Michael Abdel — oral history, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
In 2019, Michael Abdel recorded an oral-history interview that is now held in the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. The interview was conducted by Professor Robert Crawford of RMIT University as part of the Digital Dawn in Adland series — research that informed Crawford's book of the same name, published by Routledge in 2021.
The recording preserves a first-person account of the founding of The Sphere Agency in 1998 and of the Australian advertising industry's transformation over the two decades that followed: from print production, film bureaus and Cromalin proofs, through the arrival of the internet, to tactical campaigns, social platforms and the search-driven economy that reshaped how agencies make money.
An oral-history record is a different kind of evidence from an archived advertisement. A campaign preserves an output. An oral history preserves the reasoning, the conditions and the institutional memory behind it — in this case, one independent Melbourne agency's experience of a structural change that reshaped the entire industry.
The record
| Field | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Institution | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Catalogue identifier | 8YMBVKEQ | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Record title | [ABDEL, MICHAEL : DIGITAL DAWN IN ADLAND PROFILES : INTERVIEWED BY ROBERT CRAWFORD : ORAL HISTORY] | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Series | Digital Dawn in Adland Profiles | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Interviewee | Michael Abdel, founder and principal of The Sphere Agency | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Interviewer | Robert Crawford, Professor of Advertising, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University | Confirmed — catalogue and RMIT |
| Format | Oral-history interview; audio recording with transcript | Confirmed — catalogue |
| Related publication | Digital Dawn in Adland: Transforming Australian Agencies, Robert Crawford, Routledge, 2021 | Confirmed — catalogue and Routledge |
| Interview date | 19 July 2019 | From the interview recording |
| Location | Melbourne | From the interview recording |
| Duration | Approximately 61 minutes | From the interview recording |
Interview chapters
Timestamps are taken from the transcript of the recording.
- 00:00Melbourne upbringing, and a family that migrated from Egypt in the late 1960s
- 00:47The childhood television show that first pointed him towards advertising
- 01:31Leaving school in 1992 and building a reputation in Melbourne music and nightclub promotion
- 02:56Completing a Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Arts, and deciding to leave the entertainment industry
- 06:17Founding Sphere in 1998: one designer, a leased office in Armadale, no clients
- 07:47The first KFC franchisee client, and expansion across the eastern seaboard
- 09:47The first year in business, and the challenge of being taken seriously
- 10:39Moving to Swan Street, Richmond, and the decision to become an advertising agency rather than a design and print studio
- 13:12The introduction of the GST, and a difficult year for small-business clients
- 14:11Discovering Nando's when the brand had a handful of inner-Melbourne stores
- 15:25Buying a Nando's franchise, and what running a store taught him about business
- 17:35Becoming the agency behind the brand's Australian growth
- 19:32Tactical work, topical advertising, and Australian creative being reused internationally
- 21:49How client-agency relationships changed
- 26:26Marketing manager tenure, category disruption, and why marketing alone cannot carry a brand
- 30:11Specialisation, fragmentation, and the in-housing of agency functions
- 34:17Print production before digital: Macs, zip discs, film bureaus and Cromalin proofs
- 40:15The arrival of the internet, and the moment it became clear it would stay
- 41:01An accidental viral experiment in 1999, before analytics existed to measure it
- 44:27Moving a major client's budget out of television into tactical, digital and social
- 49:05Clients who resisted digital, and what it cost them
- 51:48Social media and Google as the two largest forces to reshape Australian advertising
- 57:32Talent, tenure and the specialisation of agency roles
- 01:00:15How quickly a single platform change can move the whole industry
About the Digital Dawn in Adland series
The interview was recorded by Professor Robert Crawford, Professor of Advertising in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Crawford is a historian of the Australian advertising, marketing and public relations industries and the author of But Wait There's More: A History of Australian Advertising 1900-2000 (Melbourne University Press, 2008), Behind Glass Doors: The World of Australian Advertising Agencies 1959-89 (UWA Publishing, 2016) and Oral History and Business: Disruption and Continuity (Routledge, 2023).
Digital Dawn in Adland: Transforming Australian Agencies was published by Routledge in 2021. The study draws on contemporary reports, company archives, personal archives and more than 50 interviews with past and current advertising practitioners across the range of agency departments. Michael Abdel's interview forms part of that body of research.