As the owner and ECD of Campaign Edge and an all-out adland legend, Dee Madigan does not have a lot of time on her hands for long-winded interviews. So B&T sat her down for 10 rapid-fire questions with our very own Sparrow!
1. Campaign Edge has just celebrated its 10th birthday, firstly congratulations what’s been the highlight and on the flip-side your biggest fuck-up?
Highlight — QLD election 2015 (because it was thought unwinnable) and Federal Election 2022
Fuckup — Nothing huge but lots of little ones, learning how to manage employees is a skill and I’ve lost some good ones along the way because I didn’t do it well enough
2. Your strapline is The Art of Persuasion. What’s the number 1 tip in delivering on that promise?
Stop focusing so much on the channel. Focus on the people. The channel is merely a conduit to them- and people are still motivated by what they’ve always been motivated by — their own needs
3. A lot of your agency’s great work is changing people’s habits/behaviours. Is that more difficult than selling physical products?
Yes, because people don’t like change- so the job is two-fold. Dealing with the barriers to change is just as important as promoting the benefits of change.
Also, our budgets are smaller.
4. You constantly feature on the telly e.g. Gruen, The Drum, Sunrise etc. Does that awareness translate into new business leads?
Yes. Not just new business leads — but also new business. It was because of Gruen that I got my first election campaign (specifically Todd Sampson was approached and suggested me for it) and that was what compelled me to start the agency.
5. Who have been your mentors/champions that have influenced your career?
6. As an industry, what’s one thing you would change to make us all better?
I would like us to campaign to change the rules on Australian-made content. It’s too easy to rejig an OS ad and have it classified as Australian content. The ad industry is the backbone of the creative industries – our filmmakers learn their craft shooting ads, our musos compose soundtracks, and many of our novelists and artists work in ad agencies. But the work is getting less and less. Particularly as AI takes more writing jobs. If multinationals were forced to employ Australian ad agencies to come up with ideas and fully produce their ads here it would create and protect jobs. And it also means multinationals may even look at Australia as the place they have to write and shoot ads for other countries i.e. we export our creation and production instead of importing it. And it protects our culture. Australian ads have always been a unique snapshot at who we are – from ‘Not Happy Jan’, to ‘Happy Little Vegemites’ to ‘Bugger’.
7. You are a straight shooter, I remember your Cannes in Cairns sessions, in client meetings do you drop the F or C bomb?
Absofuckinglutely
8. With the current economic headwinds, are your clients still spending?
We have a good business model with a mix of brand, behaviour change and politics so it tends to stay fairly even. Also, we’re used to doing good work on small budgets.
9. What’s one thing that’s not on your LinkedIn profile?
I can recite the Man from Snowy River by heart
10. Important last question: do your parents know what you do?
They died while I was still a teenager, so unless the whole heaven/hell thing is real (and I have serious doubts about that), then probably not!
