Australian brands should collaborate more with each other and with agencies to develop initiatives and marketing projects that have the scope to drive real-world change, Optus CMO Nathan Rosenberg believes.
His call for more collaboration and partnership projects among Aussie brands follows the mobile network’s own collaborative work with Google to launch the Clever Buoys shark detection pilot.
Rosenberg was speaking to AdNews ahead of the first of Google’s Lightening Talks at Cannes Lions. Clever Buoys is the only non-US project to be presented by Google this year and all parties involved believe it demonstrates what Australian companies can do when they put their heads together.
The project is collaboration between Optus, Google and M&C Saatchi, alongside Shark Attack Mitigation Systems.
“Australia has the capacity and the capability to do lots of great stuff and when you get really good brands together you can do really amazing stuff but what you have to remember is that you have to be OK with not knowing what the outcome is going to be," Rosenberg said.
"You may not be guaranteed success and you don’t know where you might end up. We entered this project with the mind-set that if we could do something that was world changing that solved a problem, what an amazing bonus that would be, but if nothing else, we’ve learned from it.
“Working unselfishly, what you can do with other people is greater than what you can do on your own,” he said.
Rosenberg admitted that at this point, the team don’t even know if Clever Buoy will work but that Optus is in it “for the long-haul” and is learning from the collaborative approach and applying those learning’s to other aspects of its brand and marketing.
Ben Cooper, innovation director at M&C Saatchi, said the Clever Buoy project shows how the scope of briefs from clients is changing. It was an open brief with no parameters that asked the agency to find a new way for the brand to communicate its position to people.
Cooper added that one reason the project worked so well is that all parties were “out of their comfort zone” but had huge trust in the relationships. The team took a “war room” approach and had team members dedicated solely to it to keep bringing the ideas back to the purpose.
Roberta McDonald, head of creative agency engagement at Google, agreed. She told AdNews the collaboration really came "from bottom up and top down”.
"I haven't in a long time worked in a partnership where all parties are so honest,” she added.
While the Clever Buoy is so far a concept and a prototype, Hamish Jolly, director of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems, reckons it can have a commercial model up and running in six months.
He added that while it had been considering sonar as method for shark detection for some time, working with M&C, Google and Optus and using their technology alongside its own expertise is “helping propel it forward”.
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