Nine creative agencies in seventeen years. Clemenger. Host. Ogilvy. Cummins & Partners. JWT. MullenLowe. VMLY&R. Saatchi & Saatchi. Now Howatson+Company. The advertising industry called Vodafone “Australia’s most toxic client.” The pattern never changed. The faces around the table did. $40 million in go-to-market spend. Zero net postpaid growth. At some point you stop blaming the agencies and admit the brand is cooked.
In July 2025, Vodafone Australia appointed Howatson+Company as its creative agency of record.
The announcement was handled with the customary enthusiasm. “Bold thinking.” “Cultural alignment.” “Creative firepower.” The CMO said Vodafone “thrives on challenging conventions.” The agency CEO called it “a privilege.”
Howatson+Company is the ninth creative agency to hold the Vodafone account in seventeen years.
Let that number breathe for a moment.
Nine.
The Roll Call
Since 2008, the Vodafone creative account has passed through:
- Clemenger BBDO
- Host
- Ogilvy
- Cummins & Partners
- JWT
- 303 MullenLowe (interim)
- VMLY&R
- Saatchi & Saatchi
- Howatson+Company
That’s a new creative agency roughly every two years. Some lasted less. Cummins & Partners lasted two years. VMLY&R lasted eighteen months. The relationship was described publicly as “a natural conclusion” – the corporate equivalent of “it’s not you, it’s me” after a fight in the car park.
At various points, bespoke agencies were created specifically for the account. One Barrack Street was built from scratch by STW (now WPP) to service Vodafone. Cummins & Partners opened a Sydney office on the back of the win. Both are gone. The bespoke model didn’t survive the client.
In 2017, Mumbrella published a piece asking what agency would want to work with Vodafone. The industry publication described the telco as “well on its way to becoming Australia’s most disliked client.” Agencies were reportedly unwilling to put their names forward. The article described a “pattern of agency turnover that is unparalleled.”
ChannelNews went further. The headline: “Vodafone Described As Australia’s ‘Most Toxic’ Client.” One former agency executive was quoted saying they couldn’t recommend a PR agency to Vodafone because “I honestly couldn’t think of anyone they hadn’t burned already.” Another described the marketing culture as “corrosive.”
An anonymous agency observer told Mumbrella in 2017: “With the culture internally there is a lack of knowledge about ‘Where does this Vodafone brand stand in Australia?’ It’s really sad, any challenger brand should do well in this market. There is a corrosive culture that starts from wanting to protect a business rather than grow a brand.”
Eight years and four agencies later, the same question remains unanswered.
The Pattern
Every agency arrives with a new strategy. Every strategy comes with a new tagline. Every tagline is launched with a campaign. Every campaign runs for eighteen months before the agency is replaced and the cycle starts again.
The brand never builds on anything because nothing lasts long enough to compound.
Telstra’s relationship with +61 under CMO Brent Smart has produced eighteen months of consistent, award-winning campaigns – including a Grand Prix at Cannes. That’s what continuity looks like. A brand that knows what it is, working with an agency that knows how to express it, over a period long enough for the audience to internalise the message.
Vodafone hasn’t had that kind of continuity since before the original Vodafail network crisis in 2010-2011. That crisis cost them approximately 1.5 million subscribers and destroyed whatever brand equity had been built. Everything since then has been reconstruction – but you can’t reconstruct a brand if you change architects every two years.
The Campaigns Nobody Remembers
Each agency produced work. Some of it was good. Some of it was forgettable. Almost none of it lasted long enough to enter the public consciousness.
“You Rule” – VMLY&R’s contribution – launched in 2020 during lockdown. Kings, queens, majesties of connectivity. Bold characters. The internet responded with characteristic generosity. One commenter predicted with surgical precision: “Client: we are customer focused. Agency: customers rule. Customer: Vodafone is still crap. 1 year passes, nothing happens to sales. Vodafone CEO: CMO, you’re fired. Vodafone Board: CEO, you’re fired. Campaign Brief: Vodafone out to pitch.” That comment aged like a fine wine.
“Double the Network” – the MOCN campaign – featured drone footage over Dalton, NSW. A trust-building campaign promoting network coverage in a location with weak or no indoor coverage according to Vodafone’s own maps.
When the marketing contradicts the coverage checker, you’re not building trust. You’re spending money to undermine it.
For $40 million in go-to-market spend on the MOCN launch, TPG got zero net postpaid adds on the Vodafone brand in FY25. Zero. Telstra grew postpaid. Optus grew postpaid. Vodafone – with doubled coverage, a new agency, and $40 million in marketing – didn’t add a single net postpaid customer.
At some point the board stops asking “is it the agency?” and starts asking “is it us?”
The TikTok Test
I ran an informal experiment. Posted a video listing the nine agencies and asked a simple question: “Can anyone actually name a Vodafone ad?”
The responses were more damning than any brand audit.
One person named “Yes.” That’s Optus. Another said “the one with Kramer in it 30 years ago.” Someone offered “do more with what you love” and “first term heart warming” – names so generic the person citing them couldn’t be sure they were right.
Nine agencies. Seventeen years. Hundreds of millions in cumulative marketing spend across creative, media, production, and sponsorship. And when you ask the Australian public what Vodafone advertising they remember, they accidentally name Optus.
Telstra’s “+61” work under Brent Smart won a Grand Prix at Cannes. Optus Zoo lives rent-free in the public memory two decades after it aired. Vodafone’s entire post-2008 creative output – across nine agency relationships – produced nothing that outlasted the media buy that ran it. Not one campaign. Not one tagline. Not one piece of work that entered the cultural conversation and stayed there.
That’s not nine agency failures. That’s one client failing nine times. When the audience remembers your competitor’s advertising instead of yours, the problem was never the creative.
The $25-35 Million Question
TPG pays Vodafone Group an estimated $25-35 million annually to license the Vodafone brand name. That’s the annual fee just for the right to call the product Vodafone.
On top of the licence fee, TPG funds the creative agency relationship, the media buying, the campaign production, the sponsorships, and the retail presence. The total annual brand and marketing investment is substantial – against a premium mobile product that generated zero net growth.
Two Vodafone Group nominees sit on TPG’s board. They represent a brand licensor with a direct financial interest in licence revenue continuity. Their employer gets paid $25-35 million a year regardless of whether Vodafone grows, shrinks, or flatlines. That interest may not be aligned with TPG shareholders’ interest in minimising costs or resetting brand positioning.
The question several analysts and commentators have raised is whether the brand is worth what it costs. A unified “TPG Mobile” identity would eliminate the licensing fee, remove the conflict, and provide a clean reset. Whether the board is structurally capable of asking that question – with the current composition – is a different matter entirely.
The Challenger That Can’t Challenge
Vodafone’s brand positioning has always been “the challenger.” The disruptor. The customer-first alternative to the Telstra-Optus duopoly.
But challengers need a product truth to build on. Telstra’s brand truth is coverage and reliability – boring but defensible. Optus has repositioned around sport and entertainment. Both have something real underneath the advertising.
Vodafone’s brand truth is… complicated. Complaints are up 24% year-on-year while both competitors are trending down. TIO Systemics is engaged. Two customers died from Triple Zero failures (as disclosed by TPG to the ASX). ACMA is investigating. Postpaid didn’t grow. The coverage campaign promoted areas where coverage doesn’t work.
No agency can fix that. Not Clemenger. Not Ogilvy. Not JWT. Not Saatchi. Not Howatson. Because the brand problem isn’t the creative execution. It’s the product experience, the complaint resolution, the governance, and the institutional culture that burns through agencies the way it burns through customer goodwill.
The most revealing line in the ChannelNews piece from 2017 was from an anonymous agency source: “There is a corrosive culture that starts from wanting to protect a business rather than grow a brand.”
Nine agencies later, the culture hasn’t changed. The faces around the table have. The dynamics haven’t.
What Howatson Inherited
Howatson+Company is a genuinely good agency. They’ve won Myer, the AFR, Endeavour. Chris Howatson is respected in the industry. The team is talented.
None of that matters if the client isn’t fixable at the agency level.
Howatson inherited a brand with the highest complaint trajectory among the big three. A premium product that isn’t growing. A coverage campaign that contradicts the coverage maps. A $25-35 million annual brand licensing fee that shareholders are beginning to question. And a seventeen-year pattern of agency relationships that last less time than a standard mobile contract.
The CMO, Bec Darley, joined from Domain in October 2024. She’s the latest marketing leader in a seat that has been occupied by many others before her. Adam Slattery exited after the merger. John Casey preceded him. Each brought strategy. Each brought agencies. Each left.
If Howatson breaks the pattern, it will be despite the client, not because of it. That would be genuinely impressive. But the institutional history suggests that in eighteen to twenty-four months, the “bold thinking” and “creative firepower” will give way to another “comprehensive tender process managed by Trinity P3 and TPG Telecom procurement.”
Set the clock.
The Telstra Comparison
Telstra under Brent Smart has demonstrated what happens when a telco gives an agency time to work. The +61 model – bespoke, embedded, long-term – has produced consistent creative that’s winning globally. The brand is building compounding equity because the strategy doesn’t reset every two years.
Optus, meanwhile, has assembled Droga5, Accenture Song, and BRX – a serious creative bench. The investment signals strategic commitment to brand building over the medium term.
Vodafone is on agency number nine. The question isn’t whether Howatson can produce good work – they can. The question is whether they’ll be allowed to produce it for long enough to matter.
The Bottom Line
Nine agencies in seventeen years. The brand described as “Australia’s most toxic client” by the industry that services it. A “corrosive culture” that prioritises business protection over brand growth. Zero postpaid growth on $40 million in go-to-market spend. And a $25-35 million annual licence fee for the privilege of carrying a brand name that the market increasingly associates with complaints, coverage gaps, and customer deaths.
At some point you stop blaming the marketing agencies and admit the brand is cooked.
The ninth agency isn’t the answer. Asking why you needed nine is.
⚖️ Disclaimer:
This article is commentary on Vodafone Australia’s brand and marketing strategy based on publicly available information including industry media reporting, agency appointment announcements, and TPG Telecom’s published financial results. It does not allege wrongdoing by any individual agency or marketing professional.
The author has an active dispute with TPG Telecom and has made protected disclosures under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). The author holds a very immaterial shareholding in TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG). These matters should be considered when evaluating the commentary presented.
📩 Right of Reply:
TPG Telecom, Vodafone Australia, Howatson+Company, and any current or former agencies referenced in this article are welcome to respond, clarify, or correct any matters raised. Any response received will be published in full and without editorial amendment.
Previous posts in this series:
Post #65 – When The Music Stops
Post #66 – The $2B Problem TPG Can’t Afford
Post #67 – The Bonus Year: Thin Earnings, Thick Optics
Post #68 – Buying the Narrative
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