So what were some of the first things you then looked to fix and get right to bring that brand back to market?

I had a very strong opinion about that.

And that was NRMA had for many years here in Australia stood for help.

And they did this lovely little thing with their logo where N-R-M-A, the logo would spin around and spell H-E-L-P. There's a bit of lovely little four letters in the brand name, four letters in help.

And they'd stood for help for a long time.

And then for whatever reason, IAG had stopped using help as an equity for NRMA.

For me, it's just so obvious that A, there's beautiful heritage here, but also B, I mean, that's what people want in the category.

How did you balance the two of those? Because that's a real challenge.

How do you practically do that? How do you think about keeping your team creative?

Well, it's a few things.

I mean, your first question around how did I think about the team? So we had all the capabilities you need in a modern marketing team.

We had media.

We had marketing automation.

We had a fantastic operations team because it's a big beast, Telstra, and you've got to be really good at that.

But what we didn't have was creativity.

And how about your agency partners, Sprint?

Just explain that concept and how that contributed to the work that then happened.

Yeah.

So when I joined Telstra, I obviously had the chance to, to think about, like, what is the right agency model for a big telco brand like this? And, and, you know, we're very big by Australian standards.

We're probably not that big by UK or American standards, but yeah, we, we, we do about 600 briefs a year, so it is quite a lot of work, and as I said, there's a retail nature to telco.

I think, I think the thing I didn't wanna do was make the trade-off between creativity and scale.

So I think, I think it's tempting when you're a big client and a busy client, when you've got a lot of volume and you've got a lot of velocity, 'cause we had both, then I need an agency with the resources that can handle this, and often you trade off creativity for that, and I, I, I did not wanna, wanna do that.

I really wanted a independent creative agency that couldn't normally manage a bit of business this big.

Yeah

That's an example, I presume.

Yeah.

And I think what's interesting with that commercial, yes, that was my first commercial at Telstra.

So that was a pretty big deal for me.

But what I think is interesting about that one is we found a metaphor there.

to talk about cybersecurity.

And it comes at the point I made earlier that we're looking for simple, visual, powerful ways to kind of talk about what can be pretty complicated topics like cybersecurity.

now

Christmas ad?

Ah, nice.

So we're a big retail category.

It's when we sell the most phones.

For me, it was a pretty obvious thing.

Let's make a Christmas ad.

You don't need to have your strategy and positioning sort of completely sorted out to work out that Christmas is about connecting and we're a company that does connection.

he describe the voice? How would he describe how the voice should be?