Harry McGovern.
2 months in my current role / 4 years at Half Dome
How would you describe what the company does?
We are an independent, full-service media agency built to allow our clients and internal team reach their Whole Potential.
What do you do day to day?
A combination of performance media strategy and building tools and systems that help our team deliver industry-leading work in streamlined, end-to-end workflows.
Two of my current ‘babies’ (passion projects) that I’m excited to be working on are the proprietary software apps we’re developing internally:
1. SignalLabs, which is what I consider to be the ultimate performance creative strategy tool (hook up your live ad library and generate audience research, psychologically grounded personas, run synthetic focus groups and get the most robust creative diversity reports I’ve seen in market + recommended action item lists, all housed within a sleek UI). More to come on this soon…
2. ‘Optilog Pro’, which is focused on streamlining operations for our performance team (think centralising platform testing and optimisation data/learnings so it can act as a second brain for anyone across the performance team to tap into and benefit from, along with some additional bespoke tools built for forecasting and budget optimisation).
Define your job in one word:
Systems
I got into the industry because:
I spent 2-3 years of my time in college frantically reading books trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was always fascinated with psychology but didn’t see a compelling career path for myself in that field. Ultimately, I realised that marketing is really just a subset of psychology – in that the world’s best marketers must understand the texture of a consumer’s mind so that they can deliver as much value as possible (via true product-market fit), while communicating the value proposition(s) in a way that aligns with that person’s wants and needs. When I eventually realised that digital marketing lived in and around the intersection of 3 core interests of mine – psychology, tech and design - I decided to go all in!
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?
Something that is both a blessing and a curse is how fast and dynamic this industry is. At times I’ve envied people who spend their careers building knowledge around relatively unchanging principles so that the knowledge stacks and compounds more cleanly over time, like in certain branches of physics (noting our understanding of these areas still change – *definitely* not saying physicists have it easy). Whereas in this digital landscape, you could take 6 months away from work and a large portion of your prior knowledge can become somewhat redundant as platforms, tech and laws shift to the point they become barely recognisable. That being said, it keeps you on your toes, keeps the industry fresh, and it certainly never gets boring!
What’s the biggest industry-wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
I’d love to see measurement well and truly solved so we can really understand the impact of what we’re doing on a week-to-week basis…not holding my breath though!
Who has been a great mentor to you and why?
I try my best to take little gems from everyone I interact with.
To name a few people and traits I’ve tried to integrate - my first manager in Australia (Hugh McFarlane at align.me) had an inspiring level of curiosity and empathy that I’ll never forget. My next manager, Marcus Ottosen (during my time at Dometic) gave me the perfect balance of freedom to explore and experiment, and accountability to keep me focused. And finally, I’ve always found the level of ambition and hustle from the founders of Half Dome super motivating.
Words of advice for someone wanting a job like yours?
I read a book called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport about 10 years ago, in which he attempts to lay down a guide for building a fulfilling career. One of the key principles I took away was that in order to build ‘career capital’, you need rare and valuable skills.
To acquire rare skills, you need to do “deliberate practice” – which means practising with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill you’re aiming to improve – often focusing on areas of weakness, even if it’s hard. Why? Because there’s a direct correlation between the rarity of a skill and the amount of mental tension, you’re willing to endure to build that skill. In other words, when you get that feeling of mental tension that makes you want to quit, that same tension makes other people want to quit too – and that is the signal that you’re on the right track and you need to sit through it, because you will inherently build a rare skill by doing so… Just make sure it’s a valuable skill too (a.k.a., one the market needs)! To complement this, don’t focus on being #1 in a single, narrow field – combine skills/knowledge from two or more complementary fields to offer a truly unique perspective. These ideas have guided my energy and focus over the years, and I think following them paid dividends.
If I wasn’t doing this for a living, I’d be:
A marine biologist – I’m obsessed with scuba diving and the ocean. Or something to do with animals / wildlife.
My philosophy is:
I’m a bit of a philosophy nerd so this one is hard to compress into a short answer. Someone that I think does this incredibly well is Naval Ravikant (he puts abstract philosophy into everyday language very well). A quote from an interview of his:
“The universe will be here for 70 billion years, you're around for 50-70 years, right? - it's a blink of a firefly in the night...you're just barely here. So you’ve got to make the most of every minute, which doesn't mean that you chase some stupid desire for your entire life, what it means is that every second that you have on this planet it's very precious and it's your responsibility to make sure that you're happy and you're interpreting everything in the best possible way.”…. Now there are many different schools of thought for what the “best possible way” is - I won’t preach a particular philosophy for that, but I think this line of thought is a good starting point for people.
My favourite advert is:
When you get down to the root of it - we’re in the business of memory formation – you can’t shape behaviour (or purchasing decisions) if your ad impression doesn’t leave a memory trace, because your brand/product needs to appear in the consumer’s mind when they are triggered to purchase (outside of some low price impulse buys, as an exclusion to this rule). In order to make a memory trace, you really need to evoke some sort of emotion (see Matt Johnson, PhD, books for more). If you think your business/industry is too boring to create an emotive ad for – try thinking of an excuse after watching this masterclass from Google (if something as dry as a search engine can trigger emotion, so can you!): ‘Parisian Love’ by Google.
Music and TV streaming habits: what do you subscribe to?
All of them. Far too many. This reminds me, I need to go cancel a few…
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
My middle name is Eifion (after my Welsh grandad!)
In five years’ time, I'll be:
I used to try plan 5 years or 10 years out, but at this rate of change I’m taking it 1-2 years at a time! I plan and hope to do great things with great people, while making time for family, friends and passions like diving, surfing, skiing and building creative things in work and in my spare time.
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