Building Localist a golden chance
Digital marketer brings new media to old ways.
Wednesday, January 25 2012 || News || BY William Mace, Businessday.co.nz
'I got asked to stay on and work in their marketing department, and that was back when the BNZ got bailed out by the government; it was a very staid, conservative government-owned bank and they embarked on a really big change programme as an outcome of that because they needed to rebuild the bank.
''Lindsay Pine brought on board a whole bunch of young smart people, and I guess I happened to be there and to be one of the people that got quite a lot of opportunity coming out of that.
Out of that crop came former Kiwibank chief executive and current Localist chairman Sam Knowles, Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe, former Telecom chief executive Theresa Gattung and former Reserve Bank governor and Jade Software managing director Rod Carr.
''It was an environment, working with those people, that was collaborative but it was also intensely competitive, but in a constructive way.''
After five years at BNZ he moved across the Tasman to a position with its new parent; National Australia Bank.
He was then headhunted by Gattung to Telecom and filled a variety of management positions in marketing, communications and consumer-focused departments when the company was just realising its mobile telephony and internet-fuelled future in the late-1990s.
''From a career perspective ... I've always wanted to be in an environment where you're creating new things and growing something as opposed to just managing something or shrinking something.''
The trip of a lifetime to India in 2000 was cut short when Glubb's partner discovered she was pregnant and the pair returned to New Zealand [he now has two sons aged 11 years-old and 11 months-old].
He took up work with TelstraSaturn but eventually up-rooted to live in Sydney yet again, taking an account management role with advertising agency Young & Rubicam.
His major client relationship was with Telstra's Australian pay television joint venture with News Corporation - Foxtel.
By 2003, Glubb had moved to head the direct and online marketing division of '3' - a telecommunications start-up looking to capitalise on the introduction of third generation mobile networks into Australia. It had invested a lot of money trying to gain a big chunk of the Australian mobile network but the product it launched to market didn't work as well as it could have, he said.
Glubb arrived at a time when it had been in the market for a short period of time. It needed some people inside the business who could actually put some structure and discipline around what they were doing.
''It was probably a little like 2Degrees up the road here: you have the people that start up the business and then the people who come in and organise it a little more than it was before.''
But it was his final role in Sydney, with Telstra's innovation division, that broadened his knowledge of the trends which are beginning to turn media companies on their heads.
''Interestingly they ideally wanted somebody who had an anthropology degree, which is the only time I've actually had anyone interested in the qualification.
''They had a team of people looking at not what's going to happen in the next one or two years, but in the next three to five years.''
Peering into the future is ''reasonably easy'' says Glubb, if you are able to spend your time looking at what's going on from a technology perspective.
''If you're sitting in Australia or New Zealand you can actually look at off-shore markets and certainly see what's going to happen in the next one or two years.
''Then it's thinking about how do you adapt what's going on in a market like the United States which obviously has a whole lot of different things going on in terms of infrastructure and scale... but if you understand this [NZ] market well enough you can get a reasonable picture of what will work and what won't.''
His former chief executive at Yellow Pages, Dudley Enoka, calls Glubb a ''thought leader'' with ''outstanding communications abilities which engage all stakeholders''.
Former Saatchi & Saatchi digital and direct advertising specilalist Tony Gardner characterises Glubb as ''one of the best marketers I have met.
''He makes decisions but bases those on analytical information combined with a true marketer's feel for what's right.''
With Localist, Glubb has used his experience along with a gut instinct for social behaviour, and says things have largely gone to plan so far.
The business is based on a solid business directory format fleshed out with content and recommendations generated by local communities.
Localist has signed up 51,000 Auckland businesses in its first four months active and its website averages about 250,000 visits a month, or about 150,000 unique browsers.
But one of Localist's main goals is to provide a place for people to share product and business reviews online.
It already has about 10,000 items of user generated content on the site and around 1000 business reviews are added by users per week.
''One of the hardest things in the world is getting user-generated content - it's not some thing that just happens, you can't just stick star ratings on the site and expect that suddenly everyone's going to write reviews,'' says Glubb.
Meanwhile Yellow Pages Group launched Yellowlocal with 205 suburb sites across Auckland, each featuring nine categories of useful information on events, community, shopping, real estate, hospitality, health, schools, sport and other things to do.
In addition to searching and reading, users can also like and share content from their Yellow local site with friends and other locals via Facebook.
Yellow does not split out numbers for its competing YellowLocal service but said its digital directories including yellow.co.nz. yellowlocal.co.nz, finda.co.nz and menus.co.nz were visited around 2.7 million times during the month of December. Yellow has around 300,000 active business customers across that network.
The competition is hot and the rubber will meet the road on both business models when mobile web browsing and location-based smartphone applications penetrate further into New Zealand society.
