Our Industry Profile takes a look at some of the professionals working across the advertising, adtech, marketing and media sector in Australia. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the buzzing industry.
James Poole: senior account director at Latch Digital
Time in current role:
Two months. I’m the first Latch employee in Australia and I was brought in to help launch the business here.
How would you describe what the company does?
Latch is a digital out of home (dooh) dynamic creative production agency. Dynamic dooh is essentially anything that involves intelligence as part of the creative. This could be anything from taking into account the location, audience, environment etc. of the screen to inform what version of a creative runs, to incorporating a data feed from the infinite amount of data points that exist. If you can fuse these together the result is a relevant, targeted and real time out of home campaign.
What do I do day to day?
Day to day I’ll be speaking and presenting to various contacts across the industry, be it media owners, agencies or creatives. With Latch being new to the market in Australia, it’s been great to connect with so many people to talk about our business. I’ll also be working on campaign ideation sessions and liaising with our dev team in Auckland on delivering upcoming campaigns.
Define your job in one word:
Exciting.
I got into my industry because:
Honestly, because I had nothing else on at the time. I’d left one job, had a couple of weeks on holiday, and needed to find something. This was July 2008. The ever evolving and innovative nature of out of home has meant that I’ve never been bored since.
What’s the biggest industry wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
I’d like to see the industry collaborate on how dynamic creative can be utilised more in digital out of home, where we’re only really scratching the surface of what can be done, so it becomes closer to the norm rather than a ‘one off’. There’s, rightly, a lot of buzz around programmatic in out of home at the moment however I believe there’s just as much possibility and opportunity in where dynamic dooh creative can go.
Previous companies:
JCDecaux in both the UK and Australia, Adshel, Cartology and Shopper.
Notable campaigns/initiatives:
I’ve been lucky enough to work on a bunch of great dynamic campaigns however the multiple executions during the 2012 London Olympics are a real stand out. Medal tables, event updates, congratulations messages when Team GB won gold…these really made for outstanding dooh and added to the already huge buzz across the city at the time.
Who has been a great mentor to you?
Keith Nilsen, founder of Voodooh in the UK. A real advocate for the creative possibilities of digital out of home. Someone I still speak to and look for advice from, even 10 years after we worked together.
Words of advice:
‘Don’t give up’. Wise words that I continually now remind my daughters of.
If I wasn’t doing this for a living:
I’d probably still be in 2008, wondering what to do next.
My philosophy is:
Keep moving forward.
My favourite advert is:
Ah I’m going to deviate away from out of home for once and say any Nike football/soccer TV ad from the nineties & early noughties. The ‘Good vs. Evil’ and ‘Little Less Conversation’ ones in particular are absolute classics.
Music and TV streaming habits. What do you subscribe to?
Spotify, Binge & Disney+.
In five years time I'll be:
Hopefully content with how it all panned out.
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