Bonzai’s Harley Ramien On The Business Of Creativity

Harley Ramien, Bonzai’s APAC director, has been driving exceptional results for the business over the seven years since joining the company.

Ramien joined Bonzai as its director of business development ANZ in 2016 when the firm was just three years old. A series of swift promotions followed and he now heads up a team spanning countries and time zones developing the best creative tech in the industry.

Of course, the journey is never straightforward and Ramien’s path to his current role and the industry-leading work his team is now producing shows a history of creativity and business coming together to which Bonzai has been the beneficiary.

Setting The Roots For Bonzai’s Growth

Ramien came to Bonzai after a well-known news publisher introduced him to Rahul Pandey, Bonzai’s CEO and founder. An energised hour-long phone call and an in-person platform demo in a hotel lobby were all it took for Ramien to see Bonzai’s potential and make the switch. “I just remember thinking this was what the market was calling out for. A solution that would empower creativity”.

These were early days, however. When Ramien joined in 2016, the company had just a single client. But with years of experience within the world of adtech, Ramien knew how to get the best out of his teams.

Once a project goal had been identified and set, Ramien ensured that the teams he worked across felt empowered to experiment and were given the autonomy to do so. Speed of innovation was and still is essential to success in the tech sector and Ramien described a corporate culture where talented staff need to constantly ask permission to experiment. “Most times, the answers to even the largest problems are already there inside our team. The question is how do we empower them to bring that out.”

Ramien explained to B&T that by letting his teams take ownership of their goals and experimentation, the wheels started to turn, generating more interest and excitement about Bonzai’s products. It wasn’t easy, of course, but Ramien’s management set the team up for success.

The other side to Ramien’s roles within Bonzai necessitated him forming deep, trust-based relationships with clients.

From just one client in 2016, the company now counts virtually every major publisher across the APAC region servicing thousands of advertisers with its products. Every brand you’re familiar with from Westfield to Mercedes-Benz and even small regional businesses are running with these solutions.

However, Ramien has delivered more than commercial success alone to Bonzai during his time with the firm. “When we started our media monitoring, picking up job ads listing Bonzai alongside Google as required experience, it makes us sit back and think about how far we’ve come as a company,” Ramien said.

What’s more, the company was recently accepted as one of just a handful of global firms into the Stanford Seed Transformation Program which educates CEOs, founders and management teams on innovation and entrepreneurship. Social impact is a large focus of the program which led to the realisation that the revenue generated by their publisher customers funds local journalism to the tune of over a thousand full time roles.

“Working in advertising you sometimes ask the larger question ‘What are we really achieving?’ so the idea we are helping to keep quality local journalism alive is something we can be proud of,” Ramien said.

Continuing To Grow Bonzai

Despite Ramien leading Bonzai’s incredible growth within APAC thus far, the team has no plans to slow down and is constantly innovating to drive results for clients and deliver better experiences for users.

The company recently tested its first insights system powered by artificial intelligence. Ramien explained that the new tech would give Bonzai’s clients a “serious edge”. This capability would give Bonzai’s clients the ability to know what works before running or pitching a campaign rather than trying to hope for the best and optimising once it’s already live.

A new range of ecommerce solutions is also in the offing with the ability to dramatically boost conversion rates for Bonzai’s clients. There are context-match product carousels and more complex tools including dynamic product matching.

“Context is going to be even more important given the depreciation of cookie data in the future. We’re able to understand the current page and article context to adapt the creative, for example curating the most relevant products via advertiser API or simply adapting a message to be relevant to the reader in that moment,” Ramien explained.

This feature alone is set to give Bonzai’s clients a significant advantage, even more functionality is possible for those businesses that have their first-party data in order. With ecommerce advertising traditionally dominated by simple performance banners which have to sacrifice branding, Bonzai’s clients are already finding that they can better communicate their brand proposition to users and deliver results using a single high-impact ad unit. A recent trial study from Interplay Media showed advertiser campaigns achieved a seven-fold boost to ROI using the solution.

The company also recently launched Brand Story, a new flagship mobile ad format. The interactive, high-impact, rich media ad unit is already showing up at the leading publishers in AU and NZ and Bonzai are reporting performance doubling over and above their most-popular existing mobile format.

The tight relationships that Ramien and the rest of the APAC team form with their clients are a big factor in the success they see. Clients are directly invited to join the team’s product initiatives to see what is being built and let them test it out. The team also holds regular Q&A sessions with its clients and even helps them prepare pitches.

Coming off the back of the pandemic, Bonzai recently unveiled its redesigned APAC flagship office.

“It’s been such a great way to welcome everyone back and the team has made it a real experience once we all got together for the re-opening with well-thought-out surprises like personalised luggage since we can travel again, made it special,” said Ramien.

However, the new office has also been redesigned to boost chances for innovation and productivity with a flowing workspace to enhance collaboration. It has been designed with mindful changes at every level to be as conscious as possible about reducing the carbon footprint. Further realising the role of plants in the workspace, which are known to improve creativity and a calming atmosphere, the office is tastefully decked with more than 60 pots of NASA-approved air-purifying plants.

From Timber To Bonzai

Ramien’s approach to working with clients and the team at Bonzai — many of whom he now counts as close personal friends — was not the result of leadership textbooks but of varied experiences.

His first job was working for his family’s timber company in regional New South Wales. This gave him an appreciation of business from an early age. From there, Ramien studied Design for his undergraduate degree with an opportunity to put his design skills to work redeveloping the family business warehouse into an art deco-inspired retail showroom and from there went on to study entrepreneurship at a post-graduate level.

An unlikely summer job with Play School’s Monica Trapaga followed at her furniture and homeware store Reclaim.

“It took a while for cognitive dissonance to pass,” said Ramien, “Here I was talking to Monica from Play School about furniture auctions and timber finishes!”

Being able to see every stage of the process, from purchasing a piece to restoring or re-designing and selling it, gave him immense satisfaction — something that has followed through into his work at Bonzai.

A stint working as a product photographer and retoucher for an online store, a role coding websites for government departments and then working for a multimedia creative agency taught some valuable lessons about the importance of innovation, productivity and ownership in more corporate environments.

The next role was during the early years of adtech with a global ad platform training creative agencies and digital publishers on developing interactive creatives in the late noughties. At this time, Flash was still in vogue and Ramien described the creativity and interactivity in the firm’s products as “astounding” for the time.

Working in that fast-paced environment within the relatively nascent adtech industry gave Ramien a real understanding of the challenges facing the market and what ultimately the market was looking for, plus the skills needed to boost Bonzai’s innovation that he still relies on to this day.

Of course, continuing to sit at the forefront of adtech innovation is never easy. But, with a smart, considered and battle-hardened approach to management and a world-class team beneath him, Ramien and Bonzai are better positioned than ever to lead the industry forward.