July 6, 2010
60 seconds with
Charlotte Findlay, TVNZ
Originally published in NZ Marketing March-April 2010, page 5
Charlotte Findlay, the general manager of marketing at TVNZ, walks to her Auckland office every day to manage a team of TVNZers across marketing, publicity and promotions and deals with everything from Masterchef NZ to Desperate Housewives to Shortland Street Ondemand. Who said TV was dead?
The best sources of ideas are the people around me—I work with a wide range of creatively-minded people at TVNZ. Lots of them have projects on the go outside work, such as acting, film-making or directing, so a lack of ideas is never a problem here.
If I had more budget I’d spend more on partnerships and PR, both offline and online. With the benefit of being able to use our own television and digital assets together with publicity to promote our content, we can do a lot of our marketing tasks successfully with those media. So for us it’s about spending in a way that will best complement that mix.
The toughest work challenge for 2010 is managing increasingly intricate marketing mixes. Budgets aren’t what they were, but it doesn’t change what is always the biggest challenge: how to plan and execute a complex marketing programme. The intricacy of the mixes means getting the right balance between planning and executing—and empowering people to get on with it—becomes more important.
My dream assignment is my current job. I’ve spent the bulk of my career in the broadcast and new media/telco sectors and now that they’re increasingly coming together I feel I can draw on all of that experience. And it’s always interesting: there’s the inherent interest in the content itself, but also the intellectual challenge of the emerging platforms.
Regarding the recession: The resources you have available may be scaled down, but the challenge remains the same—getting the best out of your people and planning and delivering insight-based marketing.
If I was wilfully unemployed I’d wander the back streets of Italian villages, armed with some (bad) Italian-speaking skills from the short course I would’ve squeezed in before the trip.