CMO Spotlight
Transformation, leadership and being bold: Lahnee White, CMO of G’Day Group, on the “best job in Australia”

Welcome to ADMA’s Spotlight, where every month we’ll be speaking to some of Australia’s leading CMOs to hear what makes them tick. This month, we’re talking to Lahnee White, CMO of G’day Group, on her journey so far, how her team is tackling the industry’s latest trends and her advice to the new generation of marketers.

To start off, can you tell us a little about your career to date?

I wanted to be a journalist, so I secured a role at a subscription newspaper and very quickly realised I was a terrible journalistic writer. But it wasn't all dire because I was able to leverage that experience and secure an internship over at the New York Post. That's where I really got my head around the marketing opportunity and cemented my love affair with the category.

Very early on, I focused on gaining as much experience as I could. I think you reach a certain point in your career where you start to shift from being a skill-based marketer and garner enough expertise to really start to shape a unique selling proposition. This happened to me in my mid-20s, when I had spent nine years at Westpac, where I worked across multiple areas of the marketing department and was able to brand myself as more of a transformational leader rather than a skill based marketer.

Then I moved to Sportsbet, where I used the expertise I'd built around transformation. I was able to apply the idea of building constructs and structures of how people operate in mature environments, and use it as a way for that business to go from a scale up business to a really mature business. At the same time, I was able to get some learning around how you operate in a digital-first business.

When I left Sportsbet, I was really clear that I wanted to be a CMO and that brings me to today - I think I have the best job in Australia. I work for G’day Group, we are one of Australia's leading tourism businesses. My job is to get people to go away, create memories and have this incredible time with their family and friends.

It’s a really broad remit, where I not only oversee the entire Group marketing function, but am responsible for the end-to-end function for the G’day Parks business, which is our licensed park network and digital booking platform. Under my guidance, we’ve seen double digit growth every year.

What have been a few of your professional highlights along the journey?

I've stepped into effectively overseeing this business, G’day Parks, end-to-end and that’s been a career highlight, especially as I came in with no experience of running any business. But I knew that as I moved towards my career goal of wanting to become a CEO, I needed to get that experience under my belt.

I have an incredible team around me. We've done things like getting Robert Irwin as one of our ambassadors before he took his next big step with “I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!”. It was a bit risky, because we didn't know how he was going to land with the Australian public, but it's worked really well for us.

Another career highlight is from my Westpac days - growth comes from not just doing your job, but what you do outside of your role as well. There was an opportunity at Westpac to do a secondment into an Indigenous community up in Queensland. So for about six weeks, I was seconded to a community 16 hours north of Cairns called Lockhart River. The original plan was to think about big transformational business changes that we could have in that community. But when I got there, I realised we needed something more manageable.

Instead, we set up micro-businesses in the region, like laundromats and taxi services based on who had cars. It’s something I absolutely loved and it had a really positive impact on that community.

How important is maintaining and growing your marketing skill set in today’s marketing environment? How do you approach this for you and your team?

I think about it on a couple of different levels. The first is around your market level upskilling. To be a really great marketer, you need to understand the context in which your customer is living. For example, in our industry, we're in the business of getaways but we know there are massive cost of living pressures right now. Holidays are seen to be discretionary spend and that's the first thing to go for most families when times get tough. But our marketing team understood the challenge and saw it as an opportunity and we realised we’re actually a value-based holiday choice. For example, for customers who used to go on an international holiday, we've got glamping tents - the diversity of our product is really strong.

The second level is business upskilling. No marketing team is an island. They need to make sure they understand the pressures and the opportunities that exist in the other departments and how you work together to unlock the opportunity for the broader business. So for us, we partner really closely with our operations team.

Finally, of course, there’s marketing. You need to know your own craft. For us, we talk a lot about owning your own development and being the master of your own career. We run something called the “Golden Ticket” programme. Team members can think about what development needs they have or where there might be a gap in their knowledge. It’s essentially like Shark Tank where people pitch for different development conferences or course opportunities. So they have the chance to win investment in their career that way.

We also make sure we leverage our partners. They're experts in their field and they've got their finger on the pulse in areas where we don't, so we make sure we're leaning on them. There are our industry partners like ADMA, who are experts in their field. It’s important to make sure you're tapping into that knowledge and acknowledging that you don't need to do it on your own.

What is one thing you wish you learned earlier in your career?

That there is always a window. Like everybody, I’ve faced a lot of setbacks in my career. At the time, it can feel really hard.

But what I've learned is that that door might have closed on that particular opportunity. But those that are going to succeed are those that very quickly identify where the window is, and they have the courage and the curiosity to find it. When you're faced with adversity, find opportunities for greatness. Most of the time they'll show up somewhere you hadn't expected it to.

What is going to have the biggest impact on marketing over the next few years? How are you preparing for those changes?

AI is absolutely a game changer. It's a complex trend that's really changing how we operate. Like a lot of companies, we've been using AI for a long time in our business, but the main game changer is generative AI.

My team were really hustling to want to know more, but frankly, it's so complex and we didn't really know where to start. So the first thing that we did was engage a company called Time Under Tension. They gave us a common understanding of what generative AI is and what it looks like in the marketing space. Then we ran a workshop to ideate how we could bring this technology into how we operate.

We're building a very specific marketing assistant tool so we can start to use AI end-to-end in our campaign process. We're also looking at other customer-facing tools like AI journey planning, and we were one of the first adopters of Microsoft’s Copilot.

Another trend to highlight is the rapid diversification of martech. We spend a lot of time thinking about buy versus build in terms of our technology architecture.

What do you think are the biggest challenges confronting marketers today?

As a team, we all have a responsibility for creating a culture and environment that is going to continue to attract the best talent and retain the best talent. So making sure you've got a value proposition for yourself, for your existing employees and also potential employees, is important. We recently did an organisational design exercise where we asked the team what their development plan was. Through that, we shaped an organisation design that not only met the business needs, but met the needs of our high performing talent.

The other one, more specifically in a marketing context, is the diversification of marketing. We know that customer expectations have evolved, and we know that we need to understand all the different interactions that customers have with us. We use research to dive into what motivates them, what their behaviours are, and think about all of the different touch points. We've mapped out every interaction that we might have with a customer, and what our proposition might look like through all of that.

What’s the best piece of advice you would give to a university graduate starting their first role in marketing?

Be bold. Be bold in how you show up and in how you pursue your career. Be willing to take the risks and really hustle for an outcome. In my career, I've taken risks by putting my hand up for new opportunities, even when I felt not quite ready. It can also look like taking risks in terms of working across different industries. Don't pigeonhole yourself into one particular role - be willing to think about the expertise that you have and how you can start to apply that into new categories. Let your career take you to new places.

Why are organisations like ADMA so important for the wider media and marketing industry?

There is a team of experts at ADMA that, quite frankly, can do so much that my team can't. For example over at ADMA, particularly in the regulatory space, you've got this panel of experts who understand the context and can translate that into what is a meaningful way forward for marketers. If you get things wrong, particularly in the regulatory space, there are large repercussions in terms of financial penalties. Leaning on organisations like ADMA is really valuable.

I’ve also talked a lot about upskilling and the development of teams - ADMA is at the forefront of that through all of their courses. We need to tap into that so that teams can continue to be at the forefront of thinking when it comes to technology or data-driven decision making.

Is there an example of a really well executed data-driven campaign (or partnership) that you admire? What made it stand out for you?

We love contextual based marketing, and one of the big winners for us is a recent AAMI campaign called, “AAMI’s Warning Spots”. This campaign used Spotify ads and geotargeting to pinpoint drivers where there might have been accidents in the past on the Great Ocean Road. It served up contextual warnings as customers were driving down the road listening to their Spotify, saying like, “There's some tricky bends coming up ahead. Just be careful as you drive through here,” and it was delivered through Spotify in real time. To me, that’s understanding consumer behaviour, which is driving and listening to Spotify, and AAMI, who are about preventative measures, being able to identify where there are hotspots and deliver a message in a preemptive way through a channel that consumers are actively engaged with. I think they did a remarkable job.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I have two kids, so therefore most of my life revolves around being a mum to them. I love watching them play sports on weekends and doing all those things, but as I've gotten older, I've started getting better at rediscovering some of the things that I loved doing when I was a bit younger. I've recently taken up netball, we play twice a week, and mums on the court really bring out their wild side. I also love reading so I balance that healthy dose of adrenaline with reading.