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.
Tim Debenham: sales director, Victoria at JOLT
Time in current role/time at the company:
I’ve been with JOLT for just under two years. I think I was the 11th employee; we’re sitting at around 55 people internationally – it’s been an incredible couple of years of growth.
How would you describe what the company does?
JOLT’s helping drive the transition to zero-emission transport, by providing free and fast, sustainable electric vehicle charging in metro areas across Australia, as well as New Zealand, and soon Canada and further northern hemisphere markets.
Enabling this is our market leading, 100% digital out-of-home advertising product. Our network is growing incredibly quickly, capturing not only a broad, early adopter audience for advertisers, but with the rapid growth of EV adoption we also have a rich first party audience data that’s allowing us to launch some really exciting new ad products as we head into 2024.
What do you do day-to-day?
Given we’re still a relatively young business, each day is really diverse as we continue to build our sales team, operations, as well as our business more broadly.
First and foremost, there’s the areas you’d expect and what I’ve grown to love from my time in media; connecting brands with our unique product and rich audiences. My favourite part of the job is sharing our story and vision with agency partners and clients. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive! We have such a new and unique set of products that every day is really different as we custom-build our solutions to deliver results for our partners.
Define your job in one word:
Multi-dimensional.
I got into marketing/advertising/media/tech because:
Like a lot of people I speak with in our industry, I kind of fell into media after spending four years working towards my Commerce degree and then another year completing my Honours degree/thesis in brand management at Deakin Uni.
After already delaying the inevitable and the need to pull the trigger on my career, a good friend who was working at Mediacom at the time set me up with an interview for a media assistant role. I had no expectations or assumptions about what the media industry would bring; all I knew coming out of uni was that I wanted to work with brands and connect them with audiences and ultimately customers. I was fortunate enough to land the role, and here we are today, 15 years later!
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?
It’s both a challenge, but also what attracted me to the role – it’s being a challenger brand in a really competitive out-of-home space, with lots of large, successful rivals.
While we’re building, we work really hard on clearly establishing our positioning at JOLT and our priority is to help take brands and agency partners with us on this exciting journey. What’s been most rewarding has been both the initial appetite to work with us, but also now the re-engagement and retention across dozens of new clients with JOLT.
What’s the biggest industry-wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
I’m looking forward to the day where we as an industry are more advanced in planning, buying and offering more sustainable media solutions. Most businesses on both sides of the media industry have made pledges to be scope 1 and 2 carbon neutral by 2025, but it’s the scope 3 emissions we can all have a direct influence on today by making more informed choices.
Who has been a great mentor to you and why?
I’ve been fortunate to have some incredible mentors and friends who I’ve learnt from, and have helped me forge my path in media. The late Peter ‘Murph’ Murphy was incredible for me earlier on, as have been Peter Zavecz, Simone Dalla Riva, Kim Carollo and Sam Harris.
Words of advice for someone wanting a job like yours?
What you put in is 100% what you’ll get out of it. Be patient and don’t do it half-hearted. Get yourself in a positive situation and have your bigger picture in mind.
If I wasn't doing this for a living, I'd be:
Living somewhere far warmer than Melbourne and playing golf three to four times a week.
My mantra is:
Healthy body, healthy mind. An oldie, but a goodie.
My favourite advert is:
One of my all time favourites is a Nike commercial from 2013, featuring Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.
Perhaps it’s because I love my golf, but I think it’s a really clever ad, one that captivates the audience for a full 60 seconds through utilising two of its biggest and most successful brand ambassadors. The TVC cleverly displays Nike’s personality and looking back, is a really nice moment in time where their careers intersected, a ‘passing of the mantle’ if you like, and further cemented Nike as a leader in golf globally.
Music and TV streaming habits. What do you subscribe to?
Currently Spotify, Kayo, Netflix and Stan.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you:
My first ever job was an eye-opener – as a 16 year old, picking up the rubbish at the MCG a couple of times each weekend after the AFL in winter and cricket in summer with a few mates!
In five years' time I'll be:
JOLT’s trajectory is rapidly rising and I’m really excited at what the future holds. We’re just about to start further building our local Melbourne sales team, so in five years I’ve no doubt we’ll be a really successful, high performing team – we’ll be a significant 5-CAP offering, underpinned by a huge first party data offering inline Australian compounding EV sales and JOLT customer growth over that time.
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