John: Today I’m in Melbourne and I’m joined by Paul Baron, who is a digital advisor, consultant, and strategist. Paul has considerable leadership experience in technology, digital marketing, social media, and content areas, particularly in government consumer marketing in a tourism context. In fact, I’ve known Paul for well over a decade. For fifteen years, he was the man who ran Visit Victoria’s digital presence and grew it as the times rapidly changed. He’s also the President of the Australian Chapter of the International Federation of IT Travel and Tourism and has recently become a member of the Melbourne Angels Investor Group, which works with a range of startups in both the travel and digital technology spaces. Today we’re going to have a really interesting conversation about Paul’s life and, most importantly, what he sees happening in this world of profound digital disruption. Paul, welcome to Customers Matter.
Paul: Thank you. Thanks, John.
John: You began your career by studying IT, and people will identify a subtle Kiwi lilt. Tell us a little bit about your career path, how you chose the path you chose, and some of the twists and turns on the way.
Paul: John, I studied in New Zealand in Otago. When I graduated with a degree in economics—though I did take some computer science—I came to Melbourne seeking my fortune. I figured if I failed, I could always sneak back home and pretend that I’d been overseas on holiday. I came here with a suitcase, and my Dad lent me some money to buy a suit. My first job was with a small consulting company doing a lot of regional consulting. Half my job was looking after the company computers. This was back in 1988, so it was quite early. I was doing business plans for biotech companies while also doing a lot of computer system work. My big break was going to work for BP, where they were looking for someone who spanned the gap between business and technology. That has been the sweet spot in my career.
John: So, economics. Did you graduate as an economist, in effect?
Paul: That’s right. Funnily enough, it was BP who invested in my technology skills because they wanted people who could make that bridge. They sent me on all sorts of programming courses, and I worked on a C++, Informix, and DDSQL system in the UK for six months.
John: Right, so you were a code monkey?
Paul: I was a coder for a while. It was fascinating and I am very thankful for the time with BP. I was working in the retail part of BP, and we were rolling out forecourt systems and back-office systems for what was then Food Plus and is now BP Express. These are franchise systems where you run the shop using a “business in a box” model. Your ordering and reporting systems are all there. It was those systems that I was working on with a great bunch of people.
John: It is interesting because, nowadays, point of sale tying back into your CRM systems is core to the single customer view.
Paul: It is. Interestingly enough, in those days we had a bank of modems that rang the service stations overnight and pulled back the sales data. We could then start to do analysis on people who bought milk with petrol. In those early days, we were also thinking about shop layouts, and all of that data was used for that purpose.
John: So this was really trying to predictively model what people might buy and how to shape the layout of the store to make it more alluring for them to add to their purchase?
Paul: Exactly right. But all good things come to an end. After five or so years with them, I wanted to go exploring and I went to Italy to do sculpture in Florence. My then-girlfriend was there as well, so we had an adventure and it was good fun. As often happens, we broke up. That’s a funny story, really. I ended up working in London for a bit, and then I came across an idea for a startup. It was 1994, so it was a little too early for a startup. It was an online space for IT contractors and professionals—a job bulletin board driven by content and stories for people who wanted to work in IT contracting. I had my own first web startup at that point.
John: Super interesting. It was probably just as someone was starting to think about Monster in America or job boards like Seek. But as you say, in ’94, the browser was probably still Netscape.
Paul: It was pretty ordinary. You were still debating how much graphics, if any, you should use on your site because they slowed it down so much.
John: So what happened with that venture?
Paul: I must say, I think of it like an MBA. It cost me as much money and took as much time, and in those days it was really hard to commercialize models. Many recruitment companies would advertise in The Australian newspaper. They’d spend an arm and a leg, and that was where you advertised. But I went around to try and sell advertising in the digital space and they said they were doing their own thing with websites and were not looking to advertise online. It was very hard to monetize. I got a couple of people who were prepared to sponsor the environment, but this was before listings of real estate became common. If you think about how well that’s done now.
John: So you finished your virtual MBA by running out of petrol and saying you needed a real job. Is that what happened?
Paul: That’s exactly right. The great thing is it set me up with a bunch of digital skills at the beginning of when many companies and organizations were developing their web presences. I eventually moved into government work.
John: How did that happen and what happened from there?
Paul: I had some good friends at a company called SMS Consulting in those days, which ultimately turned into things like Sausage before Sausage disappeared. I could see a lot of changes there.
John: Was it acquired ultimately by Melbourne IT? I remember SMS Consulting.
Paul: They were bought by Sausage, but then someone else bought them. They were quite a big IT integrator at one stage. I believe they still exist. I should be more knowledgeable about this. Funnily enough, a lot of the alumni have gone off and run consulting companies. SMS in the ‘90s had a famously good culture. They were a group that provided bright people to help with big changes. They were doing a lot of work with Telstra, which is where I first started working with them. They would give you the best and brightest, and they’d often embed themselves in the team to implement changes.
John: So what was your role there and how did that lead to the next chapter in your career?
Paul: In terms of digital, I was doing work for Planning and Heritage, creating their early websites online. One of the things I did was the online directory for planning schemes. At that point, Victoria was digitalizing the State Digital Map Base. There was a lot of activity in that space. My focus was on the consumer-facing websites.
John: And what year are we talking about now? The early 2000s?
Paul: It was probably ’96, ’97, or ’98. Around that time.
John: Victoria was out of the blocks early with the Lands Department and geospatial mapping.
Paul: Yes. There was also Heritage, so you had a lot of heritage data. In those times, you had internal systems that were just starting to speak to external systems. There was a lot of Lotus Notes around, and we were plugging in Lotus Notes databases and sending that data into the world, which provided the ability to look up databases.
John: And were you overseeing the technical solution or what exactly was the nature of your role?
Paul: In the early days, I was executing the work. But through ’96 to ’99, you saw the evolution of many companies delivering web services as demand grew. I started off building websites, but then I transitioned into managing the procurement of digital agencies for much larger projects.
John: As an insourced resource from SMS to the government?
Paul: That’s right. I was an expert acting as a consultant to look after digital strategies and the execution of projects through other people, which led to my first piece of work with Tourism Victoria.
John: When and how did you become involved as the head of digital for Visit Victoria? That was a role that ran for about fifteen years.
Paul: My first introduction to Tourism Victoria was under Jeff Floyd. They worked very hard to land about a seven-point-two million dollar budget for a program to make Victoria digital in a tourism sense. That was in September ’99. I knew the Project Director through SMS and he asked me to come and help with this large project because I knew about digital agencies and procurement. It was always going to be outsourced.
John: Back in that time, the tourism marketing campaign that put Victoria at the forefront of tourism engagement was about to roll out. That would be the Jigsaw campaign, am I right?
Paul: That’s right. The thinking behind the Jigsaw campaign was really more the mid-Nineties. A lot of the early thinking happened prior to my arrival around the Roy Morgan Value Segments, focusing on creative opinion leaders. This was under people like Don Richter, Durana Wern, and Bob Annells. There was a range of things they had to do, including rationalizing the regions and positioning Melbourne. They were very data-driven. They measured branded attributes and realized that no city in Australia owned themes like romance, food and wine, or arts and culture. The plan was to position Melbourne and Victoria as a premium destination to attract the premium market. We cared about spend rather than visitor numbers. The plan was to attract high-spending visitors by associating the brand of Victoria as premium. The target was often professional women aged between fifty and sixty, typically in Sydney, who love food, wine, arts, and culture. You position Melbourne as a romantic destination with black-and-white ads and feature the premium shopping and culture to own that space in their minds. That’s what the campaign tried to do. More importantly, they measured the impact of that campaign. Between ’97 and 2007, you could follow graphs of how they owned those branded attributes compared to competitors.
John: What I find interesting about this is that it was a battle for hearts and minds, and it was data-driven from the beginning.
Paul: Absolutely.
John: So what was the digital dimension to this and how did the digital platform evolve over those fifteen years?
Paul: That’s a good question. Even in those days, with that sum of money, we looked toward the personalization of experience through CMS platforms like Allaire Spectra. It’s hard to believe now as we’re still struggling with that. This was a massive project with high industry expectations. There were many examples of failed projects of this scale at that time, and it was a long, eighteen-month process. We launched it successfully, but certain things were very complicated. There were several new innovations before the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) existed. We were the first state where operators would log onto our system, create a listing, upload photos, put themselves on a map, and pay with a credit card to appear on our website.
John: Because there was no Airbnb or Stayz back then, this was really the government creating a marketplace using digital platforms.
Paul: That’s right. In 2001, early local accommodation booking companies were just one or two people. There were several overseas operators but not much locally, and we tried to partner with them.
John: So there was a recognition at Tourism Victoria that you needed to enable the operators to connect with consumers online. You guys were creating a marketplace using digital tools.
Paul: I think you’re spot on. It is wrong to think of the project solely as a seven-million-dollar spend on a website. The website was one component, but a significant goal was to raise the digital literacy of the industry. In regional Victoria, we had many small businesses without much of a digital footprint.
John: Many people don’t appreciate that the tourism industry is ninety-plus percent SMEs. There’s a lot more market failure because they don’t have the aggregative back-office systems that allow for these initiatives. That’s probably why the government got involved.
Paul: Subsequent to that, from 2009 to 2013, we were still working on trying to raise the level of literacy in small business digital areas. It is multi-faceted, involving booking systems, websites, and social media. I was recently involved in a case study for Tourism Ireland, who are struggling with that. I suspect if you talk to regional tourism bodies today, they are still talking about how to raise the digital literacy of their products.
John: What were some of the bigger shifts that you saw during that fifteen-year period? What are you proudest of in terms of the impact you were able to make?
Paul: For me, there were many highlights. If you are in the space where tourism and digital intersect, it’s a huge amount of fun. I probably stayed there too long because it’s so hard to leave. In the early days after 2001, the focus was on traffic. We did tremendously well in terms of building up audience share organically. Optimization of the website was my primary focus.
John: How big an audience did you manage to build?
Paul: We had the largest share of any state audience, and that was a matter of pride. It was an ongoing joke around the executive team that online was constantly beating records. In those early days, visitors weren’t driven so much by campaigns; optimization was critical. These days, it is much more campaign-driven with a far bigger focus on paid traffic.
John: You architected a strategy that had disproportionate digital attention through search optimization.
Paul: That is true, but we also spent more than anyone else on content because content drives traffic. We had a team of four editors working constantly. We believed that content was the key to visitor experience and driving traffic. The internet is a great niche engine. One thing the optimization process showed us was that people don’t just enter on the homepage; they land across all of our broader content. People might be interested in a flower show in Ballarat, a vintage car issue, or pet-friendly accommodation. You can use content to drive a very broad range of traffic.
John: A couple of very significant things happened on your watch: the invention of the iPhone and the rise of social platforms. What happened when social and mobile came along?
Paul: That’s a great question. Around 2006 or 2007, we started to see social making an impact. We had a campaign where we used social media for the first time. People were sensitive about it in those times. We spent about six months convincing the Minister and those above the CEO, Greg Hywood, that it was okay for us to get into social media.
John: And the fear was?
Paul: You can’t control social media, and government is used to controlling the agenda. People are used to the idea of social media now, but at that stage, we were used to pushing our message without direct engagement or potential negativity. We knew we had to moderate stuff in a twenty-four-seven situation. If we were going to moderate, it needed to appear instantly. People don’t like to give you content and have it appear weeks later.
John: So how did you deal with this?
Paul: We decided we didn’t necessarily have the resources to cope, so we externalized the moderation of the content. Greg Hywood personally briefed the moderators. He had been a journalist at The Financial Review and knew content. What you posted went up straight away, and the moderator could then decide to remove content after it had been posted.
John: That seems like a lot of heavy manual moderation. How did you end up reconciling how social platforms and government tourism agencies relate to each other?
Paul: That campaign gave us training wheels. We had two significant issues where posts had to be taken down, but it gave us the confidence to proceed. Shortly after, we appointed the first Social Media Manager and Community Manager in the Victorian Government and had a focused strategy signed off at the board level. We took everyone on the journey of understanding that you don’t have control. Straight away, social led into data. Our then Social Media Manager, Phil Lees, was tremendously strong with data.
John: What were you discovering through that data?
Paul: It was often an insights-driven process. When people engaged with us on social media, we could determine they were in Sydney and later see when they posted from Melbourne. The challenge we had was having a lot of data but struggling to turn those insights into action. I think that is still a problem for marketers today, but the platforms are improving.
John: Tell me about mobile.
Paul: We were always trying to innovate. We had a B&B guide written in WAP in 2001, which was very simple HTML for phones. Our first experiment was probably used by three people. Next, we worked with Telstra on i-mode, the Japanese version of mobile devices. We did an experiment with them and probably six people used it. Then the iPhone turned up and everything changed. However, early experiments with apps generally weren’t successful because people weren’t inclined to download them. It wasn’t until the mobile web took off that traffic went through the roof.
John: When did that really start to kick in?
Paul: Probably 2010. I remember talking to Mike Howser, the current head of Digital at Visit Victoria, about when mobile was going to overtake desktop. Around that time, Google started talking about designing for mobile-first.
John: How does a business reconcile social platforms, its own website, CRM, and mobile to engage an audience?
Paul: These days, you need a solid marketing technology infrastructure. You want to track someone from their first engagement through to purchase and post-purchase advocacy. Toward the end of my time with Visit Victoria, the focus moved from email-driven marketing to building a profile around social identities using a Data Management Platform (DMP). This allows you to build a picture of a customer based on their engagement with advertising or your website. Marrying your advertising model with social profiles allows you to build a fantastic picture of your customers.
John: Are these anonymous profiles or are you starting to see who these people are?
Paul: Once you connect them to a social profile, you can see quite a bit. A local company, Lexer, has its DNA in social. They started with a social listing platform for customers like Qantas but realized they could use social profiles to integrate with advertising models to target customers.
John: In effect, you can identify behaviors online and then remarket to them. Is that how it works?
Paul: That’s true. It can also be applied to optimize customer experience. In some recent work I did with the Department of Economic Development, we used the Salesforce platform to manage their database of thirty thousand businesses. They can match anonymous advertising data with business profiles to communicate regulatory or policy information to specific segments and track responses. With platforms like Salesforce, you can build a picture of a person so that when they call, the system pulls up all their engagements with the department—grants received, advertising seen, and previous calls. This provides a clear picture of the relationship and the customer’s needs.