The Other Side of the World
Visiting Australia Community Media
November 2018
I had the great pleasure of visiting one of the most beautiful parts of the world earlier this month—Sydney Australia. Arvid Tchivzhel and I took the long trek ‘down under’ to work with Stephen Hopkin “Hoppy”, Bruce Levine and their team on strategic planning and development of their Listener™ Digital Platform.
ACM has more than 160 regional websites tagged across Australia—which is quite impressive—but what was most impressive was the approach to the strategic process. They had their entire team, around 10-12 members, sitting in meetings for 3 days. The Audience, Advertising, Content and Business Intelligence groups attended and were very engaged. Arvid, of course, did his always impressive work sharing incredible insights from their data as well as best practices from around the world to help us come away with a very detailed set up campaigns, tactics and rollout plans to take them deep into 2019! Speaking of great hosts—Stephen and the team treated us to a wonderful team dinner where I was able to try Kangaroo for the first (and not the last) time. Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not a very adventurous eater, but that was a VERY tasty dish!
In addition to our visit with ACM, I was able to spend time traveling in Australia and New Zealand visiting other clients and those we would LOVE to have as clients. There were many great conversations and opportunities for future visits. There was one stressful few hours however, as I needed to rent a car and drive to one meeting 90 minutes outside of Melbourne. I have certainly driven outside the U.S., but this was the first time driving in a car with the steering wheel (clearly) on the wrong side of the car 😊 and I had to drive on the wrong side of the road! As I’m writing this note, the trip was without incident but I can tell you that 40 years of driving under certain conditions, I REALLY had to think about every lane change and turn!
Cheers!
