Page 14 - Adnews magazine Sep-Oct 2022

Profil
Career Highlights
Seven years as Group Publisher at Pacific Magazines, responsible for the circulation and advertising targets across seven key titles, including
New Idea. While at Pacific, she also spent four years as Editor of New Idea magazine in New Zealand and Australia.
A 10-year spell running New Zealand activation agency Spark Activate, content division of PHD, an Omnicom Media Group (OMD) agency, working with clients as varied as Holden, Unilever, NZ Lotteries, Coca Cola and Vodafone.
Nearly two years spent as MD at Clemenger Harvie Edge.
From January 2012 - June 2014 she was MD of Mindshare, Melbourne, leading the team to new business wins in the Melbourne market including NAB, Nike and Origin Energy.
Based in Singapore, for nearly
three years Anathea was head of Omnicom’s Fuse Asia Pacific, where she focused on building a culture of sharing and collaborating with teams across the region including China, India, Australia and New Zealand and instigated a more global approach.
In January 2017, she moved to Los Angeles where, for four and a half years, she was Managing Director, Midwest & West, Carat USA and Dentsu agencies, overseeing the West Coast, Atlanta and Chicago Carat offices, along with all Dentsu agencies on the West Coast.
the organisation already. So I don’t think there’s been any major pivot in that sense.
“We all work really closely together. Most of us have known each other for quite some time. So we’ve, we’ve got an understanding of the way we each operate but it’s something you have to be work at on an everyday basis. You have to have a real focus on it because it’s the easiest thing to dissipate.”
Keys to Success
Throughout her career, the hallmark of Anathea’s business and leadership style and success has been her focus on people and workplace culture.
“My career has been based around building and leading strong businesses and creating powerful cultures across all facets of the marketing spectrum including Creative, PR, Content, Experiential and Media,” she says.
“Strong cultures are directly linked to successful businesses and I have invested heavily in creating work environments that enable teams to grow, learn and succeed behind a single-minded vision.
“I have a deeply held belief that the best work is delivered by integrated and collaborative groups and I am proud that in every role I have held I have built a single team from multiple specialisms and groups.
“[I see] my role is to create an environment where people can fix things and solve problems: if there is a challenge, how can we fix it, rather than saying that belongs with that team or over there.”
Indeed, Anathea regards as one of the most satisfying achievements in the role so far is that this year UM became the first agency in the media or advertising industry to become Family Friendly Certified.
“Being family friendly goes well beyond parental leave and parents’ rooms,” she says. “It is about understanding that every person who works with us has different family needs, obligations, wants and com- mitments and creating policies and practices to enable these.
“And then monitoring, evaluating, changing and constantly adapting the way we work with our people.
“Otherwise, we will continue to lose people who believe that this is not the right industry for them. And I just don’t accept that as accurate. “We held our national conference at the end of June with 250 people coming together from across the country. We met in Canberra, which is fitting given our long relationship with the Federal Government, and spent two days connecting, listening to each other and sharing the kind of strategic dividends we all want to deliver to our people,
our clients and our industry.