For Matt White and Michael Wilkins, the idea for Playbook Advice didn’t come from a whiteboard session or corporate retreat. It started with two colleagues reflecting on their careers – the highs, the battle scars, and the shifting industry beneath their feet – and realising they could offer something different.
Everyone in media and sport talks about getting a deal over the line, but rarely about the things that stop a deal. As Wilkins told Mediaweek: “We’ve seen where negotiations have been stopped and the reasons they’ve been unsuccessful.” That experience of knowing not just how to close but how to navigate the sticking points has become central to the consultancy they’ve now built together.
Both men know what it means to sit on either side of the table.
White has spent decades in front of the camera and behind the scenes, from anchoring sport and current affairs to leading major broadcast negotiations, while Wilkins rose through the ranks of News Corp to the boardroom, managing commercial and editorial teams and working with every major sporting code.
That mix of newsroom instincts and boardroom experience now sits at the heart of Playbook Advice – their new consultancy aimed at helping businesses navigate strategy, communications and growth in a rapidly changing landscape.
From newsroom to boardroom
The pair say what differentiates Playbook Advice from other consultancies is their shared background, straddling both journalism and executive leadership.
“While there are a lot of consultancies around, we saw a gap in the market,” Wilkins said. “Matt and I have this unique proposition where we are both journalists, so we know what goes on inside newsrooms, and inside news conferences. We also then turned into media executives, so we also know what goes in the boardroom of media companies.”
That dual perspective, White added, gives them a clear point of difference.
“It’s that newsroom to the boardroom experience,” he said. “There are very few consultancy cmompanies, I think, who have the kind of experiences that we’ve had along the way. The good and the bad, you know, the highs and the lows and the ugly. We both had a few battle scars.”
Matt White
Leadership lessons
Leadership and mentoring are also central to the Playbook Advice offering. Both founders say it’s an area where real-world scars matter as much as strategy slides.
White explained: “We do a thing called Halftime Storytime in our podcast, where Wilko and I share stories from our career. The first episode is themed around leadership. And I recount a story on Dancing With The Stars, of all things. Leadership for me came in the most unlikeliest of places back in 2009.”
For Wilkins, leadership comes down to two responsibilities. “One was to make sure that the business performed as it should. And the other was to make sure that the people who I led had every opportunity to advance and be the best they could be,” he said. “I think a lot of leaders now are just very poor communicators. And I think the communication issue from leadership is still an endemic problem.”
White added that part of their approach is about improving what already works. “What I’m seeing a lot of the time is we have good leaders, but all good leaders want to be better leaders. Part of our mantra is let’s make good leaders even better leaders.”
That view has been shaped by personal experience.
White recalled the pride of being appointed Ten’s Head of Sport while still on air – a role that included helping broker the Melbourne Cup deal. “Out of everything that I’ve done in my career and all the highs and everything along the way, that was one of the proudest moments, because I achieved something that I’d been quietly working towards and also had a very strong desire not to just be successful with that role, but to also help people and lead people.”
But the role was cut short. “A couple of years later, with COVID and the state of Channel 10, I had that job taken off me. I lost my job in a phone call and I was still on air at the time. And it broke my heart.”
The setback forced him to rethink leadership. “It took me a while to recover from that, but over the last five years I’ve worked in all different ways to understand it better – from streaming and radio to mentoring students and coaching sport. What I worked out was I needed to understand what kind of leader I needed to be and what tools I needed to do that.”
“That’s brought us to this point,” he added. “What we’re doing now is a leadership position. We’re leading people to better outcomes. I’m very, very comfortable in where I’m at with that step.”
A focus on complex problems
Playbook Advice will work with clients on areas including media rights and partnerships, new revenue streams, audience growth, digital and AI strategies, communications, and executive mentoring.
The pair believe their practical experience in high-pressure negotiations allows them to simplify problems that often feel like a minefield for others.
“We’ve already got a couple of clients early on, before we’ve even launched,” Wilkins said. “It’s amazing just the nuance that we were able to deliver them, thinking through how to approach a situation differently that they were confronting. To us, the solution was pretty simple. That just comes from those years of experience.”
White added: “Quite often a lot of people think it’s the cork in the bottle that’s stopping them from going further, whereas it’s quite often what’s already in the bottle and how you actually clarify that. This is second nature to us with first-hand experience.”
Navigating a shifting sports landscape
Both men are drawing on careers spent at the intersection of sport and media.
Wilkins has worked with every major sporting code in Australia, while White oversaw key deals as Head of Sport at Ten – including rights negotiations in a market now reshaped by the $240 million World Rugby agreement with Nine.
For them, the lesson is clear: organisations can’t afford to stand still.
“One of the things Matt and I discussed when we were setting this up was we want to prepare people to be uncomfortable because we have really seen this acceleration in change,” Wilkins said.
“There are some instances where we will be saying to clients who are looking for a traditional solution, that just isn’t going to work for you. Because if you’re really looking for new audiences, you’re not going to be looking through traditional channels.”
White added: “I think the key word for us in this one is agility. A lot of the times, and we’re already doing this, we’re saying to sports and outlets and businesses, be prepared to be agile. That’s nothing new, but at the moment, the agility is going to be the key because everything is moving so fast and the understanding is so hard to grapple with.”
Michael Wilkinson (centre) stands with former Prime Minister Scott Morrison and The Daily Telegraph’s current Editor-in-Chief Ben English
Keeping the fan in focus
White’s daily SEN talkback show gives him an ear to what consumers are saying – and, he argues, their perspective is often missing from executive discussions.
“This has got to be one of the biggest, hottest topics for the punters: How can I watch my sport, where can I watch my sport, why am I paying money to watch certain things?” he said.
“Your fan, your member, your stakeholder is the key to all of this. Both media and sports have to remember the viewer, the listener and the fan, because they’re a third key component.”
Wilkins agreed: “It’s got to be – I mean in sport – it’s got to be fan first. If you’re not doing fan first, then you’re going to lose. And as sport rights become more expensive, no one can afford them all. So they have to go on different spaces. The challenge for codes is making sure they remember the fan in that process.”
The future
Playbook Advice was born out of a simple chat between two old colleagues who had both seen the industry from every angle, and what began as an offhand conversation has since become a structured business with early clients already on board.
For White and Wilkins, the appeal lies not just in leveraging their experience, but in putting it to work for others. Playbook Advice is, in their words, about helping organisations cut through the noise, adapt to change, and find clarity in a crowded media and sporting landscape.
Main image: (L-R) Michael Wilkins and Matt White