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Jason Maggs has spent the past 10 years climbing the corporate ladder, taking him to cities such as New York and Cannes. The Queensland-born strategist has also been using his skills for good — carving out a role at Initiative Australia. We sit down with him to track his journey after he was named this year’s AdNews Emerging Leader, presented by SpotX.
Jason Maggs was standing in the middle of LAX airport when he looked up to see the name of the charity program he helped launch in the US, AIME Mentoring, displayed on the flight information screen.
Maggs, along with AIME CEO Jack Manning Bancroft, had spent the previous six months putting the program together, which would connect disadvantaged students in the US with career mentors. The pair spent months creating a campaign and securing free media space to promote the program, as well as organising the travel of mentors. Now, standing with the rest of the AIME group at the airport waiting to leave for New York, Maggs describes this moment as one of the proudest in his life. But equally, he says setting up the program was very challenging, a process that brought him to the brink of tears at one point.
“We had all these amazing individuals, incredible future leaders of America all standing there with their bags packed and ready to get on the flight and I looked up at where you usually see your flight number show up, and it said the AIME plane taking off,” Maggs tells AdNews. “That moment was by far and away the proudest I've felt in my career. I get chills thinking about it now. It was a beautiful moment.
“It's funny that the most challenging things you persevere and get through, when you find success on the other end, they automatically become the most rewarding.”
Maggs’s career, which spans more than a decade, started in Queensland, his home state. Born in Cairns to two generations of carpenters on his father’s side, the sports enthusiast found he had no real skill for handy work and turned to university as an alterative path. His love of sport led him to start a physiotherapy degree at the University of Queensland. However, Maggs quickly lost interest and switched to the Queensland University of Technology to study advertising and film after developing a passion for filmmaking when his father gave him a camera in high school.
Jason in his footy days
“I loved being in the editing crew,” he says. “It was one of those things in school where I could just sit down for hours and hours and hours at a time and it was as if time didn't exist.
“I picked that up pretty quickly and really enjoyed it. It was the only thing outside of sports I was super passionate about at school. Coming out of school and trying to make that pivot at university, I was racking my brain as to what I wanted to do in the future, and I thought I may as well do something I actually really love and enjoy.”
Two years into his degree, Maggs’s career received a kickstart after a girl he was dating at the time connected him with her mother, the managing director of OMD Brisbane. Maggs began an internship at the media agency in 2010, walking in on his first day with a Mad Men idea of the industry and no real understanding of what a media agency does.
Rather than making “glamorous ads”, Maggs was instead tasked with tracking ad units online on his first day.
“I had no idea what a media agency was — like, none whatsoever,” he says. “I turned up for my internship and they sat me down and said, ‘This is your computer. You're going to be trafficking 728x90 and 300x250 ad units online.’ I kind of sat there and thought, ‘What the heck? When do we start making ads?’"
With a mentor in OMD Brisbane digital account manager Jennifer Hourigan, Maggs built his knowledge and skills, quickly becoming enamoured by the media agency world, particularly by the role of a strategist. This interest in strategy stemmed from the same interest that made Maggs want to become a detective as a child, something he imagines he would have pursued were he not in media. Maggs was fascinated with observing human behaviour, finding insights and using them to effect change in people.
This is an ability Maggs developed early in his career, and during the next few years he would secure dream jobs and be recognised as a rising talent across various award ceremonies, including the national Cannes Young Lions award in 2014.
About a year into his role at OMD, Maggs sat in on a meeting with Ignite Media Brands’ national sales director, Sharb Farjami, and Melissa Fein, state sales director at the time and now Maggs’s CEO at Initiative Australia.
“I don't know what happened in that meeting, but I must have said something that impressed them because a couple of weeks later I received a call from them inviting me to move down to Sydney and work at IMB,” he says.
“No 21-year-old would ever turn that down. I jumped at the opportunity and suddenly I was working in Sydney, at MTV. That's when I really fell in love with the industry, the bigger part of the industry in Sydney and work on some pretty awesome brands in Nickelodeon and Viacom.”
Maggs was quickly promoted at Ignite Media Brands, where he worked on accounts including MTV, Nickelodeon and National Geographic as a digital account manager overseeing Queensland and most of the NSW patch, a responsibility worth more than $1 million when Maggs confesses to not knowing how to do his weekly personal budgets. A few months into this role, Maggs would chase down a strategy role at Mindshare, which he secured in late 2012, working on accounts such as Unilever, Volvo, Kimberly Clark and General Mills.
The following year, Maggs was named Mindshare Sydney Rising Star, giving him the chance to work in any Mindshare office around the world.
“Growing up in Cairns, I always told my parents that one day I'd work in New York,” he says. “I don't know where the inspiration came from, probably from watching every movie and show under the sun.
“I thought that would be the pinnacle — that was making it in my mind so I immediately said New York. While I was over there, I just made sure I really impressed everyone and they ended up offering me a job.”
Jason's first day of work in NYC
In 2016, while still in New York, Maggs was headhunted by the newly appointed Initiative global CEO Mat Baxter, whose work Maggs describes as “brilliance”. Maggs spent two years in the US as vice-president, director of strategy, but throughout this time became “jaded” with the industry.
“I was kind of one foot out the door,” he says. “I didn't find my passion and purpose through what I did as I used to. I was working on a lot of QSR brands and doing a lot of work in that space and I thought, ‘There are so many things wrong with the world, maybe I could use my skills for good.’”
Around this time, Maggs was introduced to Jack Manning Bancroft, founder and CEO of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), an organisation that aims to eliminate educational inequality for marginalised children. Bancroft had been trying to launch the mentoring program in the US for a few years.
A scheduled 20-minute meeting between Maggs and Bancroft stretched into six hours, with Maggs pitching the idea of bringing potential US mentors to Australia so they could learn from current Indigenous AIME mentors and help marginalised children in the states.
“Jack is just one of those amazing, brilliant people who jumps at any opportunity,” says Maggs. “He can see the world's possibilities and believes he can achieve them. He started calling people, and I'm like, ‘Who the hell is he calling?’
“He was trying to call Richard Branson’s people. Fast-forward about a week and a half and we have a plane.
“So we have this plane taking off from Los Angeles to Sydney and that's when I kind of shit myself because we had a plane, we had zero media budget and there was just the two of us who were going to be on the entire plane.”
Calling in favours, the pair raised about $1.3 million in free media, produced an ad voiced by the cast of Orange is the New Black, built the registration website and finally, after six months of Maggs working on top of his role at Initiative, they sat down on launch day to watch applications roll in.
Just two applications were submitted.
“We tried our hardest,” he says. “We did everything we thought would work. Jack called me, he was sitting on the steps out the front of his place and I was in my apartment in Lower East Side [New York] and both of us were nearly in tears because we didn't know what to do.
“We had spent all our money, we had an empty plane that was going to take off. We went back to the drawing board — this was a great lesson for me in doing good — and realised what might work for a big spending client, doesn't necessarily work for a not-for-profit. You have to go back to the roots of what makes that organisation that organisation.”
Instead, the pair created the Hooded Hustle campaign which focused on one-on-one connections. As part of this, they flew about 20 AIME mentors from Australia to the US who drove from university to university and introduced the program to young people. This approach resulted in more than 3500 applications being submitted and the donated Virgin Australia plane was filled with 240 young people flying to Sydney for the AIME Mentoring program.
From this campaign, Maggs was given the role of global head of good at Initiative, allowing him to divide his time evenly as a strategist and doing good. Other programs Maggs has worked on include Citizen Reef with Ladbible, calling on the Great Barrier Reef to be granted Australian citizenship so it has the same rights and protections as every other Australian citizen. He also works with Johns Hopkins University each year to help families with kids with congenital heart disease, and Gotcha4Life, a preventative mental health organisation working on mental fitness.
Jason on his wedding day
Next on his list, Maggs would like to focus on the environment, but ultimately he would like his role as head of good to become redundant.
“Doing good should be a core function of everyone's role,” he says. “Hopefully one day we don't need a department dedicated to doing good, and that it's a democratised role where doing good is just part of every day.
“I've got a firm belief that if we all just did what we're really, really good at for those who need it the most, we'd be in a much better place in society.
“Many of us wake up every single day with that sick feeling in our stomach because the world isn't exactly how we want to see it.
“Truth of the matter is, there is no change fairy who will turn up and create that change. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world so be restless, relentless and radical in your approach to changing the world because each and every one of us has the power to do it.”
Melissa Fein, Initiative Australia CEO
I first started working with Jase over 10 years ago. He is an incredible talent and one of the most open-hearted, generous people in our industry. His genuine passion for making positive change is incredible – it has inspired many of his colleagues to find more purpose and reward in their careers by using their skills for good. From Brisbane to Sydney to New York and back, I’ve been proud to be a part of his journey. His recognition from AdNews as Emerging Leader is no less than he deserves. The future is much brighter with leaders like Jason rising to take the helm.
Maddison Keogh, Initiative client advice & management director
I am constantly in awe of Jason and the work he produces for our clients. Jase is one of the best strategists I have had the pleasure of working with, proven through the trailblazing strategies he delivers and his determination to solve the business challenges our clients face. On top of that his genuine interest and drive to make the world a better place is inspiring. The impact Jase achieves through his global good role, helping people overcome challenges and the footprint he has already left in the NFP & CSR space is amazing. You are guaranteed to be drawn into the passion Jase conveys and the positivity he provokes. I cannot wait to see the inevitable impact he will leave in this world in years to come.
Gotcha4Life founder Gus Worland
It is an absolute pleasure working with Jason at Gotcha4Life. Getting suicide rates to zero is such a passion of mine and when you find someone who is willing to give you the same passion back it is quite incredible. Jason’s very clear in his thinking and really understands the need to build mental fitness in this country. He listens and comes back with these amazing ideas that shows that (a) he’s passionate and (b) he’s pumped. The fact that he basically created his own role as a Global Head of Good and works with NFPs like Gotch4Life is a real testament to the top person he is.
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