Navigating Sports Marketing Dynamics – Josh Marton, PGA of Australia

This transcript has been transcribed by Riverside.fm, no edits (please excuse any errors)

Sean Callanan (00:01.792)
Very happy to welcome Josh Marton. He's the General Manager of Public Affairs and Marketing at PGA of Australia and Golf Australia. Josh, welcome to the podcast.

Josh Marton (00:09.972)
Thanks very much, Sean. Thanks for having me, man.

Sean Callanan (00:12.458)
Not a problem at all, not a problem at all. I always start asking people how they got their start in sports. What about yourself? How did you get your start in the world of sports?

Josh Marton (00:19.924)
I was, I think technically I started while I was in year 12 writing a few stories for the local paper in Strathalbin in country South Australia, only 50 minutes out from the city, but that's the country in SA. So started doing some sports reporting on some of the footy that I was playing in actually. And then that progressed to some additional sports journalism at the Courier in Mount Barker, still privately owned newspaper, which is pretty rare.

Josh Marton (00:47.506)
in Australia while I was doing my journalism and marketing and business studies. And then I ended up getting an internship at Elite Sports Properties, later TLA, now TGI Sport. And they were just coming into the market in Adelaide. They won the PR contract for the Coupsul 500. And the guy, Steve Cox, who was running that account was a one man band there. And he went to the university to try and…

Josh Marton (01:14.836)
get some interns and I actually was heading to talk to a lecturer around social media. This is how long ago it was because when I was working with the Mount Barker Korea, they didn't want to use social media because they thought it would take away from newspaper sales. So I was trying and I started their first social media channels back in 2012 or yeah, 2012 I think it was started their first Facebook channel and was trying to encourage them to yeah, to.

Sean Callanan (01:29.644)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (01:42.686)
to tease their content a little bit more and understand that, you know, 300 word character, 300 character post on Facebook isn't gonna take away from newspaper sales, it's going to help. And the lecturer there, her name was, she put me in touch with Steve and I did an internship and then that led to doing the PR for the Quixel 500 and running Craig Lowns around in a golf cart and all sorts of things was awesome fun. And yeah, really fortunate to do that. And then I ended up working

Josh Marton (02:11.902)
pretty much full time in my third year of uni, working at ESP and then ended up transitioning into that full time while I kept trying to plug away my marketing studies to complement the journalism studies, which I'm glad I did.

Sean Callanan (02:27.042)
So yeah, you sort of like a lot of people have come into the marketing and comms come from that journal and journalistic background. And then you sort of saw that avenue of the journal piece, the PR piece and getting the exposure in your early days at TLA is what I could probably still call it. And that sort of give you a wide breadth of different, I guess, different clients to understand the different channels and the different levers you could pull.

Josh Marton (02:57.384)
Yeah, definitely. think when I first went to my…

Josh Marton (03:01.012)
I think every journalism student has had the same experience. The first lecture you go to, the lecturer stands there and sees 100 people and says, OK, probably one or two of you are going to have a job in journalism by the end of this. And I think I was tossing up, know, do I do law with journalism? always was like, I was pretty hell bent still at the time, having done it in year 12. We're lucky enough to do a research project subject, which meant we could actually just focus on something we're passionate about, which for me was writing, sport and journalism.

Josh Marton (03:29.46)
But it was only until that lecture I was like, no, I definitely need to do something else. So then I decided on marketing, which I really fell in love with and really enjoy. But it's certainly my skills at that time were in the writing and really hunting stuff down. And that translates to the PR side and on the PR side or comm side, actually understanding what journalists and media want and need, particularly now where resources shrunk so much is really important. So I think when I joined T or ESP at the time,

Josh Marton (03:58.44)
We didn't just do PR stuff, we were doing event activation stuff with Adelaide Strikers and sponsors of the Port Adelaide Football Club in Energy Australia. So we're exposed to big brands, lots of different ways of activating. But I guess to me, it's very bottom of the funnel type activation activity. It might be about building awareness or it might be specifically about conversion, but it's very much at the very end of the funnel, not really.

Josh Marton (04:23.794)
being able to make strategic decisions. So that's kind of, I kind of felt like I had got all of, like got everything I could out of working in that space. And then I've done a few things since then.

Sean Callanan (04:35.938)
Yeah, and so since then, you've sort of, I was sort of looking over your career and going from there then to the broadcast side, you know, working at Fox Sports Australia, how is that different, from an agency side where you're working with either different sports or brands and coming up from different angles to coming at it from, the broadcast side and working with partners in a broadcast capacity.

Josh Marton (04:57.542)
very different. And I'm extremely grateful for that now in my role now where I'm I'm dealing with lots of different types of agencies. And when you're at an agency like TLA, you think, we are we're agencies when people say, our agency, it's like, it's got to be event activation or comms based. And when then you go to Fox Sports, which was a very different role, it was all about for me trying to build out the more marketing based experience and getting, understanding the commercial side of business. And that's what I was seeing in the

Josh Marton (05:25.894)
in the commercial team at Fox and at that time MCN was still running as its own business. So MCN had their sales team and their kind of integration team. We then sat in the middle of MCN and

Josh Marton (05:40.628)
broadcast production. So basically trying to find solutions or big partners who were spending a lot of money to work out how they could live in an integrated fashion inside the broadcast and dealing with, agency on top of agency, who then was dealing with one client who was dealing with three people internally was very, very different to what I've been dealing with at TLA. and, it certainly wasn't a passion of mine.

Josh Marton (06:02.182)
I must say, in terms of doing that role, which is probably why I didn't last as long, but I wouldn't give up the opportunity again because it taught me a lot about, one, the commercial side of business. And at that point, that was probably Foxtel's absolute heyday from a…

Josh Marton (06:18.556)
commercial advertising perspective and subscribers perspective, which was actually one of the great balancing acts because producers would often push back and say, well, we're producing our content for the subscriber. They're already paying. So why would we be serving them additional advertising in show? I want the logo to be this big, not this big. Or why do we need commercial content? And so it was really good actually to…

Josh Marton (06:42.056)
I've worked on a couple of cool things where I feel like we actually kind of added some value back in a content sense. I did a thing for 4 and 20, which I really enjoyed around trying to getting Jonathan Brown out to local footy clubs and we called them Pie Nights and did some really cool interviews and that kind of just reaffirmed to me I wanted to get more back into the content and communication space. I probably wore a little thin when I was at TLA working in

Josh Marton (07:09.562)
know, uncontrollable environments where things happen in a news sense and you have to react to it. But I quickly learned, relearned those skills and got myself comfortable again when I got to cricket because it was pretty issues rich.

Sean Callanan (07:23.904)
Yeah, I mean, you joined cricket again in that comms role. What was your time like at cricket? Because it was, you were coming in post, for people to remember the sandpaper gate and it was coming off that and like you weren't part of it, but still six months after the fact, there still would have been a lot of, I guess, walking on edge shoulders. So what was it like coming into CA after?

Sean Callanan (07:52.78)
having that big, I guess a crisis crisis comms session, six months earlier.

Josh Marton (08:00.428)
It certainly was that. was a more reactive environment because of that. There was a lot of turnover in team and we had some amazing people when I was at cricket. Christine Rannell, who now is chief of communications at Reiss Group. Alex Brown, who's started at Rugby Australia as their exec.

Josh Marton (08:20.66)
and a lot of people who are still now there who are amazing. So we had a really good team to kind of rebuild, I would say. My third day, I think, was announcing Kevin Roberts as CEO and working with the PortaComs team on that execution. And then we had the cultural review findings that we had to announce. And then we went into an Indian summer with a depleted team. And it was really interesting. So it was very much rebuild was the mindset.

Josh Marton (08:50.62)
And then what was really cool was then leading into the likes of the T20 Women's World Cup was the proactivity and really actually going back to try and sell tickets to try and drive revenue for the event side of the business. Commercial partnerships started to kind of revitalize. And then we went into a really awesome era where we had

Josh Marton (09:13.8)
a really cool Indian series, still probably can't get over that, the Brisbane Test when we lost. And then the Nasher series was when I finished, which was kind of going back into that peak of issues from a Cricket Australia point of view with some board movement and CEO movement and…

Josh Marton (09:32.114)
I think it's always going to be issues rich, but it is really interesting looking at it now and speaking to journalists that I worked with, still work with now, or worked with in the cricket days, certainly seems to be much less appetite for the sports business side and the board side or the board politics side in sport from a consumer perspective. Back then it was quite big and we were on staff calls where Kevin Roberts, who was doing his best to motivate.

Josh Marton (09:59.808)
the Cricket Australia business during COVID and that's being linked to media and is actually interesting. If that happened now, I don't think it would get any cut through. It really, it's not as impactful now, interestingly. And I think that maybe is a resource thing, but I think it's also the extreme focus on subscribers for new services and clicks. And, you know, it's probably just the 2000 people working in sport that…

Josh Marton (10:26.194)
click the crap out of those types of stories and not probably the general consumer. So yeah, very issues rich, but yeah, we got to turn it back into like working really closely with marketing and marketing and communications then got brought into one department. They'd previously been separate and really actually trying to work out how we position cricket and how we sell, you know, each individual summer campaign. We had some really cool world cup success that we tried to leverage. So it yeah, was a really cool time.

Sean Callanan (10:52.16)
I mean, it is very much a really good case study of, you know, turning crisis comms and helping turn around, I guess that brand perception and that published perception of the sport overall to, focus back to what's happening on the pitch and,  started,  it's awesome that you had, the women's T20 cup is a bit of a North Star to drive towards and sort of move that messaging towards and then it, then it's, then the bit flips from comms to marketing and

Sean Callanan (11:20.438)
ticket sales and like I said, commercial and you can start telling those good stories. It's sort of, I guess that's that meshing of, what is comms and getting the message out, but then starting to get that marketing message out and sort of get everyone on point.

Josh Marton (11:21.385)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (11:36.402)
Yeah, it's really interesting. We've had a few highs recently and we recently called, we separated two comms roles we have, one is called PR manager and one's called corporate comms. when I look at it, at one point at CA, I was consumer and corporate, which was basically the two roles together. And in my eyes, they're very similar things. But when you have lots of things to focus on, there's definitely value in separating it. And they're kind of different disciplines within one discipline.

Josh Marton (12:05.97)
But at the same time, think it's a slightly lazy view of the media management and the corporate comms side in that there's always an opportunity. Like if you're, you know, like for the men's cricket team.

Josh Marton (12:17.478)
it's not about picking up the phone, it's about how do you manage the 50 phone calls you got? And that was one thing, I worked really closely with Cole Hitchcock on, who's a men's team media manager, rather than just saying yes to the four people you like, or the four people that hit you up most often. It's like, well, of the 30, and we actually did this, we did a bit of an analysis on from a consumer perspective, where is the most likely audience to buy and engage with cricket? And that's who we should be saying yes to.

Josh Marton (12:45.052)
in a reactive media management sense. So that was quite an interesting exercise. It doesn't always work like that because it's about relationships in media circles, but it's cool to try and bring some discipline to it. And we were very lucky to work with Isentia in that time at cricket and have good enough budget that we could really analyze and understand the, what they call the immediate impact score, which is basically sentiment. But I don't know how much you've ever spoken to the guys at Isentia, but they do that in

Josh Marton (13:15.146)
in a manual process, understand where messages have sat, how many spokespeople are in it. And it's not just AI telling you if it's positive or negative, it's someone actually going through with a very specific minus 10 to positive 10 scale. And we actually tracked our Meteor Impact Score from Sandpaper Gate, which was at that time, like it's very hard for a sport to be under zero. And…

Sean Callanan (13:40.212)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (13:40.5)
cricket was under zero. And we're talking about an extremely high quantity of media items here. Like in the peak of the summers, it's like a hundred to 200,000 individual items a month. And the overall, and obviously it's a sample in working out the media impact score of about 500 to a thousand items a month. And we went from minus two, which is actually pretty difficult to be in sport, like easier for a bank, not so easy for sport because match reports and Australia win this test match like.

Sean Callanan (14:05.334)
Yep.

Sean Callanan (14:08.192)
Yeah, always pump the number up. Yeah.

Josh Marton (14:08.552)
that's all very high. Yeah.

Josh Marton (14:11.091)
And women's sport at the time, and I think it's still very similar now, a lot of women's sports coverage had a high media impact score because there wasn't as much analysis and criticism of the game. So, and because the women's team was going so well, the media impact score started climbing back up and it was cool to actually put a bit of discipline around it because coming from…

Josh Marton (14:35.368)
Probably more marketing brain, but having the skills and role in the comm side, something I'm pretty passionate about is trying to put some kind of discipline and rigor around comms and PR because it can be pretty.

Josh Marton (14:49.384)
Yeah, like it's easy to not measure it. It's easy to not be as planned because a lot of it is reactive because you're trying to understand what's happening in the market. But there's some really cool examples of AFL clubs, reckon, some of them are just living week to week and some

Josh Marton (15:02.731)
are like, I've got a very firm strategy for the next month.

Sean Callanan (15:02.731)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (15:07.538)
This is the narrative and the stories that we want to tell. And I'm biased as a Essendon fan, but I think they had a really clear strategy for most of this year, which was going pretty well until the form of the team became a bit uncontrollable to manage the narrative, I think.

Sean Callanan (15:22.188)
Yeah. And I think it, mean, another part of that is like you're saying before is how the landscape over that time has changed in that the, media operators, previously would be, here it is. It's hitting, a paper and we're going to be in the paper to more of them, news opening up code sports, which is trying to get subscribers. So they want to get people in. So all the effort that you're potentially doing is going to a, something that's a paywalled environment. And so is it impacting the

Sean Callanan (15:51.394)
you know, how many people so you know, it's another layer of things you've got to decide on to say, who are we going to talk to? It's like, you know, that article will be great. But if it's limited in its reach, or less people are going to read it, it's not going to have the impact. So yeah, you have that and then you have all these new, new, new media players that are that are sort of playing outside those normal traditional, you know, media roles.

Josh Marton (16:15.572)
Yeah, it's really interesting, particularly sports radio, like going back to that conversation with cricket. It's like, you know, I love love SEN and RSN and we work really closely with them. from an audience perspective, at that point in time, just going with linear radio for if you've got Mitchell star for one hour and you could get a double page spread, you know, and that's part of negotiations now. Hey, that with news, that can't be behind the paywall because we've only got limited access to these guys.

Josh Marton (16:44.636)
It's a tough conversation from time to time, but sometime in a cricket sense, I think it was less prevalent then, but now you'd have to have those conversations. So we can't give you one hour of Pat Cummins' time and excluding the potential for a lot of TV reach, podcast reach, social reach, if you're going to put it behind a paywall. So it's the interesting conversations to have.

Sean Callanan (21:02.314)
So from cricket, you joined golf and cricket being the dominant sport of the Australian summer. But golf is a massive participation sport and obviously has some amazing golf courses here and some amazing tournaments. What was your first impressions moving into the world of golf?

Josh Marton (21:20.973)
Yeah, it was really interesting, very, very different at the start. And I came in a pretty unique time for golf. I worked for Golf Australia and the PGA of Australia. And at the time, the two businesses had launched the Australian golf strategy and had put a bit of a stake in the ground to work closely together. A bit of background to that is that globally, the governing body, is Golf Australia here and the Amina body.

Josh Marton (21:46.211)
don't particularly always work super closely with the peak professional bodies. And that's usually in other markets split into vocational membership and the tours. So in the US, as an example, the USGA and you had Dan on last week governing body Amata body for golf in the US, but they also play a very global role in the LPGA tour and the PGA tour on the men's and women's sides. Totally separate organizations don't necessarily work very closely together because they're doing a lot of work in their own right to a very big

Josh Marton (22:16.145)
market in the US and then the PGA of America who looks after the vocational membership but there's crossover all over the place. The USGA run the men's and women's US Open's two big majors on both of those tours that I mentioned. The PGA of America also have their two majors men's and women's plus they're involved in the Ryder Cup so it's there's crossover all over the place and

Josh Marton (22:40.473)
when you think about the layers of four organisations, in many cases, provinces that sit underneath that or chapters in a PGA of America perspective. there's organisation upon organisation. And I guess here, if we're talking 300 million plus people in the US and we're 20 million, around 20 million adult Australians here, we don't have the market size. And they made the decision to put the Australian golf strategy together here, Golf Australia and the PGA led by James Sutherland and Gavin Kirkman.

Josh Marton (23:09.433)
They decided to move in here at Sandy Golf Links into this awesome facility, which sits on the Sandy Golf Links public golf course opposite Royal Melbourne, which is fantastic. And then when they did that, they decided, well, rather than sitting on either side of the building, which they were going to do, maybe we actually work closer together. And the first decision was they brought Karina Keisler in, who was my boss at Cricket. Long history in telcos.

Josh Marton (23:35.727)
and she came in and decided to make the necessary change to bring the two teams together in a promotional sense, marketing, comms, socials and gov relations and at the time women and girls engagement into one team. Now at the time it was basically you're paid for by the PGA and you're paid for by GA and it was very trust focused and I came in and worked with Corina for a few months and then took over the GM role.

Josh Marton (24:02.573)
Fast forward a couple of years, we now work for a joint business, a joint venture business owned by, 50 % owned by Golf Australia and the PGA called Australian Golf Services. Our team's expanded to 17 odd people. We also have finance, commercial, event operations.

Josh Marton (24:21.217)
and people and culture sitting in that joint service business and where I think we are or we're close to being the bigger employer than the two individual business and their core businesses. So, Golf Australia's core business is high performance amateur golf and relationships with clubs and facilities, administering the handicap participation.

Josh Marton (24:45.517)
And then they also have the Australian Open. So there's a small amount of overlap and some state opens. And then on the PGA side, all the bodies that I mentioned before, the PGA of Australia is a combination of men's tour, PGA tour, women's tour, LPGA tour, and like the PGA of America being a big vocational body. And we also have a really big educational arm too. So we have an RTO, the PGA Institute. If you want to become a golf professional or a PGA professional, you've got to have a very good handicap and be very good

Josh Marton (25:15.441)
at golf. So the PGA Institute is a registered TAFE, a registered training organization, I should say similar to a TAFE that offers say someone like you Sean, if you wanted to be a general manager of a golf club or wanted to get into golf business, you know, there's a diploma of golf business and management that would be.

Josh Marton (25:35.511)
suitable for probably for some of your listeners. So it's a very broad set of businesses, which was very different to what I was doing at Cricket and different to what I'd done previously. And the big appeal to me was around having all the disciplines together, having marketing, social content, comms, PR issues. And I wouldn't have said that I would have been striving to have government relations.

Sean Callanan (25:54.783)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (26:01.935)
sitting in with me in terms of my skill set, but that was in our team at Cricket Australia and I learnt a lot from Grant Poulter and Brett Wood who were there and it's really interesting to see how important that is and I really enjoy that work now working with our head of government relations and it's really important for golf in Australia because it's a big driver of revenue for events working with our government partners and golf is an incredible tourism driver, drives.

Josh Marton (26:30.959)
$3.3 billion of household expenditure. So it's really important working with our government partners across the country.

Sean Callanan (26:44.01)
So that shared, I mean, that shared service model, which is effectively what it has become in the, you're servicing the two parties, you know, in the initial stage, it looks great on a org chart to say, here's how this is all going to work. And here's how, you know, it's all, you know, here's all the different partners you're servicing and how it's going about. Change is really hard. What was those initial steps like, you know, people coming from

Sean Callanan (27:14.214)
one side or the other side into a merge team or new people into the team that had never had those previous relationships? How was it to get that model from Altart to actually working?

Josh Marton (27:26.223)
There are a few layers to that and it's progressed over the last couple of years, which has been good to see some movement because we're trying to do lots of big things. I think the first layer is actually we're bringing in a bit of a different way of working and trying to change our focus a little bit. There was a big focus on covering things on our own channels and like from an editorial journalistic sense. And we didn't quite have the audience maybe to justify that investment. that's quite a big shift in itself. Golf is…

Josh Marton (27:55.541)
is or has been in the past quite traditional in its approach in pushing the boat, et cetera. So that was a pretty big thing to try and shift. So there was the way of working and in our annual strategy that we have, we essentially cover how we are going to do things, which is really about working with our team.

Josh Marton (28:14.883)
because the business has given us the license to grow the game of golf. And it's actually more so been working with our team and recruiting the right people that are passionate about doing things in a modern way that are gonna help us drive audience. And it's not just about servicing.

Josh Marton (28:29.293)
the golf industry, is also really important in the roles that the two bodies play. But then the other part was working out what actually does core business look like? What are the priorities look like? Which I'm sure anyone in sport would put their hand up. And I'm sure one day I'll do something outside of sport to understand what kind of structure and process other organisations put in place to understand the priorities, because in sport, everyone's thing is a priority.

Josh Marton (28:56.717)
the public affairs or promotion or marketing team are always the key or the ticket to success for other teams, which is really, it's actually really hard. I, in some ways, like I actually, I feel for all of the other departments when we're not able to service them, because if we're not doing it, then who is doing it? And in their eyes, it might not be bringing as much success as it could to their particular thing, but we're only…

Josh Marton (29:22.059)
certain amount of people, only have a certain amount of resource and the big thing that we had to do was set an overarching strategy for what we are going to do, which is quite weird really because there was the Australian Golf Strategy that outlined telling our story better and then every individual product which we lay out on a page has their specific objective, whether it be driving participation,

Josh Marton (29:44.745)
whether it be telling our story better to clubs and facilities or telling clubs and facilities stories better so more people go and play at those places, telling the stories of PGA members, driving interest and ultimately revenue for our major events and our tour.

Josh Marton (30:02.445)
That bit is pretty linear, but we wanted to try and set a bit of a framework for what we are going to focus on so we could actually start with that. So that was inspire Australians to love golf and go play, which was actually the go play component was an outcome of a bit of brand work that we did, which I'm sure we're going to touch on. So yeah, that was really important. Even if it doesn't get followed, having a framework in this shared service model so we are not just reactive.

Josh Marton (30:31.457)
And we actually don't want to be considered an agency or just a business that services the two businesses. Because if we were to do that, then it would just come back to who shouts aloud us from the other departments, who probably who's the most organized. And then that's not really right. We actually need to prioritize based on what both organizations have agreed in the Australian Gulf strategy and their own operational plans. What are they trying to achieve?

Sean Callanan (30:47.093)
Yeah.

Josh Marton (30:59.183)
That needs to be then highlighted in our little strategy and approach. And then what sits underneath that is what are the departmental or the product priorities? We need 40,000 mic offers for the year. That's great, but that only comes in if we actually had an objective of more Australians playing more golf or telling the broader story of golf. And it does so it fits in.

Josh Marton (31:22.445)
The mantra is you shouldn't say something in those departmental or product priorities or how we actually implement and carry out our work in a channel sense unless it ladders into those overarching goals. And I don't think sport has been particularly strong at that because it's just so busy and it's so hard to get your head out of that.

Sean Callanan (31:36.754)
And so, mean, so…

Sean Callanan (31:40.192)
Yeah. And is that why it was important to do things like the state of the game report to sort of take that step back and that bigger picture that was across both of your key stakeholders, both of you know, so you've got the participation and sort of then pulling at, these are the key things that we're to look at, inclusivity into golf, bringing in new participants.

Sean Callanan (32:07.913)
doing things to lower barriers to participation. And then that flows into what you're trying to do, because it is serving both of your major key stakeholders.

Josh Marton (32:20.815)
It's actually the perfect example. That was actually an outcome and we haven't released that just yet. So we're looking forward to releasing that in the next couple of weeks where we reveal 3.8 million Australians are playing golf, which is really cool. But that is actually was completely an outcome of the strategy I was talking about and one of the long term objectives.

Sean Callanan (32:42.591)
Yep.

Josh Marton (32:44.047)
of the strategy was to understand our audience better. And golf had always looked at its audience as the 400,000-odd golf club members.

Josh Marton (32:53.743)
they thought that was the audience, that's who we're talking to. And quickly, it has grown a lot in the last two years, but there always has been a significant amount of people who have just played rounds of golf, at golf courses or gone to a driving range. And there's no interaction with any of the peak bodies. So it's kind of like, well, they kind of don't exist. So every annual participation report looked like there's 400,000 people playing or in 2018, 380,000 people playing. And now this year,

Josh Marton (33:24.189)
460,000 people playing as a golf club membership number. Awesome, but that's not the whole picture at all. But we actually had to really set out and go that's a priority and that became a big research project that we engaged Adam Carb, who I know you would know, who does lots of work for lots of sports and now we're here to be able to have

Josh Marton (33:45.087)
actual research and actually understand how big the pie is for golf in Australia, what people's perceptions are, what their barriers are, what their drivers are, so we can actually make better decisions. So it's such a good example because otherwise it becomes ad hoc little reports and things that was happening but we actually said no we need to do this on a quarterly basis and our next step now is

Josh Marton (34:06.703)
working out what is the best way to actually segment our audience. Because right now, someone like me, the most golf I've played, technically is, I'm a golf club member, because I'm a member of Future Golf. But if I was to run a proper segmentation in a participation sense, I would be an indoor golfer, because I play way more at a simulator.

Josh Marton (34:27.779)
than I do in any other form of golf. And that's how I would classify me. And I'd like to also then work in what is my propensity to be interested in consuming professional golf. I watch professional golf weekly. So I should be considered a super fan of sorts. the segmentation for us is a bit different because we're very participation led.

Sean Callanan (34:46.142)
Yeah.

Sean Callanan (34:53.962)
And the thing is, that overlap doesn't come without the bringing the two parties together. previously it would be, like you said, all the golf participation data and focus over here. And then the other side, you've got consumer fan behavior, hey, how do I follow tournaments? And there hasn't really been that analysis to see what that overlap is and that someone who, like you said.

Sean Callanan (35:21.576)
is on the simulator as a big golf fan or someone that's playing club golf every weekend consumes highly differently. So, I mean, the insights out of that, but then also starting to shape what your marketing and comms looks like with that merge view, like, must be exciting, but there must be so much, I guess, newness to it all because of that overlap.

Josh Marton (35:46.317)
Yeah, definitely. But it goes both ways is the really important thing. this is where golf is interesting and a bit different in that on the PGA side, are 3000 plus PGA members, about two and a half thousand vocational members. Their jobs are to be at golf clubs and facilities getting people into the game because they are very knowledgeable and they literally are like basically like university trained to teach people how to play to get them into the game.

Josh Marton (36:15.053)
They are the most important people when actually growing the game. then they're not really, the way you described it was, well, usually that would be a GA role and GA stuff. Well, actually it's really important to PGA members. And that's completely informed a campaign we're about to launch. We're completely repositioning how we talk about PGA pros. And we're actually trying to link it to consumer more. used to be very much the PGA pros are experts in golf. They know best, which is absolutely true.

Josh Marton (36:43.011)
But there's no link to how does that actually work for, say, me two and a half years ago when I hadn't played much golf and I wanted to get into it. I was really, really bad. Now I'm only just a little bit bad. And I didn't really know what to do. I didn't know how to hit a ball. And, you know, our new positioning is going to be the pro will know. And we've got we're working with TGI or TGI wildcard on the campaign and the repositioning. And there's some really cool creative there where, you know, it might be someone's got a snap driver.

Josh Marton (37:13.059)
You know, Josh has a snap driver. It's time to go see a PGA pro. The pro will know. So trying to actually link in consumer knowing that because in the past, as I said, PGA pros are very focused on golf club members. Well, golf club members literally make up 12 % of total golfers. And even for people playing on course golf, they make up not even a quarter of the number. So not even a quarter of people who have gone and played at least nine holes in the last 12 months are a golf club member.

Josh Marton (37:42.583)
So that's a big market for PGA pros to talk to in terms of all the different services they have to offer. the crisscross happens on both sides and by having everyone together, reduces the friction around whose role and responsibility is it to do research? Whose role and responsibility is it to understand the consumer? And when I got in, like there's reports and research on both sides, you know, dating back to like 2012 and everyone trying to do similar stuff. it's…

Josh Marton (38:11.105)
It's absolutely critical that it's all together.

Sean Callanan (38:16.96)
And so you do a lot of this work internally with your team and with both stakeholders to realign what you're doing from a strategy point of view. Then you need to start flipping that and letting consumers know. what does that, what's your brand journey look like to be able to communicate that both via a brand and then from that, what you're doing from a comms point of view.

Josh Marton (38:43.289)
Yeah, it's a really good point. I think at the time, you when I joined and when Karina had first started, it was very unknown, two organizations are working closer together. What's the possibility of that? So Karina, in her absolute wisdom, enlisted Rich Curtis at Future Brand to come in and help us try to understand that. And we're a bit fortunate that Rich is an absolute golf nuffy member at Magenta Shores on the…

Josh Marton (39:09.185)
Central Coast of New South Wales and he has really supported us a lot in the last two and a half years massively. Like I've never worked with you know the combo we had about agencies like just someone who can take one step back and say and it probably similar to the work that you do Sean but taking one step back and going what is the actual problem here which was interesting for us because when we went through the journey when we enlisted them in some ways there was almost an objective to

Josh Marton (39:37.965)
like to bring the brands together and.

Josh Marton (39:41.217)
like we very quickly together took a step back to say, this isn't actually about that. This is basically a challenge around the category of golf. How do we position the golf category in Australia? And how do the sub brands of Golf Australia and the PGA of Australia and all the different tournaments and bodies that sit underneath and around it, how do they all fit into that? So that was actually a really important bit of work in the end. And it kind of, in some ways people could look at it say, well, what is the outcome of that?

Josh Marton (40:09.913)
Well, the outcome is we just knew what we were doing moving forward to go. There's no such thing as Australian golf in a brand sense, but this is the golf industry. This is how we talk about the PGA and GA when they live together. And actually how do we make them more similar? So we ended up going through a huge rebrand with Golf Australia to try and align it to the PGA. So they are now very aligned and…

Josh Marton (40:31.947)
Usually I'm wearing a branded shirt, but not hard to go onto the different websites to see what we've done in a brand sense to have those two brands aligned. There was lots of disorganization in all of the sub brands across each organization. So they gave us a thousand strong recommendations to bring it all together. And we've spent two years trying to do that.

Josh Marton (40:53.807)
To make it a lot easier for the consumer to just enjoy whatever they want to do, because there's so many different things to do in golf. And if everything can start looking a little bit more similar, and we can all be talking to a similar message, which was go play, which I talked to before, which is all about trying to change the perception of the game, make it feel more inclusive, reduce the barriers. Pretty logical in terms of just opening up the funnel to include lots of people instead of just a few, which were those real avid golfers.

Josh Marton (41:23.761)
golfers and it's really worked well for us. And I shouldn't say this without talking about SE Creative or SE Products that some people know them as. They do a lot of work in merchandise with AFL, the NRL and they've been our design agency for the last four years. And they kind of worked with Future Brand to implement things. Golf is a bit different to cricket in a budget sense, Sean.

Josh Marton (41:52.121)
couldn't really have FutureBrand doing our work from go to woe. And you just have to be nimble, I would say, going back to that whole conversation of cricket versus golf. We've just got to be really smart where we invest our money, bring in the right people to give us the right advice and find the most efficient way to deliver on those recommendations.

Sean Callanan (42:14.4)
Well, I mean, it's like it's always good to hear the like the internal side then the you know, then the external facing side, but I'm appreciate you taking the time. We're recording this in late October, which is a month out from two big, two big tournaments for yourself, the Aus PGA and the Aus Open, you know, are effectively a month out. When we're recording this, you've probably got six or 10 emails that have come in while we're recording this.

Sean Callanan (42:40.992)
looking for updates and ticketing updates. How are your marketing plans coming together, you know, one month out?

Josh Marton (42:48.899)
Can you see the grays in my beard? They might be from these two projects. They're going okay. think we're driving similar, if not more interest in the two events, but certainly not seeing the same amount of pre-purchasing. And I think that's a pretty common thread across not just sports events, but general consumer products. So I think we just have to keep trusting the process that we're going through to.

Josh Marton (43:18.095)
particularly for the Australian Open, we've got pretty lofty targets this year. You know, at the time of this podcast, hopefully there are a few people who have seen, you know, 10 to 20 different touch points of the Australian Open and we're right in their consideration to buy and they're probably, unfortunately for us, going to make a decision as they get in the car and decided to drive to the golf course. That's when they're probably making their final decision to purchase. And that's pretty challenging.

Josh Marton (43:46.543)
to manage stakeholders, but also to really understand and trust the process that we're going on because you're not seeing a direct correlation from our activity to our results. We actually enlisted Combo for another time and it's more progressed. Now I won't go too far into it, but someone has been working with us on a bit of a condensed market mix modeling sort of set up to try and help us understand whether or not there is.

Josh Marton (44:13.955)
Well, we assume there's strong correlation between our activity, but what is the correlation and what are the channels that are the most effective for us? And what it's actually uncovered is there is a significant lag between our activity and people purchasing. So we kind of have to…

Josh Marton (44:29.943)
be comfortable with being uncomfortable at the moment, trust that our objective is to build as much awareness and consideration as possible and probably trust that a lot of people are going to be purchasing during that event week, which we already knew our behavioural data from the last two events says that at least 50 % of people are purchasing in event week of total ticket purchases of both of those events. But I get the sense that that number is going to shift.

Josh Marton (44:57.155)
this year, certainly based on attitudinal study that we've done, by look, I'm assuming by the behavior that we're going to get a lot of late purchases. So it's a cluttered sports market at the moment, particularly in Melbourne for the Aus Open with all of the spring racing activity going on and everyone's working pretty hard around the industry to cut through. So we just got to keep pushing on and doing what we're doing. We've had a good week of media relations and we were lucky enough to enlist Beck Judd.

Josh Marton (45:25.231)
which is actually a cool example of keeping your finger on the pulse. And for us, we work in such a bizarre industry where people from all walks of life and profile find golf and become obsessed with it. And I'm one of those people, when I joined, I thought I better play a bit of golf and now I'm like properly addicted.

Josh Marton (45:45.377)
And we saw Bechard practicing her golf swing in an Instagram story two weeks ago. And two weeks later, she is an ambassador for the Australian Open 19th fan precinct that we're building, which is all around a strategy to try and build out our product. So it's not just a golf tournament, because what we do know, and I know you talk about this all the time, and everyone who listens to this will be thinking about it, that

Josh Marton (46:08.717)
to get people to purchase now, there's got to be a broader event experience for them to have access to. And yeah, we're very lucky to have Beck be the face of that, which was, you know, got us a very rare front page of the newspaper, which I think is a topic for another time. Because I think whilst that might not have the reach that it still has, I still think the narrative driving that comes out of still the hard copy print editions is a pretty interesting study in itself.

Josh Marton (46:36.715)
to understand the impact if you looked at total reach of projects that started with really strong upfront coverage in the newspaper. I think you'd see there's a serious impact there.

Sean Callanan (46:53.406)
And it definitely is. I mean, it is one of those key touch points, but also it's a key touch point with an older demo that is still picking up and still getting ink on their fingers, effectively. they're still ticket buyers, but it's just a matter of balancing that, we've got that, but then also how many people are coming via Beck Judd's Instagram story or other things.

Sean Callanan (47:23.392)
I guess other channels or other partners you're looking at to sort of bring in bring people in

Josh Marton (47:30.631)
absolutely. I think just to touch back over that point, in a pure news and PR sense, more so referencing the fact that, and having spent time in newsrooms with friends and…

Josh Marton (47:41.487)
and taking talent into radio studios. The first thing that every other medium are doing is they've got the newspaper sat in front of them and every morning radio program is driven by that narrative. So that was more so the inference, maybe a PhD study one day for me, because I'm still quite interested in it. And I think that's what's gonna keep newspapers probably going for a long time. But obviously the commercials need to make sense. But no, from a paid point of view, it's literally every channel that we can get a touch point on.

Josh Marton (48:11.441)
Interestingly, our research tells us that online consumption is number one and radio is number two for the people that are most likely to purchase tickets for our events. So radio is really big for us. In the Aus Open sense, we're doing a national deal with Triple Siena coming in to broadcast Aus Open radio this year and then 3RW via 9Radio as well. So radio is really strong, but in an above the line sense.

Josh Marton (48:41.133)
Hopefully you see us everywhere.

Sean Callanan (48:46.046)
Well, true. We'll make sure, like I said, this is being published just before those two events. We'll put links in there for those late consideration people. If you listen to this podcast, you want to go check out either of the tournaments. We'll put the links there. Josh, you want to get to the Sports Geek Closing Five. You would have been to a lot of sports events in your time, but do you remember the first sports event you ever attended?

Josh Marton (49:09.999)
I'm going to assume, just assume that it was a footy game and it was getting in for $3 in at the MCG as an under 12, I think, and getting the train grew up in on the Mornington Peninsula before heading over to SA. Getting the train in for $2, I think, on a Sunday, then buying a ticket for $3 and being on the fence. You know, I think one of my mates tried to touch Stephen Milne's hair.

Josh Marton (49:39.201)
at the time I've got a pretty distinct memory of that. So yeah, game of footy I think.

Sean Callanan (49:49.325)
Terrific. Do you have a favourite food or a go-to favourite food memory or a go-to food at a sports event?

Josh Marton (49:57.679)
I'm a little bit privileged in sports events, Sean, because I'm often sitting in media centers where we get absolutely catered for. So every amazing dish you can think of, some of the best curries, pork is a particular favorite of mine, but and it's also pretty hard to go past sitting in the Coliseum of the MCG, where I think I went to that first sporting game and eating a pie and the scone in the…

Josh Marton (50:26.741)
MCJ Media Center is pretty good.

Sean Callanan (50:32.576)
It is, is. Managing a team and like, you know, being in the comm space, you never know when a news is going to drop. What's the first app you open in the morning?

Josh Marton (50:45.743)
I like my attitude says different to my behavior, but it still habitually is the Herald Sun. And I think they do good stuff and we work very closely with the Herald Sun. I get lots of news and education elsewhere, but it's where my thumb takes me.

Sean Callanan (51:09.296)
Awesome, awesome. Is there someone that you follow? It might be someone on social media or it might be an author alike that the podcast list you should follow and why?

Josh Marton (51:23.007)
Hard to go past Simon Sinic, I think. And I've started noticing I get a lot of Instagram ads now from Simon. So he's pushing pretty hard, but read a lot of his books and his TED Talks are pretty inspiring.

Sean Callanan (51:41.086)
And lastly, you sort of spoke about it, the start of your career helping newspapers start playing around with social media. It's changed a lot in those in the 10 to 15 years since. What social media platform is your MVP? And you can have your personal hat on and say, is mine. But then also from a golf perspective, what's the channel that's working the best for you guys?

Josh Marton (52:06.959)
Yeah, I think I'm going to say Facebook in general, just as the goat and reinventing itself consistently. And also to have the resource to do so, but consistently reinventing itself to be modern and relevant now as relevant in some ways as it was back in 2009. I think when I had my first account, TikTok is a bit untapped, like untapped for us, but TikTok and Instagram in terms of the viral.

Josh Marton (52:33.101)
type of user-gen content is really strong, but YouTube is enormous for golf instruction and you know, there are, you know, the biggest golf influencers are not players, they're a bunch of guys on YouTube and Rick Shields is actually coming in to town. So that will be really cool to see him here and he, yeah, he's done amazing things in a YouTube sense. So YouTube's pretty big for golf too.

Sean Callanan (52:41.77)
Yeah.

Sean Callanan (53:03.594)
Well, thank you, Josh. We'll put links to those accounts in the show notes. Josh, where can people find you on the internet if they want to connect with you and learn more about what you do?

Josh Marton (53:17.507)
Just jump on to LinkedIn, just Josh Marton at LinkedIn. I'm always up for a chat.

Sean Callanan (53:25.586)
No problems. Well, appreciate you taking the time, especially in a busy ticket sales period in the lead up to some big events. Really do appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Josh Marton (53:36.099)
Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it,