Thank you Tom, it’s been a wild six months! Leaving an agency/role in the UK that I loved, moving my wife and children away from their friends and family, and then coming into a new country and starting to learn the ropes. But once we’d planted the seed of experiencing a new culture and way of life, the size of the opportunity at 303MullenLowe Perth was too good to turn down. The business has gone through a period of evolution and coming out of that, the chance to help set us up for future success was a big draw. Not to mention the creative reputation and entrepreneurial spirit, which I’ve seen since arriving.

Whether working with a large multinational or a local gem, I’ve always had a pretty simple philosophy when it comes to strategy: we exist to focus and inspire the work we’re producing for the brands we’re helping to build. Focussing on the right business problem to solve and providing guardrails for creativity to thrive are key tenets in ensuring our work is effective.

How will we do that? I’m a firm believer in diversity of thinking, so we’ll challenge ourselves to look beyond conventional sources for our inspiration. Then finally, we need to simplify strategy. As a junior I wrongly believed that evidence of industry was more important than evidence of creativity, so ensuring our thinking is as creatively potent as possible is hugely important.

Work that ‘works’ is a hugely important deliverable for any agency. Creativity is inherently risky, and we need to demonstrate to CMOs/CEOs that we can have a measurable impact on their business. Ultimately, I want our clients to think of us as creative consultants rather than purveyors of a certain discipline. And that starts by having an understanding of their business at a board level, and making sure we’re tailoring our thinking to align with those needs.

So we’ll double down on measuring the effectiveness of our work. Encouraging our clients to share data with us and ensuring we’re clear what success looks like at the beginning of any project.

And we’ll continue to look at new ways to drive (and measure) effectiveness as the world around us evolves. This might be helping clients to do more with less in terms of budget, or thinking more laterally when it comes to making our recommendations.

Having largely worked in independent agencies, part of the draw of 303 MullenLowe was the opportunity to share and learn from the brilliant minds we have across the group. I’ve already started to work closely with Jody Elston and Jo Gray out of Sydney to spot opportunities for us to pool resources and in time I’ll be tapping into the MullenLowe global network to ensure we’re bringing as much diversity and potency to our thinking as possible. We also have an incredible pool of talent across the ditch in New Zealand within Attivo agencies Harvey Cameron and Farrimond, providing us access to a wide variety of thinking and experience.

At a local level, the Senior Team here in Perth are seriously impressive. Super smart and warm in equal measure, they’ve made me feel welcome from day one and I’m really looking forward to what we can build together.

To the above point, we’ve been working on providing direction to the business around how we’ll tackle client problems in the future, what behaviours we’ll need to exhibit, and then what the impact of that will be.

I’m so very fortunate to come into an agency with such a fabulous reputation for our thinking and creativity, and it’s my job to leverage all of that heritage with a view to creating something for the future that is inspiring for our people, our future recruits, and our clients.