Tom Gunter is Co-Founder & Head of New Markets at Avid Collective. He started his media career in Sydney working publisher and agency side before starting at Avid Collective. Having helped scale the Australia offering he has moved back to the UK to launch the business in London.
Who is your digital hero?
John Matthews, Executive Director Advanced Advertising at Foxtel Group Australia, previously CEO of dgm.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
John was one of the early drivers of most performance channels over in Australia from search to affiliate. His impact in growing those channels in Aus has create a very healthy industry there, and one that I massively benefited from in my early years in digital over in Sydney
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
The main reason I see him as as a hero is seeing and learning how we engaged with people. A real “people-first” operator John’s networking in the media industry is second to none, but he does it in a way where he always ensures someones benefiting from the conversation and not just taking a Friday afternoon out of the office for the sake of a jolly.
There’s a huge number of now very senior individuals in Sydney who have benefited from John’s empathy, training and time and I think media can always always benefit from more people like that
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
The current inbalance of advertising spend in the industry is something that we need hero(es) plural to solve. The continuing decline in spend to TV/publishers/radio as more and more spend goes to tech platforms can only lead to a less diverse market, with the big 5 having more and more leverage with advertisers.
The sad truth is we aren’t far away from losing many incredible businesses who depend on advertising who have shaped culture and entertainment in the past 50 years.
We have to find a way for advertising solutions to be more effective and more accessible across these other channels and help balance investment so that these business can survive and thrive.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
My favourite achievement came a couple of years ago at Avids Christmas party. After several years of running the start-up hamster wheel I walked into the office to see 30 excitable colleagues ready for an epic day off the tools to celebrate the year we had.
It was incredible to just take a step back and realise that all the hard work together had got us to a place where we were such a big group that had done some amazing work together. Its probably not a personal achievement so much as a personal experience but I always look back fondly on that moment of thinking “Wow, look where we got to”.
