Experienced global marketer David Morgan has replaced Steve Brennen as ADMA’s chair.
While Morgan hasn’t promising to rip up the organisation’s rulebook—yet, anyway—Morgan has confirmed that ADMA will seek to improve the training of marketers, as well as broadening their capability sets, and moving C-level marketers back into the centre of their businesses’ growth operations by reclaiming some of the four Ps.
“Steve has done a fantastic job,” Morgan told a roundtable briefing of journalists in Sydney yesterday adding that his leadership of ADMA has left it in a good place for the future.
Advisory Board
The first of the changes—though only slight at this stage—that Morgan announced would be changes to ADMA’s advisory board.
“The refresh on the advisory board is entirely down to [the fact] we’ve been asking too much of too many people for too long. We all sign up to the advisory board with a three-year period but that period was bumped by COVID and a whole bunch of different things,” he said.
ADMA’s advisory board includes some of the country’s leading marketers including Suncorp’s Mim Haysom, Trisca Scott-Branagan of the Australian Business Growth Fund, Susan Coghill of Tourism Australia and CommBank’s Jo Boundy. Paul McCrory, most recently of Meta; Stuart Tucker, partner at Hourigan International and former CMO of Hipages; Mark Coad, CEO of IPG’s Mediabrands; and Naomi Shepherd, group industry director at Meta complete the board along with ADMA CEO Andrea Martens and now vice-chair Brennen.
“A few will remain and many will move simply because they’ve given too much and they’re such good people that when you ask them to give more, they don’t say no,” continued Morgan.
“As much as we don’t want to get rid of them, it’s unfair to keep asking and going back to the well for more from them.”
The Only Constant Is Change
Morgan steps into the chair role during a time of considerable flux for marketers. Martens said that industry was “entering one of the most significant periods of reform” it’s ever seen and that the looming reformed Privacy Act, as well as “rising pressure” around “ethical AI, dark patterns [and] data use”.
“Marketers are now operating in a completely different risk environment than they were 12 or 18 months ago. Marketers are no longer adjacent to compliance, we are very much at the centre of it,” she added.
Brennen, meanwhile, pointed to the “crazy” explosion in martech tools, growing personalisation at scale which has moved marketing to “a whole different world” and the “tectonic” changes that AI will usher in, as evidence.
Morgan said this level of change and technological advancement will allow him to delve back into his own career for inspiration and leadership of the sector.
“I’m really not that old but if you think about how we do work, the marketing tools we used to do work, when I started we didn’t have computers. There was a computer shared by 12 people that actually didn’t work very well… We had telephones tethered to walls. We weren’t allowed to use the photocopier because it was too expensive… We didn’t invent the internet for another 10 years,” he said.
Even in terms of media to buy against, Morgan has seen significant change. In the UK, when Morgan started with Proctor & Gamble, there was only one commercial TV broadcaster—ITV.
“Think of the comparison now to the tools we have today, the thousands of platforms and how does a marketer navigate thousands of platforms to know which is the right platform that will be most effective for them? How do they know what to do, which tools to use, where the balance of doing things is going to more or less important. We talk a lot about AB testing but you can’t do AB testing on literally tens of thousands of channels or platforms and that’s where we have to really start thinking much harder about principles as well as testing,” said Morgan.
In this environment, Morgan believes, associations become significantly more important as bellwethers of truth and integrity.
Training, Training, Training
For Morgan, ADMA’s Capability Compass, launched in August last year and attracting global interest, is central to his plans for reinvigorating marketers and marketing departments around the country.
“It’s world class. We’ve looked around the world two or three times over the last three or four years, we’ve talked to association leaders around the globe and there’s nothing that exists in the calibre and quality of what we have,” he said.
Morgan said that “distractions,” “disruptions” and “change” over the last few years has allowed marketing departments to becoming tangential to the growth of businesses. Much of that can be attributed, in ADMA and Morgan’s view to marketers forgetting (or not learning) the four Ps (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, if you’ve forgotten) or having one or more of the Ps squirreled away by other sectors of the business.
“We have to build it back that marketing is integral and the central function to business success… We are the first and best leaders in how to build capability, we’re the leaders in terms of regulation, in terms of how to apply the skills for the future, the data we’re collecting and manage it in the correct way,” he said.
But marketers—at any level—will not receive this instruction from the business or their seniors. They will have to go out and learn for themselves. Fortunately, we understand ADMA has some programs knocking about.
