August 20, 2025

'Proudly indie' - Why Caroline Catterall sold Keep Left to Hardie Grant Media

32 minutes

Welcome to an audio-led edition of Unmade.

Today, we talk to both buyer and seller in Hardie Grant’s deal to buy PR agency Keep Left, and find out what boss Nick Hardie-Grant thinks of the AI tech lobby’s push to weaken Australian copyright law.

We’ve announced the schedule for this year’s Compass series. Our panel-in-the-pub, end-of-year tour kicks off in Sydney on November 3 and concludes in Hobart a fortnight later. Reflecting on 2025 and projecting into 2026, please hold the date for your city:

* November 3 – Compass Sydney

* November 5 – Compass Brisbane

* November 10 – Compass Adelaide

* November 11 – Compass Perth

* November 17 – Compass Melbourne

* November 18 – Compass Hobart

Unmade’s paying members get a free ticket to Compass. Your annual membership also gets you tickets to September’s REmade conference on retail media; and to October’s Unlock conference on marketing in the nighttime economy.

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‘Complete b******t and a blatant attack on the industry’ - Publisher Nick Hardie-Grant on the AI industry’s push to loosen local copyright protection

The M&A pipeline in the independent sector has been flowing fast in recent weeks.

Last month Private Media revealed its purchase of Pinstripe Media in what was a major piece of consolidation in the publishing sector for small and medium sized businesses. Then Solstice Media bought Australian Traveller Media, adding to other purchases including The New Daily and The 7am Podcast.

This week came news that Hardie Grant Media has added PR agency Keep Left, which has 25 staff, to its portfolio. Hardie Grant’s roster of agencies already includes digital media agency Reload, content agency Heads and Tales, production house Sherpa, and PR and influencer agency Tide Communications. It’s rapidly becoming a local holdco, and is still on the acquisition trail.

The wider Hardie Grant group is best known as a book publisher although more than half of the 220 staff work for the communications agency arm.

Today’s podcast interview features Hardie Grant Group CEO Nick Hardie-Grant and Keep Left founder Caroline Catterall. Nick Hardie-Grant’s mother Fiona Hardie started the communications arm while his father Sandy Grant started the publishing business. Catterall launched Keep Left 24 years ago. The deal was chased by Hardie-Grant after he got to know Keep Left through common clients.

According to Catterall: “We got a feel for that cultural alignment, which from both sides of the fence was really, really important. And one of the other things that was really important to us is that Hardie Grant Media is an independent agency. We've been proudly indie for a long time.”

During the interview with Unmade’s Tim Burrowes, Nick Hardie-Grant also discusses the book publishing side of the business, and the call from the Productivity Commission to consider changing local laws to make it easier for AI companies to mine content to train their large language models. Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, chair of the Australian Tech Council, has been arguing that Australia should make it permissible for AI companies to use published content without paying for it.

According to Hardie-Grant:

“It's a pretty obvious answer for someone in the publishing industry that it's complete b******t and that it's a blatant attack on the industry.

“It's extremely one-sided transparent, laughable approach has no real upside for the industry apart from the potential short-term benefits for the tech companies to gain a whole lot of copyrighted, a whole lot of information for free.”