BotW: Pork disasters and other dangerous ideas; Gumtree for sale?
Welcome to Best of the Week, written on Friday afternoon on board JQ749 home to Tassie, and in Evandale this morning. After weeks of hectic travel for Upfronts and our own events, a delicious fortnight minus interstate trips lies ahead.
Today: An ad about Muslims and pork causes as much offence as you’d expect; a Sky News bacon blunder; and classifieds business Gumtree seems to be on the block.
Happy Morning Show Hosts Day, except to Jennifer Anniston.
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Bacon, chips and safety nets
Sometimes we tempt fate.
Back when Mumbrella was small, I used to joke that I hoped we’d one day be big enough to have an HR incident at our Christmas party. A dumb joke I wouldn’t make now. Luckily I’d left the organisation by the time Mumbrella’s 2021 festive celebrations made it into the Daily Mail.
Then there was the 2015 incident when Sydney Opera House decided to hold the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, then caved in to social media and cancelled a Muslim speaker who was due to speak about honour killings. Some ideas are indeed too dangerous.
And in the UK, industry publication The Drum, has been running its Chip Shop Awards, which it promoted as “infamously irreverent and boundary-pushing”. In last month’s launch announcement they promised “No clients, no rules, no apologies”.
Owner and editor-in-chief Gordon Young explained: “The industry is in danger of disappearing up its own guidelines. While others are tightening their rules, we’re loosening our collars. This is a show that celebrates the kind of brilliant, twisted ideas that would never make it past legal, let alone a nervous client.”
Talk about tempting fate.
The Chip Shop Awards are the ultimate celebration of scam - most are fun ideas from the bottom drawer, that probably never had a client brief in the first place. Like playing tennis without a net.
And that also includes the absence of a safety net. This week a Muslim creative who had entered the awards took understandable offence at one of the shortlisted ads. The work in question was created to promote Reckitt Benckiser’s Finish dishwasher tablets although it wasn’t commissioned by the brand.
The ad featured an image of a not-entirely clean plate with the slogan in big letters “Make muslims eat pork” with the additional explanatory message underneath “or start using Finish”. As most people would be aware, abstaining from eating pork is a tenet of Muslim faith.
The boundary pushing got away from the Drum after creative Zed Anwar criticised it on LinkedIn. He took to LinkedIn stating that he was withdrawing his own shortlisted entry.
He wrote: “This isn’t clever. This isn’t provocative creativity. This is hate, pure and simple, taking my faith and my identity and reducing them to the punchline of a joke. It dehumanises Muslims everywhere.”
The backlash against The Drum was immediate. After a day or so, Gordon Young apologised, and offered context: “There is some mitigation: what circulated on LinkedIn was not what was published on the Chip Shop Awards site. The images were cropped, removing the crucial line that explained the concept was about avoiding food residue. The ad was intended to make the opposite point to the one suggested online - to respect people’s dietary and religious requirements by ensuring they’re not accidentally served food they cannot eat.”
It’s easy to see how The Drum painted itself into the corner. If you ask for boundary polishing ideas, then that’s what your jury - particularly one with the full context, and presumably lacking the cultural sensitivity of understanding the offence the work might cause - will shortlist.
Nonetheless, the work was withdrawn from the shortlist, with Young apologising: “To those we offended: I am sorry. It was never our intention to disrespect any faith or community.”
He also attempted to clarify: “The judges based their decision on a fuller submission than what’s been circulating on LinkedIn. What went online had been cropped, and the judges also had the supporting explanation of the idea, which made the intended message clearer. ”
Inevitably, Young’s apology was deemed insufficient by many those who were offended.
Kimmel redraws the line
That came in the same week where Disney redrew the line on creative expression for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Having suspended Kimmel from his ABC show over his monologue about the politicisation of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Disney backed away from the backdown when anger grew about its surrender of free speech principles.
Kimmel had been the correct side of the line after all, Disney seemed to accept before his return became one of the most anticipated (and viewed) edition as of late night television in years.
This morning, Kimmel’s vindication appears to be complete, with news that the two major ABC affiliates that continued to suspended his show, Nexstar and Sinclair, have also now reinstated it.
Sky News crosses the line
And the Chip Shop Awards was not the only pork-related disaster of the week. Sky News Australia well and truly crossed the line with a live guest on Sunday night.
The new show Freya Fires Up, featuring Freya Leach, gave airtime to the Islamophobe Ryan Williams. He joined the remote cross with a rasher of bacon draped on each shoulder. The crass joke seemed to be that he was scared of Muslims and the bacon would somehow protect him like garlic deters a vampire.
Putting the attention-seeking bigot on air was a misjudgment, even for Sky News which seeks to provoke.
It’s clear that in this quiet corner of airtime, featuring an inexperienced presenter, something went badly wrong. As the Age’s Calum Jaspan explained it: “Sky usually cycles through a roster of senior editors on a Sunday, and it is standard practice for all programs to submit their list of guests in advance. Its head of programs Mark Calvert is on leave and did not approve the guest. There was a senior producer overseeing the live broadcast, who pulled the guest around one minute into his appearance.”
There’s been no explanation of whether Leach knew the stunt was coming, but even if she did, the misjudgment is the sort of blunder that young journalists make.
Reportedly, Leach is just 22. When I was that age I made a stupid mistake at my newspaper. It came during an undercover investigation we had been working on for weeks, into a violent, far left organisation in the UK. My error could have put one of my colleagues at risk if we’d published.
In that case though we had a safety net. My experienced news editor recognised my mistake, bollocked me, and stopped us from publishing. It was a huge error I learned from, but no damage was done to the newspaper’s reputation or out staff safety.
By not providing her a similar supervisory safety net, Sky News let down Freya Leach.
See The Hack
For anyone interested in the media, it’s been a big few days of TV drama. Last week The Morning Show (the hacky Apple+ drama, not the cosy warm bath occupied by Larry Emdur and Kylie Gillies) returned. It’s every bit as ridiculous as the first two seasons, with the TV anchors played by Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon continuing to address every implausible situation in precisely the opposite way that any actual TV professional would.
But the real highlight has been The Hack, which is to be found on Stan in Australia.
Featuring David Tennant and Toby Jones (it’s the law that Jones must play the hero in every documentary-drama about a British scandal), The Hack retells the story of the phone hacking scandal that eventually led to the closure of the News of the World.
It’s so good. You might expect the subject matter to lead to plodding exposition through dialogue. But instead it edges into post modern dark comedy.
The full series, made by ITV Studios, is available to binge. I’ve only watched one episode so far. It’s so enjoyable, it deserves to be savoured.
Gumtree on the block, and down on the Unmade Index
Classifieds business Gumtree Australia saw its share price fall back by 4.8% on Friday after a week in which it signalled to the market that the business is for sale.
The company owns classified sites Carsguide, Autotrader and Gumtree.
The debt-laden Gumtree Australia - previously known as The Market, and before that as The Market Herald - sold its investor chat boards Hot Copper and Stockhouse at the end of June for a deal which delivered $2.9m in cash and reduced its debts by $4.8m. Last month the company’s annual report showed it had debts of $61.8m and $3.8m in the bank.
On Wednesday Gumtree told the ASX it had appointed a “financial adviser”. It said: “The board continues to evaluate a range of alternatives to help drive shareholder value. The board confirms that it has appointed the Highbury Partnership to assist in this valuation”.
Highbury Partnership lists itself on LinkedIn as “Australia’s leading independent M&A / advisory firm”.
After the announcement, the Gumtree share price jumped by 17.6% apparently in anticipation of a breakup or sale.
In its annual report, Gumtree said that excluding businesses it had sold or closed, its EBITDA profits for the year were $6m.
Prior to boardroom ructions, Gumtree’s share price peaked at 70c back in 2021. Gumtree closed the week on a market capitalisation of $64m with a share price of 20c.
It was a downbeat close to the week on the Unmade Index. ARN Media lost 4% on Friday while Ive Group lost 1.5% and Vinyl Group 1.1%.
Nine was down 0.9% to a market cap of $1.8bn. On Monday Nine shareholders will receive the cash from their special dividend for the sale of Domain. This week, Nine announced that Peter Tonagh will be the company’s next chair, while CEO Matt Stanton told staff that the company is considering selling its radio operation. Big week.
Seven West Media picked up 3.7% although it is still trading close to a five-year low.
The Unmade Index closed down 1.09% for the day on 472 points.
In case you missed it…
On Monday we dipped a toe into a topic we’ll return to - are the platforms incentivising some media mix modelling services to fudge their numbers?:
On Tuesday, in members-only content, we looked at the rationale for Fox Corp investing in TikTok:
On Wednesday, Amazon entered Australia’s Upfronts arena for the first time:
And on Thursday we analysed the appointment of Peter Tonagh to chair Nine, and a successful stint for his predecessor Catherine West:
More from Mumbrella…
‘The system is broken’: Inside Australia’s marketing redundancy crisis
Medium Rare, The Local Project among winners at Mumbrella Publish Awards 2025
Time to leave you to your Saturday. We’ll be back with more from Unmade next week.
In the meantime, if you’d like to hear a little more from me, last night’s episode of MediaLand on ABC Radio National was a fun one. We chatted about the return of Big Brother to the reality TV landscape, the return of Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves, and Australia’s best media books (spoiler: it’s not Scandalands). We also talked about the first episode of The Hack.
And in the Mumbrellacast we covered the Optus PR crisis and lessons from our REmade conference.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
