Words by Susan Horsburgh
The Women in Media conference showcased some trailblazing leaders in the sector – we talk to Beverley McGarvey, Natalie Harvey and Kiranpreet Kaur Dhillon about catering to Gen Z, the perils of maternity leave, and standing by unpopular decisions.
Natalie Harvey’s stellar media career all comes down to a courier delivery. When the Mamamia CEO was 19, fresh out of a year-long marketing course at a Sydney business college, she went for two office-assistant jobs and nabbed them both – one at the Seven Network and the other at Macquarie Bank. Natalie was still tossing up between the two when Seven offered to courier over the contract. Her professional fate was sealed: “Dad said, ‘They must be serious if they’re paying for a courier! You should go with them.’”
The buzzy media world was a perfect fit, and Natalie has never lamented the banking road not taken. She went on to work in media agencies, and was back at Seven as national sales director, when women’s media company Mamamia came calling earlier this year. Now the chief architect of Mamamia’s ambitious expansion plans, Natalie says her job involves planning content, growing audiences and upping revenue – all while improving women’s lives. That could be through coverage of coercive control or health issues such as perimenopause, ADHD or endometriosis. “A lot of businesses can talk about what their purpose is, and it’s pretty easily copy-and-pasted somewhere else,” she says. “You can’t do that with ours, and that is pretty remarkable.”
Directing a team that is 93 percent women, many of them under 30, Natalie says her biggest leadership quandary is understanding modern workforce dynamics, including hybrid work and generational differences. Mamamia has found that younger employees prioritise hobbies and interests almost as highly as work. “And businesses aren’t geared for that – you need people doing 40-hour weeks,” she says. “So how do you create a passionate and motivated workforce, and deliver on what’s needed from a business perspective, in a very challenging market for pretty much everybody?”
According to Natalie, the media sector’s future relies on attracting younger audiences with creative new platforms. Mamamia announced last month that KNOW – a standalone brand for Gen Z, created by Gen Z – will launch in March, with twice-daily content uploaded to bespoke TikTok and YouTube channels. “If you don’t have a Gen Z strategy on how you’re going to talk to those audiences outside of your normal BAU, that’s a real challenge,” she says. “But it’s an enormous opportunity.”
So is tapping into traditionally ignored audiences. Kiranpreet Kaur Dhillon – who calls herself “the only turbaned woman in the global advertising world” – says Netflix and Spotify are leading the way, authentically talking to people of diverse cultural backgrounds, instead of just translating to them. “In the top 10s and top 15s of these platforms is completely foreign content that some audiences may not get. Why is one of the top trending things in Australia Korean? We have massive audiences here that we’re not creating for.”
Kiran has been pushing the diversity conversation for the past seven years, ever since she mustered the confidence to speak out about advertising’s “homogenised” culture. Since then, Canadian-born Kiran has capitalised on her Punjabi heritage, highlighting the benefits of her divergent viewpoint and making it her unique point of difference. “I won’t shy away from that, but I don’t think that’s a natural thing for people to do,” she says. “It took a lot of conscious effort to turn that into a bonus for myself.”
Named in Campaign Asia’s 40 Under 40 list in 2022, Kiran has spent most of her 15-year advertising career in Australia, heading agency leadership teams since the age of 28. Last year, the self-described “strategy geek” left her role as managing director of Archibald Williams to launch her own consultancy, 42North.
With three children under six, including a newborn, Kiran says having her own company gives her more control of her schedule. She knows first-hand the professional perils of maternity leave for leaders in the industry. “Everyone’s always very supportive,” says Kiran. “They start easing you off from a workload perspective, but what they don’t realise is that you’re being removed from conversations that are vital to the strategies and plans you’ve been doing. That’s a hard balance for employers and teams, and we’re not doing it as well as the client side, so we’re losing really good female talent.”
It's understood now that more women leaders make for a better bottom line, but “the hard thing is getting the pipeline”, with childcare an ongoing problem, says Network 10 president Beverley McGarvey.
Beverley grew up in Belfast on a steady diet of British sitcoms, starting out at UTV in news, entertainment and promotions before moving to Dublin as a creative director. Her big break arrived 20 years ago, when she uprooted to become TV3’s programming director in New Zealand. Single and child-free at the time, Beverley saw it as an out-of-town tryout. “I just thought, this is a big risk. If it doesn’t work, I can always come home and nobody will know.”
Instead, she progressed to Network 10 in Sydney in 2006, taking the helm earlier this year. “My job is to get great content where the audiences are,” she says, “so that we can monetise it.” For Beverley, who is the head of streaming and regional lead for Paramount ANZ, it’s a job that plays to her strengths, especially in the current “challenged” media landscape. “I’m glad that I’m 51 in this role, and not 31 or 41,” she says, “because I don’t know that I would have had the perspective or resilience. Sometimes to run a business we have to make hard decisions, and do things that people don’t like.” That can mean pushback – and a higher public profile than many executives would like. “You’ve got to know who you are,” says Beverley, “and you’ve got to be okay with the decisions you make.”
Prospects for aspiring women leaders in Australian media are getting better, she says, but have long lagged behind much of the world. In fact, when Beverley moved to Australia, she couldn’t understand all the invitations to International Women’s Day events: “Why are there women’s things?” she recalls thinking. “I didn’t get it – because it had never been a problem for me. Only as I got more senior did it become clearer. I feel a responsibility to do more to help other women that come after me.”