From Our Own Comms Correspondent

An antipodean outlook

Adam Vincenzini outlines the challenges and innovations within the world of Australian communications

After spending more than seven years in London, coming back home to Australia has been a real eye-opener. On one hand, this very young country continues to change at an incredible rate, becoming more diverse and interesting by the day. On the other, marketing and communications practices probably haven’t evolved at the same speeds as other parts of the world.

Australia is the sixth largest country in the world in regards to land mass but 53rd overall when it comes to population. This creates a series of interesting challenges and opportunities for the businesses operating here.

In the UK, you have 10 national newspapers, in Australia there is one. The distance between the major cities in Australia, coupled with the relatively small population makes it difficult to run national campaigns even though digital has become more of a force in recent years. This impacts the marketing budget and often forces dulled down regional campaigns to be run at the expense of groundbreaking national activity.

A byproduct of the big land mass, small population situation is that there are often only two or three brands operating in each sector.

For example, Australia is dominated by two supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, which hold about 80% market share. The same is true in many other sectors including banking and finance and consumer verticals.

Resulting from this (un)competitive landscape are marketing and communication innovation struggles. This is due not to the agencies who put sometimes very creative ideas forward, but rather to the decision makers at the bigger organisations who have more to lose than gain from truly innovative campaigns. Additionally, the big guys buy the challenger brands as soon as they start gaining traction – when challenger brands do start to chip away at the market share of the big brands, often on the back of different marketing and communications activity, they get snapped up by the very brands having a run at them.

Closely linked to the market size and geographical isolation, Australia in comparison to the rest of the world, has the tendency to wait for others to adopt things before it does.

Ironically, once something is adopted, it is embraced with widely open arms. Australia is second behind the U.S. for percentage of Facebook penetration versus overall population.

This tends to lead to a copycat mentality which sees brands and business virtually rip off campaigns that take place in other parts of the world because there is an overflow effect like there can be in Europe.

However, Australia has a ‘digital obsession’ that is not confined to just the northern hemisphere as brands and businesses have been blinded by the shiny lights of digital communications out here too. But, what you tend to see, and this is probably true of most parts of the world, brands (and their agencies) want ‘digital ideas’ as opposed to ideas that can work across digital platforms. This is something that will settle down in time but it is an issue that is holding back the genuine creativity that resides on these shores.

This isn’t a negative overview of the marketing and communications landscape in this country. It simply highlights the many challenges the marketing and communications community faces in a market of this size, population and location. Like all things, the cream will eventually rise to the top.

Adam Vincenzini is the managing partner of Kamber, a newly-launched content marketing and social media agency based in Melbourne