What you need to know:

• Crown Resorts has spent the last six months building out a brand transformation program to restore its tarnished brand and launched its new positioning and campaign in October based around elevating onsite experience away from the casino floor.
• Adam Ballesty, who was brought in to help deliver the brand and marketing work led by brand chief, Danielle Keighery, has brought his cross-category experiences restoring iconic Australian brands like Dunlop Volleys and Bundy Rum, to the task at hand.
• Despite the iconic status of Crown and its strong agency partners, buy-in and the human muscle to execute the rebrand was not there when Ballesty joined, prompting a significant internal exercise to operationalise the thinking and bring the rebrand to life.
• With the rebrand now in market, Ballesty is turning his attention to how best to consolidate and bring efficiency to Crown’s disparate marketing resources, brand and digital platforms to deliver more effectiveness.

Transformation addict

Adam Ballesty isn’t quite sure why he keeps ending up in transformational marketing roles where he works himself into the ground and needs six months off to recover.

“With Domino’s, I wanted to jump into a CMO role and be in retail, to have digital, and I wanted to have a fast-paced growth agenda. That job was it,” he says of the QSR marketing gig. But having spent 95 nights in the one hotel in nine months so he could work with his Brisbane-based team, as well as surviving the ups and downs of a food chain during the pandemic, he’d had enough.

“When I left Domino’s, I was going to have six months off work. I had worked myself into the ground, travelled way too much, missed too much kid’s sport. I literally took three weeks off,” Ballesty tells MI3.

“I came into Crown on a project while trying to figure out if I am more equipped for that transformational, shifting, rubric type of role. I met Danielle Keighery [Crown’s outgoing chief brand and corporate affairs officer], who talked about the role that was earmarked and that there were big things that needed to move quite quickly – strategy, structure, budget allocation, launching a new brand.”

Interest piqued, Ballesty initially took up a strategic project role in April, then moved into full-time EGM of brand and marketing role. He’s now spent the last six months helping the troubled Australian casino, entertainment and hotel operator realise a rebrand and positioning project aimed at restoring its tarnished reputation and elevating its experience-based narrative with Australian audiences. 

Since 2021, Crown has experienced plenty of downs, including a $450 million fine for breaking Australia’s anti-laundering and counter-terrorism laws and a clear missive from the NSW gaming regulator that it wasn’t suitable to hold a licence for its newly launched, $2.2bn Sydney casino. Yet there have arguably been wins too, including its $8.9 billion acquisition by the world’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone.

“I have never been the guy who gets the job because everything is going great and they want a steady pair of hands. I am disruptive, I do like big things, creating change with teams and through people. I love building careers,” Ballesty says. “So I’m constantly exhausted, hence why I thought maybe it’s this go fast, have a rest, go fast, that works for me.

“I am adoring and fascinated by this challenge at Crown. The reality of trying to do what we’re trying to do in six months was an absolute pipedream. The transformation and turnaround job for Crown's brand and business is going to take a long, long time.”

Brand rebuilding

Yet here Crown is, with a new brand platform in-market and a chosen North Star to pursue.

The rebrand work is the first to come out of Crown for a decade and orients around the group’s ability to deliver elevated entertaining, dining, lifestyle and luxury experiences across its three Australian properties.

As well as a refresh brand logo and custom typeface, Crown has adopted the creative idea of energising and uplifting experiences shifting the focus away from its casino floors and onto its entertainment offerings. This culminates in a 60-second film shot by Finch’s Christopher Riggert exhibiting emotive visuals of its onsite destinations and experiences across four major pillars – music, art, dining and entertainment – that leads into an anticipatory drumroll. The campaign carries the tagline, ‘Here’s where things get interesting’, and has gone out nationally across TV, print, online and out-of-home.

The integrated advertising campaign is complemented by a host of event and entertainment sponsorships and partnerships in Crown’s three core cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. For example, Crown is returning to the Birdcage Enclosure at this year’s Melbourne Cup Carnival, and is the presenting partner for the Taylor Swift / The Eras Tour in Sydney and Melbourne, with a host of complementary activations and promotions on the calendar.

“Crown is never going to be a brand where there are some out-of-home posters and a TV ad and everything goes, ta-da. It’s going to be followed up with new restaurants, sponsorships, new experiences,” Ballesty says. “Our whole new brand is about creating elevated experiences and being a great partner for the cities we operate in.

“We have to be a net contributor to the culture of those cities. We have to contribute to the communities we operate in, and we have to make people proud of working at Crown and going there as a centre of elevated experience and entertainment. Those are all fascinating, energetic terms.”

The plan is to hit hard between now and Christmas to generate much-needed brand momentum. But there is also an always-on, ongoing build to the campaign, utilising Crown’s owned channels, strong communications team with long list of ambassadors and friends, as well as media houses.

“We built out a 60-second film, knowing we were going to cut that up in many different shapes and sizes and talk to the verticals of food, entertainment, the pool – all these things. Over time, you will see that pushing out,” Ballesty says. “We’re also not an FMCG brand, so the weights on TV or digital are never going to be massive. But we are going to pick great cultural moments so we can push the message out in those elevated moments.”

Ballesty is confident the new film “can last for years”. “We just need to be smart about how we use it in post-production to drive certain stories,” he says. “And it’s going to be used at its best when we’re selling an action – new restaurant, new event, sponsorship. That’s where it really comes to life.

“There are 5.5m people living in Melbourne and they need to be reminded that Crown is still, and always will be, a world-class entertainment destination. We are going to have pop-up restaurants, we’re talking to great restaurants globally, rethinking different parts of the building and how we bring it to life.”

Relearning brand

Its something of an oxymoron that despite its iconic – albeit recently tarnished – brand status, Crown isn’t a business that has historically had to overtly invest in brand, Ballesty argues. When it came to orchestrating a repositioning of the brand to rebuild its reputation and elevate its narrative, budget, along with the team to execute it, simply weren’t there.

“Crown is an institution, and iconic Australian brand – just think about having the ex-Premier of Victoria saying Crown is the heart of the city. Over 24 years, this brand has defined itself,” Ballesty explains. “It’s a brand at its best when it’s a brand in action.

“So sitting in a room, hawking for the first time in my career and working to convince [top brass that] brand builds business has been – and still is – an interesting role for me to undertake. This is a brand that has invested almost inside the four walls with great success for many years. But Covid and everything that went on at Crown created a very different need for us to look outside the four walls and rebuild this iconic brand.”

In fact, there was quite some time where the only team focused on the brand and marketing agenda at a group level were Keighery, Ballesty and a seconded Andy Holmes, The Monkeys’ group business director.

“It was building out a SWAT team and driving this through the organisation,” Ballesty says. “There was no one on the ground to actually do this work to launch this thing. That’s fascinating right? Human beings are the ones that do the work.

“We have three locations and a very large marketing team, however they’re in the properties doing F&B promotions, casino and hotel promotions, they’re booking entertainment and shows. It’s a 24/7 operation, and there’s a communications team doing so much heavy lifting, plus social and digital teams. But to relaunch a brand like this, it’s like a muscle that didn’t exist. We had to build the team.”

On the bright side, Crown did have a stable of agency partners including The Monkeys and Maud, both part of Accenture Song, plus Initiative.

Another positive Ballesty found is in Crown’s private equity owner, Blackstone. One of the benefits he cites in the goliath owner is its internal strategic marketing arm, which includes former Australian Droga5 chief strategy officer, Jonny Bauer.

“We had allies within the system. But money from a PE company never comes for free. Pretty images and a hard selling marketing exec don’t really cut it,” Ballesty says. “It’s about facts and figures. It’s walking through the conversion funnel, demonstrating how brand [drives growth] and [what] this campaign’s role is. Having people like Initiative working through external data, helping paint that narrative was a vital part of bringing that to life and ensuring advocacy went into sponsorship.”

Binning the plan

For Ballesty, one of the most overused terms in business is ‘strategy’. When he got into Crown, he found a strategy discussed for some time but that was stop/start and lacked secured funding to come into fruition.

“We’ve needed to break that down into what are the things we need to do. We need to build advocacy for what we are doing, which meant a lot of time was spent articulating the from and to,” he continues. He describes the task as “operationalising the thinking”.

“I’ve needed to have an emphasis on building out a go-to-market strategy to bring all these things to life and which instills action. Coming in, getting it off the ground, pumping energy, optimism and some effort back into this process to get it live was critical,” he says.  

And like any good plan, the initial rebrand plan proved way too ambitious – and costly – to orchestrate. The original idea was to change the ‘spray’ firework icon in the Crown logo itself.

“The reality of putting scaffolding the size of the building in Sydney to replace a logo and spending hundreds of millions of dollars, then tackling warehouses full of Crown logos on butter, tissues, napkins, slippers and robes – the cost was astronomical,” Ballesty says. “It quickly went from revolution to evolution. I think we’ve got something that’s really beautiful.”

Ballesty heaps further praise on Blackstone for a commitment to “wanting outstanding things”.

“Everyone in the ecosystem really wants Crown to regain its crown – people who have been here a long time adore it, and the new people like me on the journey, really want to be part of that turnaround story,” he says. “There is a lot of passion and energy in the business to create this transformation.” 

Category hopping pays

Ballesty flags his cross-category experiences from FMCG (Diageo) to manufacturing (Pacific Brands) as critical learnings to carving a path forward at Crown.

“I don’t think I solve anything without a precedent: I need to be able to go what’s this like, what have I done, how does that work or who can I call,” he comments. “Crown is not dissimilar to relaunching Dunlop Volley into the market, or turnaround story of Bundaberg Rum. You can say all three are iconic brands that stumbled for one reason or another.

“Volley was about distribution and quality … We relaunched that, took it to US, put quality back in the shoe and reminded Aussies that Volleys are a bit of an icon.

“It was the same with Bundy. It was a terrific opportunity to remind Australians and also get it into a format they’re ready to drink.

“Crown is no different. This is a brand that when it opened at midnight had every socialite and politician in Melbourne there. It’s a brand that has those fired gas brigades up and down Southbank that to this day people say are amazing. This brand is full of excitement and joy. Part of my role is to bring that back to life for everyone.”

Infrastructure overhaul

With the first phase of rebrand out in market, Ballesty is turning his attention to marketing infrastructure and how to drive consolidation, consistency and efficiencies across Crown’s marketing ecosystem. The short to mid-term ambition is to bring order to Crown’s seven websites, two loyalty programs, 47 social handles and 52 sub brands.

“Digital infrastructure is a huge part of what I’m looking at, and the martech stack and how it plays out long term,” Ballesty says. “I’m as excited about operationalising a marketing system that delivers efficiency and effectiveness as I am about brand growth short and longer term.”

The ultimate aim is making smarter, more informed decisions and there aren’t groups going in different directions.

“There is only so much energy in an organisation and you have to be able to direct that. Resource of time, people and money is the scarcest thing we have,” Ballesty says. “We have to point it in the right way to get us the best outcome.” 

Ballesty admits he’s not short of budget to create Crown’s story of transformation over time and to show respect for the brand icon in a way that drives key brand assets and memory structures over time. But just as he mentors upcoming marketers today, he believes efficiency is a lesson well learned.

“Over my whole career, I’ve never met a marketer who has enough money. I work very hard to help them understand they have too much money and they need to do things efficiently to create effectiveness over time,” he adds.