October, 2025.- In a world where attention is increasingly fragmented, Rhian Mason, Managing Partner at M&C Saatchi, champions a model that prioritizes earned over paid media. Her approach blends sport, entertainment, and culture to ensure brands are not just visible, but trusted and relevant. Mason emphasizes that Australians connect deeply through shared passions—whether it’s a game, a gig, or a product drop. The earned-first strategy transforms these passions into active participation, generating ideas that communities share, creators amplify, and media cover. With experience across Clemenger BBDO, DDB, Emotive, and Mediabrands, she knows that authentic cultural relevance isn’t bought—it’s earned. In this interview, Mason discusses how M&C Saatchi combines global excellence with local energy, crafting campaigns that start in culture, scale through participation, and earn a place in the public conversation.
What excites you most about reimagining M&C Saatchi’s earned and Sport & Entertainment offering at this pivotal moment?
We’re at a real tipping point. Brands have become over-reliant on paid media to buy reach in a world where attention is more fragmented than ever. You can’t out-spend fragmentation, you have to out-earn it.
What excites me about this moment is building a model that helps brands do exactly that. One where social, PR, influence, and partnerships work together to create participation, not just presence. Paid gets you seen, but earned makes you believed, and that’s what drives real cultural impact.
You’ve said that passions are where Australians connect most deeply – through sport, entertainment, and culture. How do you plan to translate those insights into culture-shaping work for brands in Australia?
Australians don’t buy ads; they buy into passions. The way we connect as people is through shared rituals: the next game, gig, or drop. Our job is to help brands move beyond presence, to show up not as sponsors, but as contributors to the culture people care about.
That means building ideas that travel through communities – ideas fans want to remix, creators want to share, and media want to talk about. That’s how you shape culture instead of chasing it.
M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment already partners with global giants like Adidas, Heineken, Coca-Cola, and LEGO. What opportunities do you see for expanding this earned-first, socially driven model in the Australian market?
The global success of Sport & Entertainment gives us an incredible foundation to build from. Around the world, S&E has proven how powerful an earned-first, passion-led model can be. The opportunity in Australia is to take that world-class craft and apply it through our own cultural lens: bold, irreverent, and proudly local.
We’ll take the strategic discipline and creative excellence of the global network and fuse it with Australia’s unique energy, designing ideas that start in culture, scale through participation, and earn their way into news feeds, headlines, and hearts.
Your background includes leadership roles at Clemenger BBDO, DDB, Emotive, and Mediabrands. How have those experiences shaped your perspective on what ‘earned-first’ really means for brands today?
Working across creative, media, social, PR, and content taught me one simple truth: the best ideas don’t fit neatly into one box. Earned-first thinking starts with cultural understanding, not the channel. It’s about designing ideas people want to engage with ideas that earn attention because they contribute something meaningful to the conversation.
I’ve seen how media can amplify, how creative can inspire, but earned is what makes it credible. In a world of algorithms and AI-driven reach, human relevance has become the real differentiator.
