As originally published via Mumbrella.
How is the operating environment impacting your team, clients and partners?
It is a very short term and competitive market. You’ve got to be on your A-game all the time. From our perspective, we feel the pressure that comes from agencies, and they feel the pressure that comes from clients. It’s our job to absorb that and be the trusted advisors for our agencies and clients, by continuing to provide great solutions and excellent service. So, that’s our focus – control what we can control, what we do really well, which is providing best in class solutions for our clients.
What changes are you seeing in consumer behaviour and preferences?
For consumer behaviour – I think people are tightening their belts a little bit more and they’re being more selective with how they spend their dollars. It’s been a pretty tough year for a lot of people so they may not be going out and splurging as much as they once would have, instead they’re actually being quite selective on doing the things that give them joy and pleasure.
How does that pan out from a media and marketing perspective?
Consumer behaviours across media and marketing have been changing a lot in the past few years and they continue to evolve. Media fragmentation is real. There are so many ways in which audiences can consume content. What that does is divide audiences, and linear TV has probably seen a lot of that in the past few years.
In Out of Home, we’re more sheltered from that because our assets are in the public space and our audience, the population, continues to grow, up by 2.5% in the last year. We’re in a country where people are outdoors a lot as well and we have invested heavily in improving our infrastructure. From a media perspective, the combination of these factors plays a part in why we’ve grown.
How are you meeting those expectations?
By ensuring that we are providing moments of joy. We talk about advertising quite a lot, but what we don’t talk about as much, is the content partnerships that we have in play. As well as advertising across 35,000 assets, we deliver content across all of our assets through our partnerships with a lot of the country’s leading content providers, like Nine, Newscorp, Broadsheet Media, Australian Open and other sport and events.
As an Out of Home provider we have a responsibility to deliver safety messages and our network is used quite a lot by governments to deliver safety messages. Out of Home has the power to get those messages out quickly and in times of crisis. So, I think we offer consumers a lot of things. Our vision, and our purpose, is to make brands unmissable and public spaces better… we take that really, really seriously. Sustainability is hugely important for us. We now have 93% of our street furniture powered by green energy and working quickly to 100%. We developed the eco banner, which is a 100% completely repurposed polyurethane banner which won a world Out of Home award for sustainability this year.
And we continue to look at ways of pioneering. We’re trialling electric vehicles, and a blackout period overnight across some of our billboards to reduce emissions as well. So, we take those two things seriously – making brands unmissable and public spaces better.
How are you using technology to your advantage?
In lots of different ways. From a programmatic perspective – we are heavily investing in this area for ease of transaction and how people can buy is advancing very quickly in that space for us. From a creative perspective, we did a campaign this year with BINGE which is really looking at being able to socially amplify. In this campaign we formed digital creative assets to layer on top of our traditional assets to provide a campaign that was really creative and cut through, but also got lots of people sharing on social as well. And that is a great innovation for us moving forward.
And then I think the third part of digital for us is how do we improve our ease of transaction? It’s internal, it’s less sexy. Not many people see it, but our technology team are working very, very hard on making us easier to buy from and making our processes and systems, much more tuned.
How are you using generative artificial intelligence?
I would say AI is playing a role in more of our processes at the backend. We’re looking at AI all of the time. At the moment, it’s really playing a role in being able to create a space where we are easier to buy from, quicker to buy from, where we can pull all of our inventory together and provide better responses to our clients.
When you lift your eyes from the screen to the media and marketing horizon, how are you planning?
I’m quite a macro person that always has got an eye on the future. The challenge for many and certainly in my role is managing the short and the long term. We’re currently planning for 2025 and we’ve being doing this for quite a while. We have a corporate strategy across the organisation, which is really gearing towards specific goals and the business is very aligned on what they are.
Everybody is very aware of that plan and everyone is switched onto that plan and running in the same direction.
What opportunities do you see, and how are you positioning your organisation to exploit them?
There’s loads of opportunities for Out of Home. It’s forecasted that Out of Home will continue to grow anywhere from 5 to 10% next year… and we have so many new tender wins that come into fruition in 2025, and this is all really exciting! And from my perspective, I feel like we’ve got a great team in place to be able to capitalise on that. I feel like we’re close to our clients and we’re really starting to deeply understand what their needs are and become trusted advisors for them and our agency partners. I’m feeling really optimistic about the year ahead.
