From launching Google Home to endless curiosity: Optus’ Cameron Luby shares his career highlights

In this month’s ADMA Spotlight, we chat to Cameron Luby, Head of Consumer Marketing at Optus, about his professional highlights, how he champions learning through doing, and the power of data-driven marketing campaigns.

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

You can pretty much divide my career into two halves - the first half is agency land. I started in media agencies, and ultimately moved to Naked Communications, which was an amazing place to learn, do great work, plus it was a lot of fun. After that, I moved to the US, where I worked for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, which is one of the top tier US agencies. 

From there, we get into the second half of my career, which has been in marketing. I moved to Google in San Francisco, and I was there for almost 10 years. But then I came back to Australia mid-Covid - I just wasn’t thrilled being in the US, so I brought my American wife and two American children back home. Since coming home, I was at Google for a year and have been at Optus for just over two years now, leading consumer marketing.

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

I'm lucky - I've had many professional highlights! All the significant moments in my career, where we've done great work and moved the dial, have all been about the people I had the chance to work with. I find you never really remember the finer details about work, but you do remember the way someone laughed, or the time someone said that thing that changed the way we all thought about a problem. Great people are the foundational highlights for me.

I certainly had that by working on projects for Coca Cola at Naked Communications, and at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, where I worked on many Super Bowl projects, where we were lucky enough to win Cannes Lions. 

At Google, I launched Google Home and ran Smart Home marketing globally for a while. Launching Google Home in the US and then in markets all around the world was a lot of fun. 

At Google in Australia, we won Campaign of the Year at the AdNews Awards for work we did with our AFL partnership. We also won B&T TV Campaign of the year, which I think is funny for a company that owns YouTube. 

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 feel like I'm constantly falling behind and only just keeping up! I'm fortunate enough to have access to experts who I can reach out to and learn from. Watching them work and learning directly from them is the way that I like to learn. I think, particularly with AI and technology and how fast it’s all moving, one of the best ways to continually learn is just by trying and doing. We’re doing so much experimentation, and I learn more from experimenting.

Aside from that, thankfully, we work in an industry where there's a lot of great resources and a lot of great partners, such as ADMA, that give you the ability to upskill the team and make sure that you're ahead of industry best practice. So, it’s a combination of leaning into the industry, and learning through doing.

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

I spent the first seven years of my career in media agencies. I loved my time there and it's a foundational part of the knowledge I have today, but I do wish I spent more time in different types of agencies exposed to different people. I ended up working in lots of different types of agencies, and it was an extremely valuable experience, but I wish I had been more intentional about that. My advice to anyone young, when they’re stumbling up the career ladder, would be to be endlessly curious.

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

I'm not the first person to say this, but I think AI is going to impact the way marketing is done in a number of different ways. Insight generation and content production are going to be really big ones here. 

For us, this is about learning through experimentation. There's a lot of work that we're doing now around how we use new technology for simple things like image generation, or to come up with and develop ideas where we previously wouldn't have had the resources. AI allows us to be creative and express the brand in new and different ways. That is something that's going to continue to evolve, and I'm excited to see where that goes.

In terms of preparing for those changes, it's about learning through experimentation. It’s about testing things, and if it doesn't work, you've just got to keep trying and pushing the boundaries.

What are some of the key regulatory developments that are in progress right now that you think will shape the future of data-driven marketing? 

Obviously, I think there's going to be an ongoing view of how marketers use data and the privacy implications of that. That's going to be an ever evolving landscape, for good reason.

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

There are two things. First, there’s the evolving way AI is being used across the industry, and by departments outside of marketing as well. As AI plays a more dominant role inside organisations this will naturally span across marketing, and it's going to be up to marketers to play a leadership role within their organisations as capabilities are built from within.

Secondly, which is specific to now, is driving ROI positive growth in a time where we know value matters more than anything else to Australians.

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

There are a few reasons. One, the opportunity for training and learning is so critical for the team, and it helps us know we've got the right skill set to be operating in a modern marketing environment. 

It's also about a sense of community. The fact we can go to events and the team can be a part of things beyond our own company is a really important part of career growth. 

Groups like ADMA are also capable of representing the whole industry. It can be challenging for individual people or teams to stand up in the industry, so having these bodies that are capable of doing that and share your collective interest is really important. 

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

There's one we’re working on at the moment that I’m proud of, and it's a campaign that's focused on demonstrating all the great things that Optus is doing around data security and then also network reliability. It’s a campaign that’s definitely not going to win any creative awards, but one that's based on deep understanding of data and how Australians feel about the Optus brand, and therefore what we need to do to build brand reputation.

The thing that I like about it is that it's not wildly creative. It's not a beautiful, stunning execution, but it is based on data telling us exactly what Australians need to hear from Optus. And the results that we see from that are really strong. It's just a good example of a campaign and a culture that is celebrating outcomes more than it is celebrating launches. 

Last of all, what do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I've got an eight year old and a five year old, so they're in that sweet spot right now where they think I'm just the best thing on earth. So I'm making the most of that, because I think when they turn 13, all of that's going to change. Spending time with them is my main thing. I'm also lucky because I've got a good group of friends, and we go out to dinner and watch sports together and that sort of thing. But I try to spend as much time with my kids and my wife as possible.