AFR Sunday axed
AFR Sunday has been cancelled by Channel Nine, with the news broken by the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window Columnist Joe Aston.
In a tongue-in-cheek piece, Aston said the enormous weight of defamation actions arising from the airing of his segment was partially to blame for the axing.
“Despite relatively strong ratings in its time slot, the program struggled to be commercially viable – the main factors being defamation costs associated with the Rear Window segment and a class action launched after the screening of repeated CPA Australia commercials allegedly caused audience trauma,” Aston wrote.
“In canning the blockbuster production, Nine has now freed up enough cash to fund a serious bid pay for the upcoming AFL rights.”
SMG and Mediacom clean up
Starcom MediaVest Australia has taken home agency of the year at the Festival of Media Asia Pacific Awards after winning six awards, while MediaCom took home two awards.
Each agency won one Gold each, for consumer research and experiential campaign respectively.
Starcom won awards for work with clients Optus, Just Car Insurance, Samsung, Virgin Mobile, and APIA.
Meanwhile MediaCom took home a bronze for its public service work with beyondblue.
Rene Carayol speaks
UK-based “business guru and media personality” Rene Carayol will be the first speaker in a six-part lecture series put on by The Marketing Academy.
Carayol will be speaking to an invite-only list of attendees in Sydney today on the issues of leadership and organisational culture.
The six lectures will take place from March to October, with today's lecture sponsored by Seven West Media and PwC Australia.
SVOD revolution saves parents
According to research from finder.com.au, parents stand to save an extraordinary amount with a Netflix subscription.
It calculated buying the DVDs of all the children's content on Netflix would cost a princely sum of $4221.76.
That would be enough to have a basic Netflix subscription for 39 years.
However, much more realistically, if parents bought one DVD per month costing $21, the Netflix switch could save parents about $144 per year.
Publicis Groupe boss to exit in May 2017
Publicis Groupe head honcho Maurice Levy will officially step down in May 2017, with a full team set to replace him rather than an individual. Speaking to an audience at Advertising Week Europe, he revealed that he will remain with the company until the May after its 2016 AGM.
“We are working to build two teams; a supervisory board and director management board with five members. So the solution will not be one person. It will be a team. I am very confident this is going to happen in due course,” he told those assembled. Levy did not reveal the names of the people who will populate the teams.
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