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.
Paul Sinkinson: managing director ANZ at Analytic Partners
Time in current role/time at the company:
Eight years.
How would you describe what the company does?
Analytic Partners is a leader in marketing measurement and optimising the spend on marketing. In other words, we help our clients grow through our tech platform and our people.
The platform provides adaptive solutions for deeper business understanding, right-time planning, and optimisation for marketing and beyond. Our people offer some of the best consulting to help turn those insights into actions that can be used to change marketing and make the business grow, rather than just tell you what marketing drove last month.
What do you do day-to-day?
The day to day for me can be quite varied. There’s the glamorous world of reviewing historic media plans and spend files, to running simulations in our platform GPSE, or talking with clients and their agencies about the opportunities to optimise their programs.
I’m very lucky with the clients we have that we’re able to work in a genuine spirit of partnership with them and agencies alike. This means the conversations can vary from model outputs, insights we’re seeing across the market or internationally, or discussing whether a new marketing platform could work for them and how to experiment with it.
Define your job in one word:
Growth.
I got into my industry because:
Showing my age, but analytics wasn’t a degree when I came through uni, so I fell into it working for a UK retailer. I’d worked in strategy roles before, and when we implemented SAS into the business, there was a natural progression from getting the sales data together and running pricing work to understanding the impact of media.
It was still a relatively nice and new field at the time and so it felt like there was so much to learn and I could help shape the way it worked. Twenty years later and I still feel the same way - there’s so much to learn and I feel that I can shape the way the work is done.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?
Data. For all the AI genius and speed of processing complex equations, data still slows it all down. Having marketing activity documented and verified with a few years of history is still something that is not done well by a lot of the industry.
What’s the biggest industry-wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
Data. Getting marketing data available faster in a way that we can trust. It’s the most boring part of the job, and it’s been a challenge since the 1990s when I got into this.
It’s going to have far more impact than the biggest of ‘snakeoil AI’ claims.
Who has been a great mentor to you and why?
It sounds like a cliché, but our global boss, Nancy Smith. She started a company that everyone told her would be a failure, and had to borrow a desk in her husband's business.
23 years later, she’s built what Forrester recognises as the global leader in marketing measurement and optimisation, all the while maintaining the strongest culture of collaboration of any company I’ve worked in.
It all starts from the top, with an approach of honesty, trusting the team, and keeping people focused on the big goal rather than siloed targets. She’s not just inspiring, but someone that drives you to be better and do it all faster- that’s a great example for all leaders.
Words of advice for someone wanting a job like yours?
Don’t get too specialised. This industry has changed so much over the last 20 years that getting focused on one programming language, one field of maths, or one approach to advertising, would have left you redundant. A broad set of skills coupled with a commitment to career-long learning is key to success in this gig.
If I wasn't doing this for a living, I'd be:
I never thought I’d say it as I spent the first 20 years escaping it, but back in country town New Zealand. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to appreciate far more what I had in my youth, and that’s more than just an ability to get out of a chair without making creaking noises. The sense of community is strong, the space greater and the ability to be in the bush or the beach within minutes unrivalled.
My mantra is:
It’s important to be lucky, but remember luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
My favourite advert is (and why):
'Any last requests' the Pixie Caramel advert from NZ in the 1980s. As well as being about an awesome chocolate bar, it’s the perfect example of realising the power of consistency. This ad, with what I’ll sympathetically assume was a very limited production budget, ran for years and I can still recite the script off memory 30 years later.
That consistency means this ad is always still front of mind when someone mentions chocolate.
Music and TV streaming habits. What do you subscribe to?
The Spotify playlist is a chaotic mix of grunge music from my youth and my son’s far more modern tastes. TV streaming is equally broad with most streaming platforms in - Kayo, Binge, Prime, Paramount, Disney+, Stan, Netflix. I’m a sucker for great drama like Succession or Industry through to the most puerile of comedy.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
I’m a pretty open book at work. I’ve actually been asked to stop sharing, particularly any of the stories that end up with a hospital stay.
In five years' time, I'll be:
I’ve given up predicting anything about what this industry will look like more than a year out, so I’ll say I’ll still be remembering a fantastic Rugby World Cup that I got to take both my sons to. They were finally old enough to have a pie and pint in the stands as the All Blacks won another title.
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