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Home / Rear Window REAR WINDOW

Feb 3 2016 at 7:00 PM

Updated Feb 3 2016 at 9:44 PM

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Alex Malley's big life on CPA money

The Naked CEO Alex Malley, wearing clothes, thankfully. Louise Kennerley

You can't walk past a bus station or drive through a major intersection these days without being bombarded by the image of Alex Malley, the head of the suburban accountants' union CPA Australia – although you might know him better as "the by Joe Aston

suspended schoolboy who became a disruptive CEO".

Major Australian airports are awash with billboards advertising his returning talk show on Channel Nine – seven episodes, two of which are interviews with Channel Nine staff! It's the non-satirical version of Stephen Colbert's Interviews I Could Get. This coming Sunday, Malley will talk to Laurie Oakes about "living a big life" – don't tune in expecting a lesson in portion control. Seriously, what can CPA members learn about their profession from Big Livin' Laurie? How Sizzler signed its own death warrant when it introduced the salad bar? Malley's ad campaign – for his campaign, not Nine's, it most assuredly is – sports the tagline "Alex is back". Which is oddly comforting. I wondered why my life had felt so empty and pointless since the last time I watched repeats of The Bottom Line. According to CPA's last annual report, it reported revenues (ie: membership subscription) of $157 million and spent $30.5 million of it on "marketing, promotion

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and publications" – a fair bit of which seems to have been spent on marketing Malley himself.

The Eduardo stuff stops here

An illustrative comparison: Australia's leading supermarket chain, Coles, brought in

NAB set up 'blue wash' before Chaney departed

revenues of $38.2 billion (that's billion, not million) and spent $53.6 million of it on marketing.

CPA boss hypocrite on 'shareholders first'

Coles, whose business is actually selling stuff to people, spent one-seventh of 1 per cent on marketing, while an obscure professional standards body with no consumer sales pitch spent 20 per cent of its revenue on marketing … its Naked CEO. For example, what do family accounting practices in Broadmeadows or Ipswich gain from