After an epic Pinterest Welcome Party, marketing leaders from around the country woke up bright and early for breakfast with Boomtown at Crystalbrook Flynn.
Cairns itself is Boomtown incarnate, a regional Australian city that is absolutely flying all weeks of the year—not just during the week of Cairns Crocodiles.
The CMO breakfast, held the day after Bernard Salt’s keynote session, was set among the palm trees and overlooking a resplendent Cairns harbour. Australia’s most famous demographer was joined on stage by outgoing WPP chief strategy officer Katie Rigg-Smith, and Boomtown chairman Brian Gallagher joined the lucky attendees for a panel discussion. Together, the trio discussed the finer points of regional media buying and demographic shifts.
The thrust of Salt’s keynote was that there is an entire market the size of Sydney located outside the country’s five capital cities. What’s more, the inner city-dwelling matcha-sipping millennials are no longer looking for the hipster dream. Instead, they’re looking for their forever homes with their partners in the lifestyle towns situated outside the capital cities. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms and parking spaces, and a big back yard for a four-burner barbecue and a game of cricket with the family on Christmas Day.
“Let’s have a look at Sydney, a bit more than 5 million people at the moment… Let’s assume that Sydney adds about 100,000 people per year in net terms. 100,000 people means about 40,000 dwellings, 40,000 mortgages, 40,000 refrigerators. That’s a machine that needs to be fed,” he said.
“There is this secret city just beyond the edge of Melbourne, the edge of Brisbane that links it all together from places like Bowral or Warrigal Drouin, now the fastest-growing town on the Australian continent.”
Despite the explosive growth of the areas just outside the capital cities, it is widely felt that regional media receive significantly less investment than media focused on the big five.
For Rigg-Smith, it’s all to do with exposure.
“It comes down to lived experiences and being exposed to people with different lived experiences. That’s why I think Boomtown and what the regional marketers are doing is really powerful. We’re not changing the fact that we’ve got pockets in Sydney and Melbourne and people buying from Britain etc., but it’s how well we can educate people with their lived experience and the nuances of the local market because regional offers growth,” she said.
“Every single one of us in this room is charged with growth, or we’re here to unlock growth for a client. And you can see from the numbers that the opportunity is there. There’s cash to liberate. So we need to make sure that we’re connecting with regional, but on a nuanced level.”
Connecting with Australia’s regional areas requires adjusting messaging, according to Rigg-Smith. Regional Australians have the same top-level hopes, fears and dreams of metropolitan Aussies (and heaps more disposable cash), but it’s clear when marketing communications are meant for city dwellers.
“There is a big opportunity to take these national ideas of brand, but then land them in a way that is respectful to that community. If you go to Dubbo, it’s very different to Cairns, which is very different to the Sunshine Coast… Regional is not a homogeneous market. It’s all these individually beautifully vibrant areas, and there is so much opportunity to target and create relevance through local media, and it’s the gateway to unlocking growth with these 10 million people.”
It’s a misconception, too, that regional Australia is somehow backward or regressive when compared to the metro areas – just look at the last Federal Election, for instance.
“I grew up in Maitland, outside Newcastle,” said Gallagher.
“We had two Chinese places for takeaway in Maitland, so we were quite up with the times. But it was very different and from an ethnicity point of view, it was totes Anglo. My wife is half-Asian, and she was basically the only Asian in the village. She copped it, it was a tough lifestyle. There were a lot of those old stereotypes about remote communities. But I go there now and it’s completely changed… And you drive down the street and realise most of those homes are owned outright. The cars in front are not leased, and you start to realise that disposable income is getting a workout.”
If you take one thing away from Cairns Crocodiles, it’s that there is a huge amount of opportunity beyond Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs and Northern Beaches, or St Kilda in Melbourne. Don’t let your bias kill your growth.
