DTSACMO: Robbie Brammall

Time for another DTSACMO, and this time we’ve got Robbie Brammall.

For the past eight years, Robbie has been CMO at Mona, one of the most infamous cultural and commercial institutions in the world. There, he was responsible for over 30 creatively motivated brands owned by billionaire gambler David Wash, including the Museum of Old & New Art, a brewery, three wineries, some festivals, a recording studio featuring the mixing desk from Abbey Road, and a fleet of luxury catamarans with fibreglass animals for seats. He’s now “escaped the cult” (his words) to found his own marketing and communications consultancy, Brandango. Before his internment at Mona, Robbie was a highly awarded copywriter and creative director, working for the likes of DDB, BBDO and Saacthi’s. He’s currently based in Hobart, eating scallop pies, paying very little for parking, and servicing clients around the world, with ‘Death to boring’ at the heart of Brandango’s philosophy.

Having worked as both an agency creative, and a client-side CMO, what impact has constantly pushing for better creative had on your career?

I remember as a junior copywriter in London I had a post-it note attached to the side of my purple iMac that read: ‘Do cool shit that works’. Not much has changed. I’ve always tried to produce creative that gets noticed, that people talk about, and that gets the tills ringing. But it begs the question - what is ‘better creative’? For me ‘better creative’ means pushing for work that is more distinctive (it stands out and is sticky), more differentiated (helps reinforce the brand’s positioning), and more cohesive (a big idea that can be embraced and adapted throughout the business).

For a creative that’s a pretty good recipe for ‘cool shit that works’. And the good news, in 2025, is that there’s not a single CMO in the world who doesn’t want that also. The science of marketing effectiveness, as preached by the likes of Sharp (Ehrengberg-Bass), Ritson, Binet & Field, and more recently System1 demands that we do shit that gets noticed, resonates and sticks (is cohesive). The frustration when you’re a creative on the agency side is that you usually only get to apply that recipe to ads. As the CMO at Mona, I was able to apply that pursuit of ‘better creative’ to the entire marketing function, and that just made everything so much easier and more effective. 

You famously had a boss at Mona, David Walsh, who ‘hated advertising’ and described your marketing role as ‘the worst job at Mona’. You then went on to make a ton of great work whilst there. What’s your advice for any aspiring and current CMOs in getting broader stakeholder buy-in?

My pitch for the CMO job at Mona was that I told David marketing should contribute to the creativity of Mona, not just communicate it. The most interesting brand in Australia can’t have the most boring comms in the category. And he bought into that, so disruptive marketing had to follow. But let’s be real, the biggest challenge every CMO faces is to get their business to adequately invest in brand. That’s where growth comes from (future demand). Not from relentless performance marketing to your existing audience, not from a splatter gun of random tactical ideas, but from building excess share of voice in your category by continuously and cohesively amplifying your brand. That was absolutely the challenge I faced at Mona. Mona was a ‘show don’t tell brand’ that relied almost entirely on earned media, so you’d get these big spikes in attention when we did something, but then Mona would disappear again. Strategically, the challenge was to be top of mind with consumers 365 days a year, not 5, so when the moons aligned and a customer was finally in a position to travel, Mona would be there in market. The solution was an always-on brand campaign.

I managed to get Walshy’s support for the investment by telling him it was hugely ill-advised, potentially libellous and the opposite of what a tourist attraction should do— we found our worst reviews on TripAdvisor and turned them into ads. We called it The Best of Our Worst Reviews. His response? “I hate advertising but I like this, because it tells the fucking truth.” I gained his support because the campaign played into the DNA of what he (and Mona) was about - risk. Anyway, aided awareness increased 10% and visitation went up 25%. Getting those runs on the board made further investment in brand a lot less of an arm wrestle.

You’ve mentioned that creativity isn’t just about ads. It’s something that should be applied to every single part of the marketing process. Can you share some more on this philosophy?

Creativity absolutely has to be applied to all four Ps, and not just to the promotional P. Otherwise, the ads are just lipstick on a pig. It’s a lot more fun when your product is ‘the world’s rarest beer’ instead of a slightly more hoppy IPA, or when your distribution mechanic is a travelling beer roulette vending machine and not just shelf facings in BWS, or your Black Friday pricing structure is determined by how long online viewers watch a mechanical stomach take a shit. Make the product distinctive, make the pricing mechanic distinctive, make the distribution model distinctive. The ads really don’t make that much of a difference. Ritson reckons it’s 6% of it. The real gains for a business are in the other three Ps, and we experienced enormous success at Mona by applying our creativity and the recipe for marketing effectiveness to the whole marketing function. 

Recently you described a modern marketing landscape where too much focus on algorithms, imitation, and ‘micro-optimisations’ has led to a ‘drift to the middle’ - what’s your advice for other marketers feeling this same pressure?

We can all see it. Thanks to technology and social media we’re experiencing a rapid homogenisation of culture, which is reflected in brand behaviour as well. Everyone copies everyone else. At Mona we called this the drift to the middle, and the instruction from David Walsh was always to keep Mona “on the fucking edge”. When the middle comes towards you, purposefully dive off the edge again. It feels more like a sprint towards the mean at the moment—Algorithms force-feed us what has worked previously, so you get this entirely linear progression, where optimisations yield diminishing returns as competition imitates and emulates. Something is fresh and effective for a moment and then copied and diminished until it’s bathwater. That is not the formula for success. And it certainly isn’t the recipe for marketing effectiveness. If you want above-category growth you have to innovate.

David Walsh is a statistical genius, and he makes his business decisions based on the statistical theory of asymmetric upside, where you take lots of bets with high upside and low downside. Nine might fail, but one will pay out big time, and the business progresses in a purposefully nonlinear and unpredictable direction. I simply applied that same philosophy to Mona’s marketing. Jeff Bezos has his 1000 doors philosophy of innovation to maximise growth, where he encourages his Amazon business units to walk through as many new doors as possible, but never one you can’t walk straight back out of. Nassim Taleb frames it as the Theory of Antifragility - investing in one high-risk software company is fragile, investing in ten high-risk software companies is robust. Apple has a growth philosophy based on an unrelenting commitment to innovation moonshots— it iterates the successes with one hand and keeps launching the moonshots with the other. Successful businesses know they can’t beat their competition if all they do is ape them. Innovation has to be at the core of growth, and that should be part of the marketing department’s DNA too.

And, anything final you’d like to add?

I hope some of this has been useful. Apologies if not. But I have one final thought based on our collective pursuit of death to shit ads. We’ve used these handles forever, but I wonder if words like ‘creativity’, ‘creative’ and ‘risk’ do us more harm than good when we’re trying to win support from stakeholders who are wired somewhat differently to us? Instead, what if we use their words— effectiveness, distinctiveness, differentiation? Pick your audience, of course. My personal post-it note will still read: ‘buy more scallop pies’ and  ‘do cool shit that works’.

There’s plenty of gems to be found here, but one that really stands out is avoiding the ‘drift to the middle’.

‘Something is fresh and effective for a moment and then copied and diminished until it’s bathwater. That is not the formula for success. And it certainly isn’t the recipe for marketing effectiveness.’

‘When the middle comes towards you, purposefully dive off the edge again.’

Robbie’s perspective is an interesting one, and worth paying attention to, because it’s fairly well-rounded. We’re not talking about a pure creative being precious, or a marketer who’s only ever seen things through a client’s eyes. He’s been a creative, he’s been a creative director, he’s been a CMO, he’s been the ‘client’, and now a business owner.

As well as sharing a lot of Robbie’s philosophies, this perspective is one of the rare strengths the leadership team have at SICKDOGWOLFMAN. We’ve been and are creatives, we’ve been and are creative leaders, we’ve run our own agencies (I’ve been a partner of two), we’ve been client side, we’ve been ‘the client’, with SLATHER we ARE the client, and on top of an agency - we’ve also started our own brand. We’ve done everything. We’ve seen it from all angles, and there’s not much here we would disagree with.

Thanks Robbie. Great yarn.