What you need to know:

• This year’s Australian Marketing Institute Excellence Awards recognised two emerging leaders from the financial services space: ANZ strategy and proposition manager, Alice Callaghan (Emerging Marketer of the Year) and Move Bank marketing manager, Matthew Farnham) Emerging Leader of the Year).
• Both highlight the sheer volume of data, commerciality and diverse skill set required to be a successful modern marketer as key learnings as they’ve stepped up the career ladder.
• Mentorship, a willingness to lean in and “do something extra” and strategic career goals have been key drivers for Callaghan, who has been working with Treasury Wine Estates CMO, Kristy Keyte, to get out of her comfort zone and build her commercial acumen.
• Teamwork is meanwhile a driver for Farnham, who sets his team investigative tasks as a way of building knowledge, creativity and cut through as a small mutual bank.

The sheer volume of data, commercial nous and teamwork required to excel in marketing have been the biggest surprises for two emerging leaders honoured at this year’s Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) Marketing Excellence Awards. But even as they work to build out these skillsets and push the boundaries of what marketing can do inside business, both credit their career trajectories to marketing and business leaders who hired for aptitude and passion – then rewarded persistent curiosity to learn on the job.

Financial services institutions were certainly in the spotlight at this year’s gala awards, this time for an arguably more positive reason than the public scrutiny of recent years: Their investment into nurturing emerging marketing talent to become the next generation of leaders. Both Emerging Leader of the Year and Emerging Marketer of the Year trophies went to banking professionals: Move Bank marketing manager, Matthew Farnham, and ANZ Bank strategy and proposition manager, Alice Callaghan.

Neither winner actually grew up with a burning desire to study marketing. For Farnham, a stint as a teller at Suncorp Bank fed into being the bridge between the frontline and marketing teams and a decision to study marketing eight years into his career. For Callaghan, pursuing a fine arts career was replaced by a shift into PR, ultimately leading into agency roles and the eventual move client-side with ANZ and an increasingly diverse marketing portfolio.

But what both exhibit is an insatiable desire to learn, a preference for team collaboration, growing people leadership smarts, and an earnestness for exploring just how commercially impactful marketing can be.

AMI Awards Emerging Marketer of the Year: ANZ marketing strategy and proposition manager, Alice Callaghan

Callaghan saw the AMI Emerging Marketer of the Year award recognising not just the work a marketer is doing, but how they’re developing and growing themselves.

“That’s something I have always been very passionate about,” she told Mi3, noting a mixed career that started in fine art, moved quickly to PR, then advertising, agency and a decision to go client side.

“It was quite hard to get into marketing from the agency side. People are doubtful you can do it. But I always believed I could be,” Callaghan continued. “I worked on ANZ as a client before I moved across, which definitely helped. But the only thing that really helped was my hiring manager at ANZ, who was and is still a great mentor to me, looking beyond the hiring specifics. She was like, you come from agency, so I know you're efficient and hard working as anything. You have all the skills and aptitude. You've never done, X, Y and Z, but that's the stuff I’ll teach you. For example, I’d not done a business case, so she taught me how to do a business case. She said I had the drive, creativity, hard skills.”

Having gained a decade of campaign experience and now moved from execution to strategy, Callaghan said she wanted the AMI Awards judges to see how deliberately she’s worked to do “something extra” and lean in through her career to date.

“Where else can I stretch? What else can I do? Where else can I grow? I don't like to be stagnant. I like to learn constantly, and that's what I hoped they would be able to see,” she said. “I had all these career goals to get where I am now. I wanted to move into strategy; I'm a strategist. I wanted to move into marketing; I'm in marketing. I wanted to move into finance or something hard corporate; I did that. What do I do now? I spent a year trying to work out what was next, then trying to work on that.”

To do this, Callaghan has leveraged ANZ’s internal learning programs and also joined the AMI’s Mentoring Program for emerging marketers this year. She was paired with CMO of the Penfold's brand at Treasury Wine Estates, Kristy Keyte – a move reflecting their similar backgrounds as marketing generalists.

“We looked at my CV, and I said: You're a CMO. You're hiring me for a really senior role. What's missing? Where are the gaps? She said, okay, you've got all this experience, so you don't need to do any of that again. But what you're lacking is people management experience, and you need to show more commerciality. You understand the concepts, but you need to prove that now. And you need to start to inspire and influence, rather than do the work. You're a worker, and you need to start to get out of the work a little bit.”

A career mapping session with ANZ identifying five goals has since led Callaghan to a new role in a highly commercial oriented area focused on cost reduction, customer service and transformation.

“I had two or three jobs at the time, and I sat down with Kristy and said, what do you think? She said I was tempted to go back to the stuff I’d done but advised I needed to learn commerciality, how to do cost reduction, learn how cost and revenues work, how you can reduce costs to drive growth… my role now focuses on prioritisation and resourcing, annual planning and I’m trying to lean into leadership.”

It’s work Callaghan didn't initially realise could be in the purview of marketing. “I did not know how big marketing was. I do much more commercial proposition, user experience work. That's where I ended up working for the last four years,” she said. 

Future Leader of the Year: Move Bank marketing manager, Matthew Farnham

Farnham, meanwhile, fell into marketing after transitioning into a banking support role liaising between the marketing and frontline teams. He then completed a marketing degree and this year, became an AMI Certified Practising Marketer.

“The appeal was the practical side of it, and the commonsense approach; it's not rocket science. I was working full time and studying full time, and that was hectic, but knew there's a light at the end of that tunnel and knew I wanted to do this,” he told Mi3. “Marketing is fun and it's interesting. You get this sense of achievement, but you also don't have to be out for yourself. If you're a salesperson, you're a hunt and gather person. In marketing, you get the team, and you get to win as a team. And if you win, the whole organisation wins.

“The way I explain it to my team is: We're getting rewarded on the whole thing coming together, and your piece of it coming in. There's no ego, we have to win together.”

Having joined QBank as campaign and marketing manager, Farnham then switched to Move Bank and now leads a three-person marketing team. Primarily based in Queensland, Move started as the Railways Credit Union, part of Queensland Rail, and is a mutual bank based on a model of earning profit for members instead of shareholders.

In his submission for the Future Leader Award, Farnham talked about his philosophy developing his marketing team and what he wanted them to achieve. He also earned a glowing testimonial from chief digital officer, who oversees both marketing and IT at Move Bank.

“There's definitely a certain set of skills required in marketing and he knows that,” said Farnham. “He's got enough marketing knowledge to ask the right questions and then listen to what I'm saying and why I'm saying it. I feel very heard.”

Like Callaghan, Farnham pointed to the volume of data in use by marketers today along with commercial thinking as a huge learning curve as he’s progressed.

“The video we’re filming is not just being filmed because we think it'll be fun. There's a whole theory and strategy, and data behind why we're filming this video, why we're saying those things,” he commented. “For example, I’m doing a monthly update to the entire staff outlining all the things we did, here's why we did them, here's what that got us, and also here are some things we're thinking about.”

A marketing highlight was “very nearly Kim K crashing the internet in December because we had a market-leading growth saver rate”.

“Our website had never seen so much traffic, which is a great problem to have,” Farnham said, adding the growth saver product was number one in market at the time, gaining earned media kudos via stories through Canstar and Mozo. “A week and a half later, one of the execs came to me and said can we turn off the ads for the growth saver because it's killing us. Yet they’d been off for a week, the continued engagement was all organic.”

Right now, the dominant consumer insight to navigate is savings, budgeting and affordability. “One of the things we do is talk a lot about our offset product. If you've got the offset, are you using it effectively, and are you saving you money? There's a lot of education to do. We want your loan with us, but we also don’t want you to pay more than you have,” Farnham explained. 

“That’s a really important piece for me, because I’ve grown up in banking. I’ve constantly been shocked at what my friends don’t know about banking and what they don’t know about budgeting and that sort of stuff.”

With trust and brand perception super important to the banking industry, there’s also an emphasis on brand investment being pursued at Move Bank.

“There are ad platforms where brand is the only thing that performs and product specific stuff doesn't perform. With LinkedIn, for example, our product-specific ads do not perform but our brand stuff is working well,” Farnham said.

“As a mutual bank, we have a nice story. We are so small compared to a Commonwealth Bank, and we don't have the budgets of any other big player. So how do we tell that story in a way it's going to get cut through? We have a lot more of a challenge there, because we can't just throw money at the problem.”

A recruitment video shot entirely on an iPhone featuring staff who volunteered to be in the video and answer questions has proven another winning tactic.

“I was doing some hiring and the first four people I phoned screen had watched that video and said I think I understand who you guys are,” Farnham said. “You need to be creative, but also get your teams to tell you what they think you should be doing. I will set investigation tasks for my team to go away and research something, then come back and tell me what we should be doing. Then we build the plan.”