Bonfire

This morning, our kitchen turned into a bakehouse.

The Bonfire team came together once again for Australia's Biggest Morning Tea to support Cancer Council WA. More than 10 dishes made it to the table, from sausage rolls and caramel slices to madalenas and chicken pot pie.

Hayley White, Account Director, took the crown with her chicken pot pie, with Bronagh Spence, Content Manager, a very close second for her sausage rolls.

We have supported Australia's Biggest Morning Tea since 2013. This year, we raised over $1,000 in donations and shared personal stories with each other that reminded us why this cause keeps showing up in our calendar.

Thank you to everyone who baked, donated and showed up.

We hosted two masterclasses this week with our Senior Performance Media Specialist, Brodie McMaster, who flew over from our Bonfire Melbourne office to present The 7 Deadly Sins of Scaling: What Holds Advertising Back.

Brodie unpacked the patterns and biases that limit the effectiveness of paid media campaigns and shared practical ways to identify, challenge and improve them.

The seven sins, as explored by Brodie:

- Worshipping the Winner. Blind investment in the highest-performing channel.
- The Myth of Linear Scale. Scaling paid media looks more like a goldmine than a freeway.
- Chasing Cheap. Cheap leads can become expensive customers.
- Random Acts of Testing. Test with intent, not impulse.
- The ROAS Trap. Strong performance requires more context than a single metric.
- Blaming the Traffic. Campaigns rarely fail because of one channel alone.
- You’re Not the Target Audience. Incorrect assumptions can derail your strategy.

Thank you to everyone who attended this week and learnt about how to build stronger and more sustainable paid media strategies.

If you'd like support with Paid Media, reach out to Alex Gavalas, Evan Dela-Grammaticas or Nicholas Willitts.

Most bad advertising advice doesn’t sound bad.

It sounds practical. Efficient. Like something intelligent that would be suggested in a meeting

“Put more budget into what’s working.”

“If it’s cheaper, it’s more efficient.”

“The platform will figure it out.”

These ideas can sound perfectly reasonable in the moment. Then they quietly waste budget, distort results and make growth harder than it needs to be.

At our upcoming Bonfire masterclass, Senior Performance Media Specialist Brodie McMaster is flying over from our Bonfire Melbourne office to unpack The 7 Deadly Sins of Scaling: the paid media habits, assumptions and rules that can send businesses down the wrong path.

Expect a sharp, commercially grounded session on what gets in the way of better advertising performance, how to spot the difference between surface-level efficiency and real business value, and what smarter scaling decisions look like in practice.

If you’re a marketer, business owner or decision-maker looking to get more from your advertising, register your interest for Thursday, May 7th. Limited spots available.

Register here: https://on.bonfire.com.au/event-the-7-deadly-sins-of-scaling-bonfire