Watch the full episode of The B-Side with Dee Madigan above.
There isn’t an industry or major blue chip brand that Dee Madigan hasn’t worked in a glittering career as one of Australia’s leading creative voices. The ECD of Campaign Edge and Gruen regular speaks to Dan Krigstein about her journey into purpose-led advertising and the thrill of political campaigning B-Side vodcast series by the Growth Distillery in partnership with B&T.
It’s little surprise that Campaign Edge ECD Dee Madigan is into politics. Her Irish parents were involved in the politics of the Emerald Isee before migrating to Australia where they leaned towards the Labor Party under the Hawke and Keating eras of the 80s and 90s.
Madian joined the Labor Party when she was 18 but was unsure what she wanted to as a career.
She studied teaching before she moved into advertising. Although she initially enjoyed adland, Madigan felt that she had more to give in the field of politics and campaigning.
After appearing on Gruen, Madigan found opportunities to write for newspapers about politics while maintaining her role in adland.
“I had two streams going, one of which wasn’t making me any money, but I loved, and one which was making me a lot of money, but I didn’t love,” she told The Growth Distillery’s director and head of intelligence Dan Krigstein at a live vodcast recording at this year’s Cannes in Cairns.
“I then got the opportunity to do the Queensland 2012 election. Anyone with half a brain would have said no, Labor was going to get smashed, but it’s the first time in my life where I had this feeling I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing…for me there was no turning back.”
Madigan describes working on election campaigns as akin to taking heroin – although she has never used the opiate – because of the adrenalin and buzz you receive with each shot.
“You actually feel like you are making a difference, whereas with advertising, a lot of the time you feel like you are selling people stuff they don’t actually need, it’s contributing to landfill sometime,” she said.
Madigan said the skills she learnt in advertising are a great foundation for campaigning.
“The brand stuff matters. I always say to politicians, ‘no one cares about you, they care about themselves’. And it’s the same with brands. We know with branding it’s about how you make people feel,” she said.
One of Madigan’s gripes is there are a lot of people in advertising who do purpose led, pro-bono campaigns for the wrong reasons, namely to win awards.
“They go to agencies that promise the word and do these weird and wacky campaigns that didn’t actually help the client. The expression we used to use in advertising is ‘there’s the dead dog, where’s my award’”.
Madigan offers some advice on how to get purpose campaigns right, why she steers away from hiring do gooders who ‘drunk the kool-aid’, what she learnt from a sensational election campaign loss, algorithms’ impact advertising and how she has learnt to overcome her insecurities.
Watch other episodes of The B-Side
The B-Side: Chris Colter & Sam Geer On Pitching, Accountability & What Drives Their Success
