Awesome, you’ve found my creative portfolio. A little context, then: I’m an award-winning Creative Director and CMO. For eight years, I was Director of Marketing & Communications at Mona (I call them Mona's glory years), heading up both the Marketing and Creative departments. I wrote the marketing strategy, briefed the work, made the work, and signed it off myself. So, a bit different from the way I worked in my previous 15 years as a creative director on the agency side.
At Mona, I helped turn the in-house agency into one of Australia’s most awarded and effective. We won more than 200 awards, grew e-commerce to $30m, increased visitation by 25%, grew the database to 350,000 and lifted brand awareness from 27% to 44%. We also helped make Mona one of the most admired, creative and talked-about brands in culture.
My philosophy has always been 'Death to boring'. And that starts way before the advertising—with a brand's positioning. That critical, un-boring positioning is the thing that then gets executed across the 4Ps. I brought that approach to Mona, and earlier to DDB, BBDO and Saatchis. Nonetheless, managing 30 brands for Mona’s owner, David Walsh (a maths genius and risk psychopath), was a challenge. The trick was applying just enough marketing science to back my ideas.
Some examples? We launched a festival airline, Air Mofo, and gave every seat to one person: a kleptomaniac Pentecostal priest. We made handbags from cane toads to raise awareness of invasive species. We created Walshy’s Wine Cult, where 'after-life members' could volunteer to be buried under the vines to flavour the next pinot vintage. We turned the museum's worst Tripadvisor reviews into Mona's first brand campaign. We decided to own the day before Black Friday, called it 'Brown Thursday', and tied discounts to how long people watched a live feed of one of Mona's artworks (Cloaca) taking a shit. We even changed the theme of Mona’s fanciest restaurant, Faro, every week for two months. On Bogan Pub Week, unsuspecting punters sat down to Liquid Chicken Parmas, a drinks menu that was entirely rum & Coke, and a string quartet that only played Cold Chisel. Good creative times. Challenger-brand times!
Anyway, if you want to chat about making some creative or marketing mischief, hit me up at robbie@brandango.com.au .
Or slither into my LinkedIn DMs.