Wil Anderson: “The audience are my power”

Gruen may only have a studio audience of 30 – 40 people when it returns to ABC this week, but Wil Anderson is happy they are there to restore his ‘power’ as host.

“Gruen, when it’s at its worst, can be like a Mumbrella conference… just advertising people talking about advertising and marketing. It can be a bit boring,” he tells TV Tonight.

“So the audience keeps the panelists honest. When they become too advertise-y, jargon-y, or advertiser w**kery, the audience are what I use to be able to pull them up on things. To hold them to account.

“So the audience are my power. My role on that show is to be essentially the voice of the audience. Not just the audience in the studio, but the voice of the audience watching the show at home.”

Last year during COVID lockdowns the show had to stick to a ‘Gruen bubble’ of production team members in the audience, some laughing at jokes they already knew were coming or vision they had already seen. While he is grateful for a small crowd of public this year, he’s also unsure if recordings will ever return to a full house.

“We used to record the show in front of 200 people.”

“We used to record the show in front of 200 people. We haven’t done that for at least two years. I’m not sure that we will ever go back to that, to be fair. I just can’t see that that will ever be a reality.”

But he is looking forward to Russel Howcroft returning to the panel, having appeared remotely for most of 2021 and unavailable for Gruen Nation due to COVID.

“Hopefully with that extra time away, he’ll be fully recovered and raring to go”

“Hopefully with that extra time away, he’ll be fully recovered and raring to go. But I think that we we live in a world where the reality that losing team members to COVID is probably more of a reality now than it has ever been. Even in the times where we’re in full lockdown, in some ways, we were more safe from losing someone to COVID then than we are now. It’s very much out in the wild and people aren’t taking the same precautions,” he suggests.

“I’m hoping there won’t be a time where we’re as many team members down as we work for the first episode of Gruen Nation. We really had significantly half of our major team not available for that first episode. So my hope would be that for the regular season, the worst is behind us. I think it’s just sensible these days that you have to have contingencies in place.”

He declines to nominate his own understudy.

“There’s no person that we’ve said, ‘Come in and shadow me,” he explains.

“The truth is in those situations if you’re relying on one person, you’re just open to the exact same thing. One person’s not enough as a back-up, because clearly that other person can also get COVID.”

Now 14 seasons long, Gruen remains one of ABC’s most popular shows, regularly dissecting, demystifying and sometimes even celebrating the power of advertising. Along with regulars Todd Sampson, Dee Madigan and a parade of seasoned industry execs, the show educates, informs and amuses.

But has it changed the way Australians view advertising? Anderson isn’t so presumptive.

“No. I think it would be ridiculous to suggest that ….that’s like the boy at the beach pissing into the ocean thinking that he’s making a difference,” he explains.

“We’re 10 episodes x 35 minutes up against a multi billion dollar advertising industry. One ad campaign for one product would have a bigger budget than we have for making 10 episodes of our show every year.

“Small moments of stickiness”

“But I think that there’s moments -small moments of stickiness. I tell our team our show is at it’s best when the next time that you see an ad or a technique being used, you go, ‘I know why they’re doing that.’

“Now does that actually stop you from being susceptible, being influenced by that ad? Absolutely not,” he observes.

“In fact, I will tell you that it’s often the complete opposite. The amount of times, for example, we’ve done a segment about the evils of Coca Cola marketing, and then immediately afterwards, all you want is a Coca Cola! Because regardless of the fact that we’ve been talking about these ads and dissecting them, we’ve also been watching all this marketing for them!”

“The major hesitation around advertising people…”

With its bumper ratings and a considered, informed approach to the tricks of advertising and marketing, Gruen has managed to do the seemingly impossible: gain the respect of a very cynical ad industry.

But it wasn’t always that way.

“I feel like if you went back 14 years ago, the major hesitation around advertising people during the show was that if you gave away the secrets, then the secrets wouldn’t work,” Anderson recalls.

“They discovered very early on that explaining how the magic works did not stop the magic from working. That’s why for 14 years, we’ve been able to get the top people in the industry on to tell us what they’re doing.”

Gruen returns 8pm Wednesday on ABC.