Making Great Work in Media – Does The Size Of The Market Matter?

Ben McAuliffe (lead image) is the investment partnerships manager at Initiative Perth has just returned from two weeks in the New York office as part of Initiative’s ‘Emily in Paris’ program. Here he talks about the differences in working in a huge market (the Big Apple) versus a smaller one (Perth)….

A vital ‘tool’ to getting the most out of yourself in the media industry is broadening your perspectives, so I was stoked to be selected to fly to New York City and be a part of Initiative’s ‘Emily in Paris’ program.

To date I’ve spent my career working solely in teams of three to six on WA-based clients.  In NYC I was thrust into an environment  working alongside some of Initiative’s 300-plus people client teams including Applebees, Nintendo and the US Food & Drug Administration.  The experience left me internally questioning, which market naturally produces the best work and why?

In NYC, the first thing that stood out was the team’s ability to demonstrate incredible bravery with media partnerships. This was shown by the T–Mobile team: the first ever partner of a Roku Original film, Weird – The Al Yankovic Story. Initiative and T-Mobile took the risk of aligning themselves with the film prior to production and have since reaped the rewards of the collaboration since the film’s success. While bravery can always be demonstrated by a client and media agency of any size, having the ability to capitalise on an opportunity that has a risk to reward ratio of that scale would be unusual in a smaller market like Perth.

The wise words of The Notorious B.I.G. “mo’ money, mo’ problems” made itself abundantly clear in the two weeks I visited the Big Apple. Short turnaround briefs or sudden, drastic campaign changes are inevitable any market.  However, the potential ramifications of a poorly planned campaign or internal ways of working to cope with sudden demand on a team can be disproportionately amplified in larger markets. I was not envious of watching a global-scaled client scramble to completely flip its media strategy resulting from talent only allowing a 60” video to be recorded and used in the weeks leading up to a campaign launch.

While issues and short turnarounds can always arise in Perth, the influence would only be to partners within our market and always managed in a timely manner, not ripple out into a global network of countless partners and supporting teams. This in turn naturally opens the window to Perth having the opportunity to produce some incredibly time sensitive work that may not be possible elsewhere.

The scale of work also meant the US team needed to take a few different approaches to building client and internal partner relationship. In Perth, I can walk to the other side of the office to chat to my programmatic traders or social team, the NYC team have eight floors of people working on campaigns across the globe, which makes ‘crossing the floor’ more challenging.

While the team managed workloads seamlessly, it did highlight the importance of promoting communication channels beyond numerous daily meetings. Initiatives such as the ‘Walk a Mile’ program where clients and internal teams worked side by side and spend time demonstrating unique daily tasks created an unspoken synergy and culture of trust between the teams as they understood the workload those around them where contributing.

Working in an agency (of the same brand) in two very differently sized markets was an amazing experience and I am incredibly grateful to all those who made it happen. Beyond the countless learnings I was able to absorb from a practical workload standpoint, the time away cemented my standpoint on the importance of broad perspectives and how programs of this nature should continue to be promoted industry wide, now the world has opened back up. The disproportionate returns do not only come in personal development, but in today’s competitive media industry landscape, businesses being able to draw from alternative viewpoints is what creates great work, not the market size.