Tuesdata: How the salaries of ASX-listed media and marketing CEOs stack up

The ASX-listed company leaders have a big gap from first to last

Welcome to Unmade’s new regular data post, Tuesdata. No prizes for guessing where the name came from.

Tuesdata will take a look at various data points across the media and marketing industry and will be available to paid subscribers only. Our monthly exclusive Canda data on the top ads by spend and spot will be part of Tuesdata. 

Today we are comparing the remuneration of CEOs of ASX-listed companies by fixed and total remuneration. 

The full content of this post is for Unmade’s paying members only. Others will hit the paywall a little lower down.

We’ve gone through all of the most recent annual reports to rank the highest paid in order of their fixed remuneration, but have also included their total as well so you can see what they were really rewarded with. 

There’s no perfect time to do this comparison, with companies on this list reporting at various times of the year. Towards the end of last year we did a smaller comparison and awarded James Warburton CEO of the year.

We now have the most recent results were from Ooh Media, which reports on the calendar year and therefore was able to provide data on a full year for CEO Cathy O’Connor.

Carsales, REA Group, HT&E, SWM, Ooh, Domain, SCA, Nine, Enero and Pureprofile are listed on the ASX. While News Corp is dual listed on both the NYSE and ASX, it does not provide details for Australian boss Michael Miller.

Of the 10 companies we’ve included here, O’Connor is the only female CEO 

There is one incomplete data point on this list, and that is Nine CEO Mike Sneesby. One of the highest profile CEOs thanks to the scale of Nine, he began his tenure on April 1, 2021 and therefore has not recorded a full year’s salary in a financial year. 

Despite this, it still doesn’t place him at the bottom of the pile, and with a fixed salary of $1.4m, he can be expected to be well within the top five after this year’s annual reports.