Best of the Week: Jason and me; The Cat vs Fairfax; Yahoo7’s awful PR; Trimantium’s stalled float

best of the week And another thing.. Welcome to Best of the Week, written - for the first time ever - in the entirely vanilla circumstances of normal working hours, at my office desk in Sydney. Just for a change, [2 Many DJs - Live at La3 Valencia]( is the soundtrack. There’s a very real possibility that by the time you’ve read this I’ll have just had an actual Saturday lie in, rather than the usual 5am alarm call to give it a final polish. Which is a joyous feeling. This week: the exit of Jason Dooris, the non-arrival of Trimantium, The Cat versus Fairfax and Yahoo7’s terrible comms. You know where the Door Is With the big stories, you might think there’d be a similar sense of joy when they finally reach their conclusion. Often though, when the moment comes, it’s just a sense of relief, or even anti-climax. And so it was on Monday morning, when [Jason Dooris finally announced he was quitting Atomic 212, with an implausible-sounding plan to study politics and terrorism at Oxford University](. I’m delighted that this may well be the last time that I write about Jason Dooris. You may recall that shortly before Christmas we published the results of our investigation into the exaggerated claims made by Dooris in a number of awards competitions in Australia and the wider Asia Pacific. At the time, it felt like there was so much evidence, he’d go quickly, limiting damage to the agency and indeed his own reputation. In part, I suspect the delay was because negotiations would have been going on behind the scenes. There would have been ownership and legal issues to resolve. Until the day he addressed the staff about his exit, I understand he hadn’t been spotted inside the agency since before Christmas. But as it dragged out, I began to get worried. I didn’t doubt our facts, but I was concerned about staff of the agency becoming collateral damage if clients moved business away as a result of the hit to to the agency’s reputation. That had the potential to affect a lot of people who weren’t at fault. The story always felt like it was predominantly about the actions of one person, rather than an agency culture. And while his management colleagues, including co-owners James Dixon and Barry O’Brien, should undoubtedly have started asking questions sooner, we didn’t want to make it a vendetta against Atomic. Which is why it was a relief when the agency was finally able to announce his departure. Atomic still has good clients and does good work. With the right CEO to replace Dooris, it will be possible for it to bounce back quite quickly - with the caveat that Atomic will need to convince the industry it will take a different approach to awards in the future. Over the last three or four years, Jason Dooris and I had an odd relationship. He’d invite me to lunch and we’d set a date. But there’d always be a reason on the day why he had to postpone. A new date would go into the diary, and the pattern would repeat. It became a running joke in the newsroom. In the end, the only times we ever talked face to face were at various rounds of Mumbrella Awards judging in Sydney and Singapore. That included the period after we began to have concerns about discrepancies in his entries, and had done additional due diligence before he spoke to our juries. We’d brief our jurors on specific questions it would be useful to ask him. Then I’d bump into him in the holding area while he waited to present. And we’d chat politely about inconsequential things. He knew that I knew. And I knew that he knew that I knew. There’s really no etiquette guide on the correct way to behave in such a circumstance. But it was weird between us even before then. Nearly two years ago, Atomic was a finalist for Mumbrella’s media agency of the year - which is a category in which our jury visits each of the finalist agencies. Ahead of the day, Jason somehow learned that one juror was a former client of his from a previous job who he felt would not have a high opinion of him. In the days before judging, he sent me a note with what felt to me like a manufactured claim that she had a conflict of interest. When we assemble juries we try to avoid direct conflicts of interest. And in case we miss anything, we’ve always given our jurors clear advice on what conflicts of interest they should declare, and when they should step back from judging a particular entry. If they’re not sure, they share the information with the rest of the jury and follow their advice. In an industry as interconnected as ours, it happens every year, and for that presentation, the juror leaves the room and doesn’t score the entry. It’s routine. But this wasn’t one of those conflicts. We considered it, and concluded that the risk of real conflict of interest was low. It was tangential, and old. Instead, it felt like jury shopping on his part. So we stuck with our jury. When they arrived at Atomic on the day, Dooris refused to present, and the flabbergasted jury left the building without hearing from the agency. There was then a frantic few hours while we tried to work out what was the fairest thing to do next. Along with our editor at the time, Alex Hayes, I rushed out of the office and met the jury at the coffee shop below Havas Media, who were their next stop. The jury was unanimous. There was no conflict of interest, and they would not allow the agency to dictate to them who could hear the presentation - it was all of them or none of them. What followed was even more extraordinary. In the days that followed, Dooris went legal. He wrote to us demanding that we reconstitute an entirely new jury and judge the whole category with fresh people. Atomic’s lawyer threatened to seek an injunction in the Supreme Court if we didn’t accede. We lawyered up - (I wholeheartedly recommend DVM Law’s Stephen von Muenster, by the way) - and stood our ground. Our CEO Martin Lane and I met with Atomic’s Barry O’Brien, who acted as a middle man. We explained that the reputation of our awards and the imperative of backing the wishes of our jury was such that the expense of going to court to fight any injunction would be what we’d feel obliged to do. We’ll see you in court, we implied, even if we didn’t use quite that an aggressive form of words To my relief, Atomic backed down, and agreed to present to our original jury. Keen not to create any bias in the jury against Atomic, we didn’t tell our jurors about the legal skirmishes that had been going on since they’d been sent away. The jury went back to Atomic’s office and tried again, and the presentation went smoothly. Then more oddness. In the days before the award ceremony, an extravagant gift arrived for me, from Dooris. I was a beautiful Mont Blanc pen, worth hundreds of dollars. I didn’t have to think too hard about whether I could accept it. Early in Mumbrella’s life, I created a gift policy after reading about the one adopted by The Economist. The example they used was that accepting a bottle of wine as a thank you for something might be fine, accepting a case of wine… not so much. So our policy is no gifts over the value of $100. If we get them, we send them back, or if it’s appropriate, get the sender’s permission to give them to a charity. Plus, every year, we publish the list of who sends us what. [You can see our 2017 gift register via this link](. As you’ll see, over the years, we’ve never wanted for cupcakes or USB sticks. So I sent the pen straight back to Dooris with a note expressing my regret at being unable to accept the (I felt inappropriate) gift. Nonetheless, I felt bad when he replied that he’d had the pen engraved with my name - I hadn’t taken it out of its case, so hadn’t noticed. I joked that he should hang onto it until the day Mumbrella sacks me, and we left it at that. What he didn’t know at that point was that despite him kicking them out the first time, our jury had indeed remained open-minded. They had indeed chosen Atomic as their winner. No gifts were required. By the way, in our recent investigation into the exaggerated claims made by Atomic in its round of award entries from a year later, our reporter Steve Jones also combed through this winning entry. We decided that even though it was nearly two years later, if there was anything suspect, we’d take it back to the jury. But it held up. It feels like the exaggerated claims mainly related to the agency’s later 2017 award entries. Fast forward 12 months to last May, and the judging of the 2017 Mumbrella Awards, which I’ve written about in Best of the Week previously, so I won’t go over too much old ground. By then, industry disquiet over Atomic’s misleading claims in its winning AdNews Awards entry had reached us. So we briefed the juries on the questions they should ask. It was a gruelling and unsuccessful day for Dooris as the misleading claims were laid bare, interspersed with the polite chit-chat I refer to above. Not long afterwards, I resolved that we needed to look into him further, and I commissioned Steve Jones to begin his investigation. Meanwhile, Atomic was shortlisted in the Mumbrella Asia Awards. We repeated the process in Singapore. I briefed the jury beforehand; Jason and I made polite conversation in the lobby while avoiding the elephant in the room. Shortly before the awards night in Singapore (at which they didn’t win) I had one final text exchange with Jason. By then, undoubtedly aware we were investigating him, he offered to sponsor the awards. I didn’t reply. And the last time I heard from Jason was at 3.20pm on December 7. His lawyers (a different set to last time) sent us a legal letter threatening an injunction to stop us publishing the investigation. Exactly ten minutes later, we published. I haven’t heard from him since, and I doubt I ever will again. TGO no-go Another outfit who’s been keeping Stephen von Muenster busy with lawyers’ letters is Trimantium GrowthOps. As I’ve previously written, I’m sceptical about TGO’s proposed float on the ASX. The company proposes bringing agencies AJF Partnership, Khemistry and Voodoo Creative together with various tech firms to create a $140m+ ASX-listed marketing and tech behemoth. To our surprise, late last month, the company suddenly closed its offer a few days early. It said the offering had been fully subscribed. I prepared to eat my metaphorical hat. Maybe I’d been wrong to be cynical. We got to Tuesday of this week, the day for settlement, ahead of completion on Wednesday, and commencement of trading on the ASX yesterday. Had all gone well, we wanted to know? The company declined to comment. Then on Thursday it posted a new announcement on its website. [The float was on hold](. “Certain applicants have notified the Company that they require a longer period of time to transfer their application monies from foreign bank accounts into the IPO settlement trust account. As such, the Company has not yet completed Settlement.” Which to me sounds a lot like “the cheque’s in the post”. TGO is now saying it will publish a new timetable on Monday. I’ll be watching with interest. Maybe I won’t have to eat that hat after all. Catalano’s exit Speaking of the ASX, and of lawyers, this week saw an extraordinary piece of reporting in the Fairfax press about somebody who until quite recently was one of the company’s own. [The paper made detailed allegations about the culture of its (now floated) real estate arm Domain under CEO Antony Catalano](. For those outside the organisation, it’s difficult to weigh the credibility of the specific claims. Where does a hard-driving (and eccentric) leadership style become one that’s unacceptable HR practice? I suspect we’ll find out if this one goes to court. In the meantime, the reporting of the meeting between Fairfax and Domain’s executive chairman Nick Falloon and Catalano was fascinating for what it suggests of the changed environment for tolerance of individual management styles. Regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of the claims about Catalano, the advertising world has tended to overlook some pretty crass management styles when the result has been a financially successful one. The obligations upon those who enable such environments to flourish - and the reputational risks of doing so - are now beginning to dawn on many. Yahoo7’s bullshit announcement On Tuesday, just as we were preparing to send our daily email newsletter, a press release arrived from Yahoo7. The fact that it was accompanied by a note saying “there will be no further statements at this time” was an immediate flag that we should read it carefully. Yet what it contained was virtually meaningless, a mixture of jargon and platitudes about people and technology. Yahoo7 is a joint venture between Seven West Media and Yahoo, which is owned these days by the US-based Oath. And the announcement bore all the hallmarks of a multi-stakeholder, multi-draft compromise where all meaning was gradually removed. Back in the days when they thought of themselves as forever TV companies, both Seven and Nine decided to outsource the digital thinking to the tech behemoths of the time. Nine tied up with Microsoft to create nineMSN. Seven tied up with Yahoo to create Yahoo7. They turned out to be bad long-term deals for both Australian companies, who found themselves hamstrung on what they could do in their own digital sphere. As a result, the industry’s biggest two local magazine companies - Bauer Media (which was then ACP magazines and aligned with Nine) and Pacific Magazines (owned by Seven West Media) missed out on a decade of local digital development and strategic digital expertise, from which they’ve never recovered. Nine has since unwound the nineMSN deal and is beginning to finally get its digital act together. Yahoo7, meanwhile, has been going through a number of years of declining revenues and profits which cannot have been helped by the joint ownership structure. Which brings me to this week’s Yahoo7 announcement, which was poor on a number of fronts. For starters, it’s simply a bad piece of communication. If a company has something to say, it strikes me that communicating that clearly would be the main aim of the release. On that front alone, it failed. We took the relatively unusual decision on the day that rather than even trying to translate it, [we’d publish it in full, and let our audience have their say](. I’d love to know whether the PR company involved - and there was indeed a PR company involved - advised Yahoo7’s management that it was a bad release and was overruled, or whether it wrote the thing in the first place. As I say, I suspect there was a committee involved, from both sides of the Pacific. The reason since offered by the company for the lack of clarity is that it’s in the midst of a legal process involving people’s jobs. Which may be true. But unfortunately, that’s a situation faced by lots of media companies these days. In such circumstances, they put out announcements being clear on what they can say and what they cannot say. They don’t try to hide the bad news in a release spruiking new technology platforms. It felt dismissive and disrespectful of the people whose jobs are affected. Ironically, it has now become a far bigger story than it otherwise would have, as people speculate on the scope of the cuts. That’s truly bad PR. Speaking of PR, should you have news to share, my colleague Abigail Dawson is on the newsdesk this weekend. You’ll find her at abigail@mumbrella.com.au. And I’m always keen to hear your thoughts at tim@mumbrella.com.au. Have a splendid weekend. Toodlepip, Tim Burrowes Content director - Mumbrella [Unsubscribe]( / [Manage Subscriptions](