simonislawson

[simonislawson]

My profile photo for the 2018 Whitelion Bail Out. 

Our gang of 7 Melbourne media identities including me, Alex Peckish, Tiffany Damm, Wade James, Daniel Bradley, Rob Moore and Andrew Knowles raised $16,700 for this great cause. 

[simonislawson]

Nick Swifte introducing me as part of the debate at the 2018 Melbourne Media Hall of Fame event at Crown Palladium.

[simonislawson]

Melbourne Media Hall Of Fame Debate Speech: Out with the old and in with the new...

Thanks, Swifty: You “used” to be a good friend!

This afternoon, I’m arguing “in with the new and out with the old” is a good thing.

After all, every healthy system in life has an effective process of renewal, and the media industry is no different. From time to time, “we need to cut out the deadwood” … “and it’s great to see so many of you here today”!

Ok, enough with the small talk. Let’s get started…

“The top 5 reasons why new is better than old”:

Dress code

Can you believe that when I was employed as a junior at Mitchells early this century, I “actually” had to wear a suit to work, with a tie? “The horror”!

Today we live in more “evolved” times, and a day when half the guys in the office are “actually” wearing socks is a good day!

Check this out? (Display sockless ankles to the crowd)

See what I mean, things are better now!        

What else?

Billboards

At the risk of offending last year’s inductee, who I’m told is still keen to finish off the second part of his speech, if anyone has a spare three hours? … I believe he was up to 1987? … “Anyone?”

But billboards used to be “shit”…

Cast your minds back to the prehistoric era when dinosaurs like Shagga here used to buy billboards for a whole month and display the same static ad to everyone:

“100% share of voice”: How “boring”!

We are so lucky to have “digital billboards” now!

For those who don’t know, digital billboards are basically static billboards that move every now and then. Instead of having it all to yourself, you get to share the sign with 9 of your best mates, but who *fucking* knows how many? “If your ad runs at all”.

This is from those same trustworthy people who brought us the “lunar calendar”!

(Sorry Dan!)   

See what I mean, things are better now!

What else?

Awards

Back in the olden days, award shows were few and far between, and there were hardly any winners. I know this sounds hard to believe, but in some years, there was only one agency of the year! How “elitist”!

These days, there are so many new award shows and new awards categories; “it’s literally harder to not win an award than it is to win one”!

With the new guard in charge, “we’re all winners”!

Or at least we were…

Atomic 212: “What have you done?”: “Really guys?”…

See what I mean, things are better now!

What else?

Brand safety

Brand safety used to be pretty basic…

1.    Keep Jetstar away from Air Crash Investigations

2.    Keep Swifty away from journalists; and,

3.    Keep Cameron Hoy away from Anna Nicole Smith

How hard could it be?

These days, agencies are pleased to charge their clients for “bulletproof” brand safety measures and they all work flawlessly.

Right up until they don’t…which hardly ever happens!

See what I mean, things are better now!

What else?

Job Titles

I’ve gotta be honest, job titles in this industry used to be “pathetic”.

·         Media planner/buyers: How “condescending”.

Thankfully, this “travesty” doesn’t happen anymore, and we’ve had some great entries in the job title “inflation” game over the past year…

But, the winner of this year’s most inflated job title has to be Adrian Roeling of Amplifi. He wasn’t interested in just being a Vice President, he went straight for President!

El Presidente: The Donald Trump of Melbourne media.

What does a president actually do, Adrian?  

Coady, we need to talk!  

See what I mean, things are better now.

But that’s only the top 5 reasons why the new is better than the old.

There are plenty more:

1.    Accenture marking our work, and now their own: Nice work if you can get it!

2.    Millennials calling in sick with a text message, LOL! 

3.    “The LinkedIn Agency Influencer program” (Who are they kidding?)

4.    The Gentleman’s Gin Club” (Actually, I don’t think that’s a thing anymore!)

Um, I actually think I might be on the wrong side…  

Can I be old? “Actually, I am”!

Does anyone have some spare socks I can borrow? My ankles are cold…

Thanks for your time.

[simonislawson]

Change the way we pitch and we reduce staff turnover

The Media Federation of Australia (MFA) released data in June last year indicating staff turnover in media agencies was approaching 35%.  Peter Horgan, chairman of the MFA, blamed the rise on the huge increase in pitches.    

At the same time, it’s clear to me that it’s a high client priority, if the not the highest client priority, that in these pitches clients are presented with the full team that will actually work on their business.

These dynamics are related.  

How can the industry introduce a more sustainable approach to new business that leads to happier media agency client teams, doing better work for clients, leading to improved relationships and better commercial outcomes for all?  

Let’s start with the pitch process.

Clients almost always want to meet the people who will actually work on the business as part of the process. For most clients, this means they’re looking to meet the person who may lead their account, and better yet, the whole team who may soon become dedicated to their account.  

This is almost always a difficult request to address.

The reality is that very few media agencies have the luxury of carrying any excess capacity on their books in today’s business environment.  The reality is that client organisations are in the same boat: Nobody has spare people just waiting around anymore, if they ever did.    

Most, if not all, media agencies run lean and the only people who can be put forward in pitches are generally people who are presently occupied in other roles, working with the media agency’s existing clients.  

At the same time, more and more clients are looking for dedicated people who are prepared to work out of their offices for at least a portion of the week.

Faced with having to provide a team sheet of existing team members who will work on the account to have a good chance of winning a pitch, media agencies are left with few choices.  

Some common approaches include:

1.    Put your existing people forward and indicate they’ll be happy to co-locate with the client on the basis that you’ll be able to work it out in the event you’re ultimately successful in winning the pitch.  

 2.    Acknowledge you don’t have the required people presently available, but indicate you do have the resources to successfully on-board the client, and will work diligently with them to transparently recruit great talent who are genuinely prepared to co-locate with them.

Experience tells me that whilst the 2nd option is more transparent and honest, it doesn’t tick the box for most clients.  You almost always need to go with the 1st option, if you’re to have a decent chance at winning the business.

As a media agency leader, this worries me.

I don’t want to be tempted into the telling a client what they want to hear if it’s not real, and it almost never is. I’m concerned that this type of behaviour is contributing to the near 35% turnover in media agency staff mentioned earlier: I would rather be honest and transparent.  

So what’s the solution?

Pitching clients and their pitch consultants would ideally place more emphasis on media agencies’ track record with existing clients: Do they have longstanding client relationships?  Are those relationships resulting in commercially effective work?  Are their staff happy? Do they have below average turnover? Are they an employer of choice with a proven ability to attract exceptional staff?  

Media agencies need to better balance the needs of their people with the requirements of new clients if we’re to reduce the challenge of high industry staff turnover. If a pitching client is asking for co-location, an agency that values their staff will always ask them first. Given the current talent shortage, forcing media agency staff to co-locate is almost always going to result in rapid turnover, to nobody’s benefit.  

Clients should want to work with media agencies who take this view. After all, it’s to their ultimate benefit. It’s a cliché I know, but people are a media agency’s most valuable asset, the media agencies that look after them best are the ones clients should want to work with.  

Don’t get me wrong, it is perfectly ok to ask for an idea as to who might be the potential leaders on an account.  Smart media agencies might have a couple of up-and-comers ready to take the next step, an existing leader looking for a move, or someone qualified waiting in the wings, but to ask for a full team sheet of existing people seems like a step too far.  

Make this change and we’ll be on our way to reducing the high rates of media agency staff turnover that is to the frustration of all.  Let’s introduce a more honest, transparent and realistic approach to putting forward client teams in pitches.

It will be to the benefit of everyone.          

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[simonislawson]

Nice recognition of PHD’s success: It’s been fantastic to be a part of i!

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Mobil Bega, 2-6 Swan St - Circa 2007

[simonislawson]

Mum’s 70th birthday speech

I’d like to officially welcome you to my mum, Pam Lawson’s 70th birthday party: She’s not too keen on me mentioning her age, but there you go!  

Having made the decision to have a party, one of the first decisions we had to make was where?  

Mum was insistent that any celebration be held in East Gippsland: Having lived more than 30 years of her life in this area, mum feels most at home in this region. She has so many fond memories here and has made so many good friends:  She wanted it to be here, and here we are.

Cameron and I appreciate that it’s not the most convenient place to get to and we’d like to especially thank everyone who’s had to travel from Melbourne and other parts of Victoria to be here today: We hope you enjoy your time in Metung.  

Mum is especially happy that all of her sisters and her brother and their respective partners are here today; as Cameron and I are: It’s good to see you.

Mum is also thrilled that her cousin Lawrie and his wife Cheryl are here today.  

We’d also like to thank Tony and the team at the Metung Yacht Club for putting on such a lovely lunch for our mum and her family and friends on this special occasion:

Thanks Tony and team.

The last time I spoke about my mum in public was her 60th birthday in Nungurner, 10 years ago.  In the lead up to that event, I had reiterated to mum that if she wanted me to say anything, she needed to tell me in advance.  She explained she didn’t want any speeches, but halfway through the party, I was convinced to say a few unprepared words: Great.

I didn’t say much, but I remember saying something about the fact that despite turning 60, she had some of the best years of her life ahead of her, or something like that.

To be honest, mum was very nervous at that time about moving to Melbourne on her own: But when I look at the last 10 years, I’m so proud of the new life she has forged for herself.  

She sold her home in Nungurner, sold her service station in Cann River, bought herself a new home in Melbourne, renovated it, taught herself to invest, made new friends and is the most wonderful grandmother or “nanny Pam” to her grandchildren Eliza and Rory.

But most importantly, I understand she is now a demon Bridge player, feared by opponents both domestic and international.

As we all know too well, life has it successes … and its failures, and Pam certainly hasn’t been immune to those over the course of her 70 years.

I remember being Pam’s son the scout back in the mid-to-late 80s: I would earn rare badges for my achievements and it was customary to collect badges and have your mum sew them on your uniform and sleeping bag.

Mum had a decent crack at sewing these badges onto my uniform and sleeping bag, but after a few challenges, a family decision was made to outsource this task to upholsterers in Macleod St.  Today we’d call this outsourcing, but back then, well its best we move on…

Continuing our theme, the Scouts also used to hold a jam-pot jamboree every year to raise money for causes I can’t remember now.  Mum was an enthusiastic participant and set to work cooking as many conserves as she could, right up until the moment the kitchen blind at Riverine St caught fire in the process: The fire was quickly doused and our family’s participation in the jamboree instantaneously shifted from making conserves to buying them!

With that said, my mum has been and continues to be an inspiration in my life and her constant support and belief in me has probably been more than I’ve deserved at times.

I remember saying at my wedding that as a child you don’t realise your parents are people too.  With the arrival of two young kids since then, I feel like my appreciation of, and empathy with, mum and her life has deepened even further.  

It would not have been easy for mum to leave her life and family in Melbourne to follow my father to Bairnsdale in early 1974, but she did, and while she missed her family terribly, she is all the happier for her time in Bairnsdale.

Upon moving back to Melbourne in 2008, mum joined a new club, The Ionians.  I don’t know if many of you here today are aware of the Ionians? I certainly wasn’t.

From their website: “The Ionians is the friendship club for women on the move!”

It’s a club for women who are, or have been newly arrived in an area and appreciate the support of other women.

Mum speaks of women who have arrived in Melbourne from the UK and Canada. Senior executives or wives of senior executives.  Women making their way in an unfamiliar environment: Women who’ve never been to Melbourne before.  

I like to tease mum on occasion that they probably weren’t thinking they’d be catering for women who’d grown up in Melbourne, moved to East Gippsland in their 20s and moved back to Melbourne sometime later.  

I like to joke with mum about whether she knows what a tram is or whether she knows where the Jam Factory is!

She takes it all in good humour.

The truth is mum continues to embrace life and has been a bit of an explorer in recent years.

Prior to 2015, mum, Cam and I hadn’t been overseas together since a family holiday to Fiji in 1987.  

That’s changed recently and in the past 2 years, we’ve spent a week together in New York with mum and me flying in from Melbourne and Cameron meeting us from his base at that time of London.

Last year, mum and I travelled to London to be there for Cameron’s wedding to his partner, Blenard. The wedding was such a joyous occasion and we thoroughly enjoyed our time in London as well as side trips to Paris and Rome.

These recent travels have been some of the happiest times I’ve ever spent with my mum.

I’d like to finish with a story of which mum reminds me often:

The year is 1994, I’m 18, just finished school and working as a ski instructor at Mt Hotham.

Following my first private lesson, mum asked me who I’d been instructing:

“Some middle-aged woman”

Mum responded along the lines of: “Do you mean a woman my age?”

“No mum, she was in her 30s!”

This was 23 years ago.

Mum, thank you for being a terrific mother to Cam and I; and for being a wonderful Nanny Pam to Eliza and Rory.

I’m so pleased you’re surrounded by your family and best friends on this wonderful occasion.

We love you to bits and wish you the very best of birthdays:

Happy 70th birthday mum: May the next 10 years be as action-packed as the last!

[simonislawson]

An article about an ANZ campaign that includes a comment by me on the effective use of RSS feeds on digital out of home billboards.

[simonislawson]

How technology and creativity are impacting media planning

Friday, 10 February 2017

PHD Melbourne group business director Simon Lawson discusses the evolution of programmatic and artificial intelligence and what media planners need to know about their relationship with effectiveness and creativity.

TCC: How is the evolution of programmatic and artificial intelligence having an impact on how media planning is changing?

SL: For some people, programmatic might mean that creativity is being removed (in terms of importance) from the media and advertising equation. But that’s an incorrect understanding of where the world is going. It’s not about just being creative or machine driven, it’s about being creative and machine driven.

The thing with programmatic media is, that while it’s rules based, it’s still driven by human influence and it’s always humans creating those rules. So paradoxically, the importance of humans in programmatic is actually increased rather than reduced. It’s just a new way of working, rather than everything having changed. We are still working towards the same objective, but we now have different tools to deliver with.

TCC: What role do they have to play in delivering effective channel strategies?

SL: AI is still a work in progress. There is a lot of discussion about how AI is going to influence advertising, but at the moment, it’s more like things are going to happen rather than things are happening. There are platforms that are already demonstrating how AI is beating humans at solving various different problems. How that’s working today in media though is more of a promise than an immediate impact.

Progammatic, on the other hand, is allowing people to create more custom user journeys for different audience segments. It used to be that you would execute one message to many people and now you can convey many messages to many segments. You have the opportunity to drive better ROI because your messages are more personalised to that user’s place in the customer journey. The old adage of ‘right place, right time’ rings true still because that’s what programmatic is delivering on, to offer relevant advertising rather than broadcasting to the masses.

TCC: Can a good idea still be delivered in a creative way when programmatic and AI are involved?

SL: Absolutely. It’s not about it being mutually exclusive. What strong creative will do in the programmatic world is be more effective and offer more layers to the messaging. A single core idea can then ladder down to different audiences in different ways to make that idea work harder.

What we are looking for from programmatic is to be able to expand the channels which we buy across from digital to TV, outdoor and radio. Once you create campaigns that can work across all those channels, at scale, then you start to move to the next level. You can buy TV programmatically now of course, but not yet at scale. Once that happens, we will be in an amazing place. Then it will be up to media agencies to deliver on what technology is enabling us to do.

There are challenges though in producing personalised messages for the different stages of the customer journey to ensure the production efficiency can match up to the investment that has been made in the medium.

TCC: What single best practice case study can you reference that combines creativity and technology?

SL: Programmatic should be invisible to the consumer. The fact that it should be seamless means that it's quite difficult to identify when programmatic is being best utilised to effectively marry custom journeys with advanced messaging matrices.

One of they key components of programmatic is that it works best at this stage for brands where the purchase is conducted online. It’s in the e-commerce space that programmatic is the most sophisticated.

A good case study that I can reference is The Economist when it comes to driving subscriptions. The customer journey starts with thought leadership and breaking news and ends up with a drive toward subscribing to the magazine. They are making sure that they are starting with something valuable to the consumer then building their understanding of why a subscription is desirable, then going in for the acquisition.

Simon Lawson, along with Kathryn Weatherlake, business director PHD Melbourne, will be presenting AdSchool’s Media Mechanics Accelerator in Melbourne on February 16 and 23. Participants will gain a solid understanding of each channel and best practice case studies, along with an understanding as to where media is headed including the evolution of programmatic and artificial intelligence.

[simonislawson]

Me and my doppelganger on St Kilda Road

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The day PHD moved from Richmond to St Kilda Road: #JCDecaux put me on a tram poster.  If you can make it in St Kilda Road, you can make it anywhere!

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Me and a sea lion on the beach. This was a trip to the Galapagos Islands with APN Outdoor 

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An article in the Bega District News, published on Monday 15th August 2016, about the sale of the Bega Coles Express.

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An article in the Australian Financial Review published on Wednesday 29 June 2016 mentioning the sale at auction of the Bega Coles Express

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My opinion piece on the potential impact of self-driving cars on the out of home media industry, published by Mumbrella on 27 July 2016

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Grand opening day at the new Bega Coles Express - 20 October 2015