Page 13 - Adnews magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Anathea Ruys’ return to Australia
After eight years, first in Asia and then the US, in powerhouse media business leadership roles, Anathea Ruys’ triumphant return to Sydney as CEO of UM Australia transpired to be less than auspicious.
“At the same time we were starting to see some green shoots. I remember having these wonder- ful conversations with people about coming back to the office and what might that look like, that respected that we were in a changed world and all of those sorts of things.
“Then, bang! The second lock- downs happened. So my first few months were certainly all about listening, but also very much about just helping people to keep func- tioning, keep doing what they needed to do in these really trau- matic, difficult times.”
Birth of a media
agency career
A warm, down to earth, engaging personality, Anathea’s career experience over the past 30 years has been diverse.
She has held senior level roles (see breakout Career Highlights Prior To Current Role) across the communications spectrum, includ- ing content, publishing, activation, PR, advertising and media. Her industry experience spans FMCG, beauty, retail, auto, gaming, tech- nology, telco, alcohol, finance, con- fectionery, oil and government.
But at the beginning of her media agency career, coming from maga- zine publishing, “I had no real idea what media agencies were all about,” Anathea laughs. “I hadn’t grown up in that space. I went to run what I thought was going to be a PR agency inside a media agency that was work- ing a lot for Unilever at the time.
“But really my job was to look at the challenge that the brand - whatever the brand was - had and say: `Well, how can we work with the media teams to do some differ- ent things, to connect with people? I mean, it was really that simple.
“We did a lot of what we now call experiential and activation work. This is where we started really doing integrated sponsor- ships. So for me, that was the start of the career I have now in this industry - based around collabo- rating through the agency.
“It suited by my personality. I like to work with a lot of different people, so I’ve never left that.
“When I came into the role at UM, it was very much a part of
A
t the height of the strictest COVID lockdown period in NSW, in early
April last year, Anathea Ruys was taken from Sydney Airport by police with the aid of military personnel to her hotel room to ensure she didn’t “abscond”.
She then spent two weeks locked in the pokey hotel room, with meals left on a tray at the door. Welcome back.
Of course, it was a quarantine scenario familiar to hundreds of travellers arriving in Australia at the time, but a shock to the system, nonetheless.
Despite the less-than-salubrious homecoming
(and being separated from her husband and teen-
age sons, who were still finishing up business and schooling in LA, for longer than expected - more
of that later), upon her “release” Anathea says she
was immediately struck by the strength of the industry.
“In the year before I came back I was concerned about the Australian market because it was coming off the back of devastating bushfires, floods, and then Covid,” she recalls.
“But I seriously underestimated the strength of the market here. There seems to be a real resilience around our industry. I know that that’s not consistent across all sectors and groups, but I was and am still really impressed.
“It’s always been a market that really punches above its way in terms of creativity and the kind of thinking that goes on.
“And I can tell you there is a real celebration of Aussies in the US market. We have a really excellent reputation for being broad thinkers, no matter what part of the business we are working in.”
The adrenaline bubble burst
Despite the strength and resilience she experienced in the Australian market on her return, Anathea found “a real fragility around how people were experiencing the world in general: about what work means, how work into interacts with non-work or your home life.
“There were these real blurring of lines. By April, 2021, when I returned, people were coming out of the adrenaline of the period of the first ... shock, if you like.
“At the start, we all went into that high intensity, fuelled by adrenaline, period where no-one knew what was happening. Clients didn’t know, we didn’t know.
“And so we see people started working incredibly hard, turning things around that you wouldn’t ordinarily do or need to do in short periods of time.
Then a year or so later, people were exhausted and fragile because we hadn’t worked our way out of that high adrenaline. You can’t live in that ... phase for that long.
Anathea Ruys
WORDS BY
JENNI GILBERT
www.adnews.com.au | September - October 2022 13