In this series, we’re taking a look at some of the most creative faces in Melbourne with some help from our friend Kathleen Gunther, who partners with independent agencies across Australia and New Zealand to scale their brand presence and drive sustainable growth. This week we spoke with Kyle Duckitt, strategy director at AQKA.
1. How long have you been in Melbourne? Did you choose it or did it choose you?
We’ve been here about 18 months now, and Melbourne is the fifth city I’ve called home. I’d love to tell you there was some grand plan behind all the moving, but the truth is I’m just not very good at sitting still.
Before this we were in Singapore, and life there was good. I was head of strategy at BBH, the work was strong, and the weather never once let me down (though after a few years of it, I’d take cold over humid any day). Then a creative director role came up in Melbourne for my wife, Heidi, and we did what we always do: talk it over for about a day and then move to a country we’ve never even set foot in on little more than a gut feeling.
So, did I choose Melbourne, or did it choose me? Neither, really. We backed ourselves again, the way we always do, and it hasn’t let us down yet. Now I lead strategy at AKQA across both offices, and after seven-odd years of never quite settling anywhere, it’s the first place in a long while that actually feels like home.
2. The most Melbourne thing about the way your team works?
The most Melbourne thing about my team is that it barely looks like one team. Kind of the same way Melbourne itself is almost impossible to describe, because it’s really just a bunch of little nooks and villages stitched together.
We’re split across Melbourne and Sydney, almost everyone comes from a different discipline and a different country, and we end up blending creative, tech, strategy, production, whatever the problem needs, everyone mixed in together instead of sitting in neat rows. That suits the city, because Melbourne has always prized difference, and Visit Victoria even bottled it in a line: “every bit different”. I’ve come to think that’s close to what good strategy does too. Find the thing that makes you distinctive and make it impossible to ignore.
I’ve always believed that you don’t get different answers by throwing more of the same people and the same thinking at a brief. The best thinking here, like the best of this city, turns up down a side street you weren’t planning to walk down.
3. Who in the local industry has shaped how you think?
Right, I’m going to be cheeky and bend the word “local” well past breaking point here, while quietly shaking my head at myself for not landing on someone more original or more actually Melbourne.
The name I keep coming back to is Mark Ritson, who’s English, and whose only real tie to the city is the few years he spent teaching at Melbourne Business School, which he’s since left. So, not local at all, really.
What I keep stealing from him is “bothism”, his refusal to treat marketing as a run of holy wars. Brand or performance, long or short, art or science, the honest answer is nearly always “both”, in whatever mix the problem needs. That’s about the only religion I’ll sign up to. I’ve never trusted dogma, and the job, as far as I can tell, is to find the best in any approach and use it, not to pick a side and spend your career defending it.
4. Your favourite Melbourne or Victorian campaign?
Remote Control Tourist, Tourism Victoria, 2014. They let people anywhere in the world steer real humans around the city in real time, live through social media, and it pulled something like 43 million earned impressions across 158 countries. I first wrote about it as an intern at BBDO in Chicago, in one of the first trends reports I ever put together, a recap of that year’s Cannes winners.
I sat at a desk in Chicago watching the world explore Melbourne through a screen, and roughly a decade later I live in the very city I was looking at (while my wife works at that very same agency that made the work… like how weird).
It also sits exactly where I think the best work sits, at the meeting point of technology, imagination and a commercial outcome. Which is also a big part of what lured me to AKQA.
5. If you were a Melbourne landmark, what would you be?
The Skipping Girl. Little Audrey, the neon sign up on Victoria Street in Abbotsford. She was one of the first animated neon signs in the country, she has been skipping on the same spot since 1936, and when they tried to take her down the city kicked up enough of a fuss to have her rebuilt and heritage listed.
I like that she isn’t a grand monument. She’s a little bit kitsch, endlessly in motion, kept going by people who are fond of her, and these days she runs on solar. If I’m any landmark, I’d want to be her. Ninety years in, still bouncing, and quietly reinventing myself while staying true to who I am.
Kathleen Gunther is the founder of Gunther Consulting, partnering with independent agencies across Australia and New Zealand to scale their brand presence and drive sustainable growth. With expertise spanning digital marketing, brand strategy, PR and communications, she brings the pragmatism, specialist connections and industry know-how to help agencies market their most important client — themselves. Kathleen also serves as a Board Member of AWIA, actively shaping Australia’s digital landscape and championing inclusivity in the industry.
