decision to move him to Singapore too, as more of the APAC bosses were based there, although HK was admittedly a more fun place to be.
Robin was always passionate about the industry and the personification of a mission-driven journalist – who sees their job as serving readers by aiming to tell it like it is, rather than prioritising cosy relationships or short-term commercial considerations.
In his launch article, Robin compared his ambitions with that of Mumbrella Australia:
“What has made Mumbrella work is that it has a point of view. The stories we love to cover have a point of contention – a starting point for debate. Our best pieces touch on the issues that matter and get people talking. And this is what we want to achieve in Asia.
“Now, I’ve been told that the Mumbrella approach won’t work in this part of the world. That we’re too controversial (WPP boss Martin Sorrell has called us ‘aggressive’). That, unlike in Australia, readers will be less willing to jump in and join the discussion. But from what I gather from the people I’ve met since I’ve been back, I’m fairly confident the doubters will be proved wrong.”
It turns out that Robin was both right and wrong.
We quickly built a following and keen commenters. And at any given time, a number of company bosses would not be talking to us because of something we’d written. However, unlike Australia – where a disgruntled boss would pick up the phone and give us a blast before we all moved on – in Asia, it would sometimes be months before we realised a relationship was on ice.
When our then publisher (and now general manager) Dean Carroll came on board shortly before Robin left, he discovered there were many relationships that would benefit from a reset.
Meanwhile, our next editor, Eleanor Dickinson, was almost as driven as Robin, and just as likely to test the boundaries.
It was a relatively brief stint. While Dean, whose role included editorial oversight, was on holiday, Eleanor’s boundary-testing included writing about a sensitive Singaporean political issue. A few weeks later, her employment pass was not renewed by the government, and we found ourselves with a few days to get her out of the country.
Which brings us on to Mumbrella Asia’s third editor, Ravi Balakrishnan, who was a veteran of the Indian marketing trade press before joining us last year. Ravi had been editor of Brand Equity in India – the marketing magazine of The Economic Times, India’s most-read daily financial newspaper.
Our little team began to come together quite nicely as we found our niche within the community. Ravi’s gravitas and Dean’s diplomatic skills mended a lot of fences. And the personable Wilfred Wong spearheaded our sales effort. We won Trade Media of the Year and News Media of the Year at the Asia Pacific Publishing Awards.
However, we were also discovering a couple of things about our strategy.
First, we might call ourselves Mumbrella Asia, but events were such a key part of our business model that really we were Mumbrella Singapore.
Our mature business model in Australia enjoys three major sources of revenue. We have healthy advertising on our website and our daily email newsletter; we do well for sponsorship of our conferences; and we generate good revenues from event ticket sales.
For Mumbrella Asia, we were never able to kickstart that advertising stream. The market norm wasn’t there. In Australia, five years before, we’d been successful in persuading traditional print advertisers within the trade press that it was worth investing in digital advertising to talk to our audience. But with Mumbrella Asia we never pulled off that trick.
I’ve always opposed us taking programmatic advertising. I’m convinced it doesn’t work for B2B publishers. Their audience is too concentrated and too niche for it to be valued properly by algorithms.
A few months ago, as something of a last throw of the dice, I argued that we should give programmatic a try. Surely our 2.5m page impressions a year had to be worth something?
Even if we only pulled in a CPM of $10 (a fraction of our rate card) for two ad slots per page, that might contribute $50k per year.
In truth we’d left that experiment too late. The early stages saw it return CPMs in the cents rather than dollars, and in cash terms just a couple of hundred dollars per month.
Which left us with the other two parts of the business model – event sponsorship and ticket sales.
And that’s the point I was making about us being Mumbrella Singapore, not Mumbrella Asia. Events are, in the most part, attended by a local audience. When we launched, we told ourselves we were entering a bigger market than Australia. In truth, we were going into a smaller one.
But it still felt like a market worth being in. A lot of decisions affecting the whole region are made in Singapore.
Two years back, in late 2017, we ran Mumbrella360 for the first time in Singapore, at Marina Bay Sands.
It was a fraught, stressful and bumpy experience. It was a big event – four streams of content per day, plus masterclasses, plus the Mumbrella Awards, plus a networking afternoon.
In the run up, most of the logistics were increasingly taken on by our Australia-based events team, as our single Singapore-based event manager gradually became overwhelmed by the scale of the event.
The event itself was something to be proud of.
Sponsors – particularly those who were familiar with Mumbrella360 in Australia – were generous in their support.
But we still lost a lot of money – again, in the six figures across that year.
Our biggest miss came in ticket sales.
We’d set a premium price. Our model has always been one of respecting the audience. We’ve always wanted to be an event organiser whose delegates expect to pay a premium to come away having learnt more and been sold to less.
But we were operating in a market where ticket prices are typically lower, and where sponsors therefore have higher expectations in how they can deliver sales messages to delegates.
In that first year of Mumbrella360, the quality of our program didn’t move the needle on ticket sales.
And yet, we’d promised our sponsors that Mumbrella360 would be well attended, and we needed to keep that promise. Letting down those who had gone out of their way to support us was not an option.
So as the event loomed, we gave away a lot of tickets to friends and contacts. It delivered a big, and senior audience to our sponsors, but it didn’t help our profit number.
Shortly afterwards, Mumbrella’s ownership changed, as we sold to Diversified Communications.
As 2017 turned to 2018, the rational thing to do seemed to be to close Mumbrella Asia.
Meanwhile, in April 2018 the first Mumbrella Asia Travel Marketing Summit took place.
Myself and our CEO/co-founder Martin Lane flew across for it, both thinking that this would be our final Mumbrella trip to Singapore.
It was a great event, and once again it had great sponsorship support. (And once again, we didn’t sell as many tickets as we’d have liked.)
At one point standing to one side of the room, I remember whispering to Martin something along the lines of “This is too good to let it die”.
Martin agreed. Once we were back in Sydney, we made a new recommendation. Reduce some of the risk by postponing the return of Mumbrella360 for one year, while we focused on growing our media sales and our audience.
Our new owners accepted our recommendations.
As a result, in 2018 we ran a good summit and a good Mumbrella Asia Awards. I was delighted that we were able to move to the live, presentation-based judging that helps ensure the quality of the Australian version of the awards. And at the end of the year, on that smaller risk model, we still lost money.
Which brought us into 2019, with much hanging on getting the media sales side of the business going, and the return of Mumbrella360 in November.
We decided to respond to the local market and reduce the ticket price.
It didn’t work. We didn’t sell many more tickets than the time before – and now they were at a lower price.
The sponsorship part of the equation did work though. Our sales team smashed that sponsorship budget.
But unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to close the gap on what we’d missed our advertising sales target by across the rest of the year.
Which brings us to where we are.
We’ve got a publishing product I’m really proud of. Traffic’s growing and so are email subscribers.
And we’ve delivered events that I’m convinced are world class.
But only the sponsorship part of the model is working.
And on a business model based around advertising, ticket sales and sponsorship, one-and-a-half out of three is not enough.
So it’s time to call it.
We gave Dean the news a couple of weeks ago. We asked him to come and work for us in Australia, but he’s had to decline for family reasons.
Meanwhile, we’re talking to Ravi about a potential role in Australia.
And as for Wilfred, if you’d like to hire an excellent, upbeat salesperson who’s just hit his sponsorship budget, then you know where to go.
We thought carefully about alternatives to closing.
Could we wind things back and keep things ticking over? We couldn’t figure out a way that wouldn’t also decrease revenue.
Or could we repurpose the Mumbrella Asia site to become editorial-only and more internationally focused, so we didn’t have to lose face by admitting we were shutting things down? That sleight-of-hand didn’t really feel like our style.
To be clear though, this is not the end of our international ambitions. We’re owned by a company which has a strong presence in the UK and US among others.
And what we’ve learned about the conditions for failure of our model in Singapore also helps us understand the conditions for success elsewhere.
We’ll leave Singapore knowing that we gave it our best shot.
To the many commercial partners who took a risk and supported us: Thank you – we never took it for granted.
To those who read Mumbrella, or commented: Thank you for your contributions.
And to all of our staff: Thank you. It was our strategy that was the failure. You succeeded on all the challenges we set you.
This has been, by far, the most interesting site to get real information, insight and unfiltered (well, mostly) feedback on the business we all
love and champion.
The fakers who bore the brunt of critical assessment here will be happy to see you go. But the ones who like the truth will have lost a unique voice that served them well.
All the best for everything you guys do next!
ReplyCommendable transparency and honesty. Rare in the industry but the wheelhouse of the Mumbrella brand. Very best wishes to you all.
ReplyVery sad to read this news but really admire your approach to the situation that has faced you and the team. It’s another new world for media which is always evolving at breakneck speed, and keeping up while being profitable is a momentous challenge. I wish you all the very best in your new adventures, and thank you all for keeping us abreast of marcomm news and insights in Asia.
ReplyKudos Tim for trying to give your team some dignity.
[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
Australia has some solid content with strong investigative pieces. Singapore devolved into the worst self promotional pieces of fluff written by third rate vendors.
ReplySad news for a publication that changed the face of the media industry in Singapore. Many thanks to all involved right from the start! Best of luck to everyone!
ReplyAlways unafraid to voice an opinion; love it or hate it, you have to respect it. Good run and shame to see it end here.
ReplyBut CEOs, ECDs, CMOs are all probably breathing a sigh of relief with nobody to call out their bullshit. Great work guys, it’s a shame this is the end. All the best in your future endeavours.
ReplyMassive massive respect for the transparency and the way you handled this. Lots of learning in the article. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyI wonder if anything other than positive acclaim will make it through the famous Mumbrella moderators? Here goes…
ReplyAs much as I have been a frequent visitor to the site, I think it’s tough to deny that Mumbrella’s “unafraid editorial policy” did not frequently cross the line into tittle-tattle and gossip mongering. Industry media is supposed to promote the industry it covers – and yes, hold it to account when needed – but Mumbrella too often felt like it was trying to stir controversy rather than debate. I suspect that’s one reason that ad revenue and ticket sales were hard to come by. The credibility of the editorial is bound to reflect on the perceived credibility of the events and advertising opportunities. Hopefully, they’ll take some lessons for the next expansion. Whether or not this gets posted will be an indicator I guess…
I agree…..all to often it felt like salacious gossip under the guise is industry reporting
ReplyHi Tim, I am sorry to see read this as Mumbrella Asia provides an alternative to the “send us your press release” + “event and awards business model” of the 2 other sites known in Singapore for marketing news. For them, there is no way to out-cosy them in their established business model.
However, I have this to share. Singapore is not representative of the best and most advance developments in Asia. That honor belongs to Japan, Korea and China with their world leading companies, industry category leading brands and non-stop technology and consumer developments. Singapore is just a low tax and relatively clean, easy to survive city for expats that just wants easy and cost working relationships.
Think about coming to China instead as Australia and China’s economy are more intertwined compared to Singapore.
And again, thanks for telling it like it is.
ReplySad to read this!
Mumbrella Asia has been part of my daily read for years! Here’s hoping it comes back to this part of the world on some form that’s sustainable!
I wish the staff well!
ReplyGoing to miss you guys. It was such a great run while it lasted.
ReplyVery sad to read, as Mumbrella was the only site at times that truly had an honest point of view on an industry topic, regardless of the controversy it would have caused. Really appreciate the candour in which this news was delivered though. All the best to Dean and the team!
ReplyTim, thank YOU for the transparent recount. I sense your passion, your thoughts, and most of all your sincerity. That’s what I’ve come to know of MumbrellaAsia. As you said, it is all about the learning, continuous learning. As a client twice, at SAP and at Syniti, and the Mumbrella Award finalist, I salute you and your entire team for your diligence, your service, and wishing you the very best. ASIA is a jewel for many and sincerely sorry to hear that MumbrellaAsia will be ending it’s chapter in a few days.
Living our word is one of the core values of @Syniti and your recount and your authenticity gets an A++ in history. Thank you for being a great role model for authentic and responsible leadership.
ReplySad to see you guys go.
ReplyThanks to Robin, Eleanor, Ravi & Dean for a good run.
You’ll leave a gaping void.
Thank you for all the hard work. I felt the deep love, and hardships while reading this. And I wish I had done more for Mumbrella. You brought the hard truths and the transparency needed. I feel that we lost a significant partner today, and that we in Singapore, has failed you.
ReplyBut wasn’t that part of the problem? Singapore didn’t need another trade and certainly not one that questioned the banality and conformity that so many execs have built careers upon.
Mumbrella was publishing in a bubble. Those of us outside of Singapore could see that. And the bubble wasn’t even profitable. Fatal errors.
ReplyGo all 40K a month Singapore MD’s and CD’s … hiding behind a 1983 press release and rubber trees.
ReplyI think there are way bigger issues that Mumbrella could choose to be a part of or cover but simply chooses not to. Are readers really that interested in a who’s who of the media industry, getting every update as a select group of senior marketers move from one job to another? What about covering the massive changes in industry, from how climate change is affecting us (and the renewables boom) and how people are creating new products to solve this and other innovations. There are countless issues and trends. There is a big vaccuum for this but I feel we just keep getting more of the ‘who moved to this job this week’ gossip. Just sayin!
ReplyNow where will we go to laugh about [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]?
ReplySad days. The run was good though, and really put the spotlight on how vacuous the other trade publications were/are. Saying that, they are still in business (just about, in the case of the largest of them) so must be doing something right.
Agree that too often it felt like Mumbrella Singapore – covering a very limited and (some would say) creatively conservative market would always be difficult to sustain. The amount of coverage for example of a small and regionally irrelevant company such as [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] was hugely disproportionate. Felt odd for commenters to be arguing over a local ECD hire or another telco generic campaign film while no attention at all was being given to all the things happening in East Asia and others. And as you say, once relationships are broken in such a small and parochial market, they are tough to rebuild.
I always wished you guys would have gambled on Shanghai. I can understand that Singapore is a softer landing, but the elements that make it such an easy place to work also make it rather uncompelling. I always felt Mumbrella’s way of working would have been much better suited to a wilder and more innovative market. As someone who lives outside of Singapore, I was always disappointed that the region’s largest markets (China, Japan and Korea) were practically ignored. Small market approach works for someone like Marketing, which is prepared to play the [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] press release game, but Mumbrella? Certainly not in your early days (before you also started relying more on non-exclusive agency press releases )
Anyway, good luck to everyone involved. Mumbrella will be missed, not least because is anyone really going to turn to Drum, Campaign or Marketing for a trusted and objective point of view? Hardly.
ReplyNow what will the [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] trolls go next …
Personally – this was always a mouthpiece for those who just couldn’t cut it … whether that was real work, scam, proactive whatever.
It was their safe space. Unfortunately – the rest of the industry was just getting on with it while the “purist” (read : low energy bemoaning morons) just say here and wasted another 6 years of their lives with more should have, could have and would have.
[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]. Suppose it back to 5 hour Facebook sessions again, some iteration of a “just do it” line and lots of regret …
“Should have studied engineering”.
Unfortunately … it like every other industry requires playing by some unfair rules, silly benchmarks, fads and trends but most importantly … passion and a desire to make it happen. Not everyone is going to make it to the top of the pyramid despite what your mother told u … u don’t deserve everything. It’s ugly. It’s sad. But it’s the real world.
It’s never been the industry, it’s never been your boss, your CEO, your imported CD, your annoying business lead …
It’s always been you. You’re just not good enough. Take stock of that as we near the end of the year and ask yourself … how do I make 2020 something spectacular.
Maybe it’s less reading of opinions … maybe it’s more reading of books!
ReplySad to see you go. Although you should have read the writing on the wall when the Sg government rejected Eleanor’s work permit. Make no mistake, it is a [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] infamous for kissing-your-ass while stabbing you in the back. I enjoyed your brutal honesty and will miss your clarity. perhaps there is room for an online magazine that supports scam and props up a failing business (as long as they pay you) and never ever say anything bad about the sensitive [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]. Well done to all, past and present, at Mumbrella. You gave it a good shot. Cheers!
Reply“perhaps there is room for an online magazine that supports scam and props up a failing business (as long as they pay you) and never ever say anything bad”
You mean [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] right?
ReplySad to see a trade publisher close particularly when there are so few servicing the advertising industry in the first place. If a third of the commercial model was reliant on clients and agencies in Singapore paying for tickets then no surprise in the result.
To attract sponsors and paying delegates you have to have clients in the room. They leverage this fact to gain free access and ensure they stay up to date with all the latest trends, not to mention the connections they make with the most interesting global speakers.
Agencies don’t buy tickets – unless they are up for an award and expect some quo for their quid. Their businesses are under more pressure than ever before yet they have only one person on business development duty and no budget for learning and development – unless of course budget spent on training equals one of those prized awards.
Finally Singapore. Many companies have been lured to the Lion City as a “regional hub”. A convenient destination to influence all these important regional decision makers. Only to discover that decisions aren’t made regionally and the real power lies with the local market leaders who manage the largest P&Ls.
Creating a commercial model that profitably services local markets with quality editorial and events is a challenge most (remaining) publishers face. I hope you haven’t given up on this challenge and we get to see you somewhere in Asia again.
ReplyNever heard of you before ( I am currently stationed in Malaysia). However this was one of the best, straight forward, honest opinions/editorials I have read in a long while. You seem like a brave company which is so rare in today’s world. I am sorry that I only found out about you through a linkedin post and won’t get a chance to follow you and read your opinions and articles.
ReplyI wish all of you great success. I wish everybody in the corporate world was as straight forward and honest as you guys. It must have been a pleasure working in your team.
Thanks to all the Mumbrella Asia crew for giving us an alternative view of the industry. As a reader, some times commentator, occasional column writer, 360 speaker, awards judge… The while Mumbrella team have always been great listeners and willing helpers.
Asia will miss you… I really hope that big lump if Asia I originally hail from makes space for some Asia content in its Mumbrella coverage
ReplyThe only marcom news site that spoke truth to power and held their feet to the fire.
I read some BS vanilla interview elsewhere with some lowbrow nitwit who’s just made ECD at some equally lumbering giant with many accounts and piss poor work. Rightly, Mumbrella didn’t even cover this appointment.
Q: What have you been doing since starting your job 3 months ago?
A: Mostly listening.
Mumbrella would never tolerate such knuckle dragging responses and would probe with uncomfortable questions.
Sad to see you guys bow out. But you can do so with heads held high.
ReplyThis is great news for the creative frauds and spin pushers with their cookie cutter resumes of decade-old greatest hits and buzz word bloated sound bites.
ReplyThe watch dogs of BS are heading out of town.
Where will we be able to follow VM’s career now? Who is going to care about the CEO with a mohawk now? What about Gary V?
In all seriousness, this is sad news. Thanks for your coverage the past few years. All the best.
ReplyI see this across the entire marketing / creative space in Singapore. I get people ask me on a daily basis if their agency should have a base in Singapore, the answer is always no. Sure it looks like a sexy office location on the website but in reality, the vast majority of successful agencies that stick around only do so as they have overseas offices to keep the Singapore office propped up.
ReplyThe amount of garbage that has built up in Singapore agencies has seriously clogged up the ability to do anything worthwhile here. You run into absolute troglodytes at the highest levels….thus preventing any attempt at getting anything even half decent done. Planners are the new creatives and creatives are the new nobodies. Mumbrella did a great job exposing this but now it’s like the gates of san quentin have been thrown wide open and the guards have all gone home.
ReplyHaving been on the ground in and around asia.
I still think one hub-office servicing other markets is best. The nonsense that happens within each market is not worth the hassle. You’re better off paying for small native tounge teams to sit in the hub and crack out specific market work.
The cost of those staff, will come out less than the mysterious brown envelopes circulating the Mekong and other muddy waters.
If all work is created and signed off in that hub, it will work, but that would take vision and skilled, nuanced management, so it will never happen. As I’ve never come across more than one or two true leaders in one organization, client or agency side … in Asia.
ReplyI think what really did for you in terms of goodwill, potential revenue and attendance was the early years of [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] anonymous comments.
[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]
As a potential contributor you thought twice about Mumbrella, as anything you posted was troll bait, and [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
And as an agency you always had a legitimate grudge not over what Mumbrella had written, but by what they’d allowed to be published in the comments box.
In truth you were sunk by your audience – and no amount of late stage moderation or enforcing of T&Cs was going to bring that back.
It wasn’t the journalism, it wasn’t the model – it was the slow drip [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] of a hundred comments thread [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
ReplyThe Sing industry has no sling and its tail is up its own buttocks for no reason. Much of its management are at best heads of new biz, senior marketers or excel…lent HR tick-boxers.
The modern nature of this global biz is changing this anyway, the hieroglyphics are on the walls for these ancient buzz-word sock-mouths.
ReplyI have been reading Mumbrella for a long time but this is my virgin comment. This website was my go-to for honest, in-your-face articles related to the industry.
I did hate the comments section because it was heavily edited thus the reason I didn’t bother with it.
Kudos to the Mumbrella team. I want to be in the know if a miracle happens with this site.
A part of me is going to feel empty during the journey to/fro work now. But life goes on.
ReplySo this is really Val’s last chance to say she is sorry for her role in the #browngate scandal. VMLY&R, [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] I guess. As for poor Havas, damage is done lads, sorry. The agency is now being run by [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] when the shit hit the fan. Going to miss this rag, it had so much spirit and the articles were beautifully written. It had no fear and it ultimately lived and died by the sword. [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
ReplyWill miss you guys a lot. Robin was excellent, Eleanor very cool, Dean a dude. All good things, as they say. Proud to have had nominations and picked up at your awards. Still highly rate your anti-scam principals. Hope you all go on to great things. I wish you well.
Reply(@@)
ReplyO
“However, unlike Australia – where a disgruntled boss would pick up the phone and give us a blast before we all moved on – in Asia, it would sometimes be months before we realised a relationship was on ice.”
And in Asia, once a relationship is on ice, we’ll never trust you again.
I was one of the bosses you burned. I gave Robin good interviews in Manila, lots of content, every time he asked, even when he wasn’t reporting on news (He had me come up with some PR strategies for crisis responses, etc). [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
Next time around, learn how to maintain relationships rather than bite the hand that feeds you.
ReplyTony – You mean the story where they revealed [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]?
https://www.mumbrella.asia/2018/01/pr-man-tony-ahn-banned-wikipedia-paid-edits-account-abuse
That’s exactly the sort of reporting we’re going to miss.
People [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] will certainly get a lot less scrutiny in the future.
ReplyThis comment encapsulates exactly why Mumbrella will be missed.
Unbelievable lack of [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines].
Now more than ever a voice is needed to genuinely support the industry but at the same time hold up a mirror, no matter how ugly you think the reflection may be. I have no idea where I can now go for unbiased and uncompromised reporting. I guess there is an argument that agencies finally have the trade coverage they deserve.
ReplyReally sad to see this happen, I really learn a lot from mumbrella since Robin’s day (still yet to meet him), both Dean and Ravi are cool guys, all the best to them.
Every time I will open the most comments article and that’s the ugly truth to know the real stuff. I will certainly miss #brownface and mohawk CEO
ReplyVery sad to learn of Mumbrella Asia’s closing. I’ve always appreciated the candour and bravura with which they approached trade journalism.
Hopefully, you guys can find a way to make this profitable somewhere down the line and resuscitate the site. If not, I’d like to say thank you for all the great coverage, unflinchingly honest opinions, and even for the entertaining comments section (all those who commented). I will miss you guys/gals dearly. Wishing you all the best in your next adventures!
ReplyReally impressed and touched by seeing how this news has been approached and how Mumbrella decided to communicate this. Honest, transparent and real. Kudos to the team at Mumbrella for all the hard work and wishing the team all the very best. It will continue to be one of the best sources for industry news and info for me.
ReplySuch a sincere farewell letter, which makes me ponder how much hype is now out there, and who are actually running in “the emperor’s new clothes”.
ReplyRobin Hicks was truly “the personification of mission-driven journalism”. Thank you for recognising his incredible work ethic and for allowing him to set the standard for Mumbrella Asia so many years ago.
ReplyMany service businesses such as advertising where there is layer of regional management, the decision to set up a regional hub in Singapore makes no economic sense.
Singapore is too small to generate, let alone provide a sustainable source of indigenous revenue.
But regional folks just love it in Singapore.
While the lifestyle is comfortable, the cost is very high.
As a result, many regional cost centres are not self-financing. Instead they become an overhead cost (in SGD) that cannot be amortised across the region with its basket of depreciating currencies.
The short term solution is to apply a plaster to a gapping wound that’s bleeding headcount and staff.
While some bright sparks (aka cunning Regional CFOs) have resorted to merging the regional costs into the local P&L so regional folks can continue to enjoy their generous pay check (with contracted bonuses) and company-funded perks at the expense of locals who have to work twice as hard for no incentives and a pay check which doesn’t cover the cost of living hikes.
All this wouldn’t be such a bitter pill if the regional folks actually carried their weight by by adding value to local clients.
Instead, they are just another internal layer of uninvited complication.
Sucking down Starbucks in extended internal meetings, judging work from an ivory tower and generally pissing the local clients off by pushing for solutions that are unrealistic in terms of budget, execution and timeline.
The advertising business is facing enough disruptions caused by technology, inflation, relevance and global pressures.
ReplyBut the addition costs and unnecessary complications of a regional layer of ‘experts’ is purely-self administered.
I agree and disagree.
Trying to align more than 2/3 markets in the region is like filing every new cat meme posted on every new global platform.
The regional markets are currently paying for the Sing Hub, no doubt. As these cartoon lion offices all have a layer of quite frankly, inept deadwood that don’t pay for themselves.
However it’s better to close small time-wasting regional offices, take the [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines] knowledgeable locals, and base them in Sing, thus removing the erratic and “very grey area” regional nonsense.
Then Sing Hubs can pay for themselves. It just takes serious global strategic clarity and business savvy weight to make clients sign up for this.
Plus the ever illusive big picture mindset within a quarterly focussed industry … long term thinking.
ReplySad news. So much respect to you Mumbrella for your true journalism. And your stance towards BS. The industry will miss you big time. Thanks everyone at Mumbrella for being with us.
Nugi
ReplyAs early as 2000 when I arrived in Asia to be an agency head, we all wanted to be in Singapore or Hong Kong, but quickly ‘bit the bullet” and relocated to Shanghai. Had you done so, your market would have been there and an event ticket could have been priced premium and still be way cheaper than a ticket, flight to Singapore and hotel. Shanghai wasn’t the popular place to live, but it was the business necessity place to be!
ReplyYou guys were amazing. The polar opposite of shills. Never going for the easy headline and intellectually vigorous. I was very happy to contributed thought pieces to a thoughtful publication. I am sad it didn’t work out but your experience and victories will not evaporate. They are there for the record and on the record.
ReplyI always thought your model was wrong for Asia. Some of the stories were good, others were just plain bitchy and the comments section rarely offered insight, just snark. Works in Australia, but not really the way business is done in Asia.
If it makes you feel any better Bloomberg investigated this phenomenon in 2018 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-03/australia-s-corporate-giants-burn-4-7-billion-in-offshore-fail I think there’s a syndicated version on SMH.
ReplyDevastating news for our industry. You guys did a fantastic job despite a tough market.
ReplyHave your say