Archive April 2009 The Turner prize
| The Turner prize |
| Tuesday, 28 April 2009 10:48 |
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Adept at communication and passionate about broadcasting, Barnaby Dawe is a perfect fit for Turner Entertainment Networks – and he’s made the role of VP for marketing and communications his own. Heather McGregor reports: Barnaby Dawe’s philosophy is simple: “I think it is really important that your career should focus on what you are passionate about.” His own is a testament to this belief and he is almost evangelical about it. He has even been prepared to wait on the sidelines until something he really feels passionate about comes along. How did the VP for marketing and communications at Turner Broadcasting first get started? Barnaby did French, German and Russian at A-level (“because I hated science”) and went on to do French and Russian at Bristol University. In his placement year, he spent eight months in Paris and five in Russia – the French placement with Le Creuset, the cookware company, working to the marketing director. This fi rst encounter with advertising campaigns and market research proved to be infl uential in Barnaby’s career path after university. He graduated in 1991 into the teeth of the recession and tried but failed to get a job in an advertising agency. Undaunted, he did some more work for Le Creuset in London and Paris before landing a marketing and PR job at Corporate Finance Publishing, in its successful conferences business. Unfortunately, the holding company folded, and at 23 Barnaby found himself facing unemployment. However, he had noticed that one publication in the group, Investor Relations magazine, had been doing well. He approached the publisher, Janet Dignan, and together with a small group of other investors, bought the magazine from the receiver. “I was 23 and had nothing to lose,” he said, of his foray into entrepreneurship. His fi rst responsibility was to build subscriptions and he went on to manage events – drawing on his conferences experience – and to help with the day-to-day management of the business. “We then set up a company in New York and suddenly I found myself, at a very young age, shuttling backwards and forward to the US and talking to international lawyers and accountants about double taxation! It was the most fantastic experience.” Barnaby was doing well and the more successful the business became, the more senior people he was talking to in the world of investor relations. “But I gradually came to realise that I just wasn’t passionate enough about IR.” Where did his passion lie? “In television.” So he quit – though he remained a shareholder and kept his seat on the board – and gave himself six months to fi nd a job in TV. He wrote to everyone, o ffering to work without pay and was taken on by a number of stations including Channel 4, which quickly off ered him a permanent job. Initially, he joined the PR department, working for Yvonne Taylor. When Channel 4 appointed the young and feisty Polly Cochrane from Channel Five to head their marketing department, Barnaby (knowing her reputation for shaking things up) knocked on her door and asked if he could join her team. “After Sex and the City, we ran a great campaign for the series Queer as Folk when we managed to rile the Daily Mail very successfully”t;The first marketing campaign he worked on for Cochrane was the launch of Sex and the City, at the time the biggest ever support for a television series. Even after she had been there for ten years, Cochrane admitted that, when she sat down with the commissioning teams each season to select eight big pieces to receive most of its marketing support, they started with the ones they hoped would de ne the channel. And there were plenty of those in Barnaby’s time. “After Sex and the City, we ran a great campaign for the series Queer as Folk when we managed to rile the Daily Mail very successfully.” He was very happy at Channel 4 and there was a shared feeling with colleagues that they were pioneers and breaking new ground in marketing TV. “Polly was a very hard taskmaster, but I learnt so much from her,” he says. “But after two-and-a-half years I had hit the ceiling and there was nowhere to go.” At the time, Cochrane was not going anywhere to clear the way for him – she ended up staying at C4 for 11 years, leaving recently at he still-young age of 45, to join Warner Brothers as group marketing director for the UK. What does she have to say now about her former protégée?
“I met Barnaby during my fi rst week at Channel 4. He popped his head round the door and simply said, ‘You look busy – would you like some help?’ People say impressions are formed in the fi rst 30 seconds and this encounter has always summed Barnaby up for me - smart, highly motivated and someone you really want on your side. It’s no surprise that he’s gone on to be so successful.” By now the dotcom boom was taking off and Barnaby joined Open TV, an interactive TV channel owned jointly by Sky, HSBC and BT, working for marketing director Charlie Ponsonby. Once again he felt like a pioneer – this time in the revolutionary medium of interactive TV. But before long, Sky bought the other In 2002, Dawn Airey joined Sky. Barnaby credits this, and the arrival of James Murdoch as CEO, with softening the corporate culture and making it a much more enjoyable place to work. In particular, Barnaby says that he learnt a lot working for Dawn, who he describes as having wonderful leadership skills. There But Barnaby himself made quite a strong impression on colleagues during his time at Sky. Will Abbot, marketing and communications director at Freesat describes being mentored by him, when Barnaby was director of marketing for Sky Networks. “He has an incredible feel for brands,” says Will, “a real creative By the time Barnaby left Sky, he was working across eight or nine di erent brands but felt overstretched and realised that what he really aspired to was putting all his e orts into one brand. He left for Heart FM where he became managing director – much more of a general management role, but running the P&L didn’t faze him thanks to his earlier experience, not least because that experience had been learnt when he had a stake in the venture. Heart had been looking for an MD who would combine focusing on the brand with devising content and connecting with an audience. Barnaby was passionate about his role and he loved the brand. His greatest achievement was breaking Capital Radio’s 30-year record in the number one slot at breakfast in London. When Chrysalis sold the station to Global Radio, Barnaby found himself once again facing into the abyss of enforced unemployment. This time he did not return to entrepreneurship. Instead, he took nine months off . “I had intended it to be four, but I enjoyed it so much it grew to nine.” He found it very hard not to be employed and admits that he is very work-focused. The workplace, he says, gives him a sense of belonging. Conscious that he was in his late 30s, it didn’t feel right to take his foot off the gas. It was a time of real soul-searching but, with his friends’ encouragement, he persevered and once he got used to the idea, enjoyed his sabbatical. He took up skiing, tennis, horseriding and waterskiing and ran the London and the Brussels marathons in 2008. Barnaby used his time out to think what to do next. Where did his passion lie? He was drawn to working for a big US company and joined Turner Broadcasting as the VP, marketing and communications. At Turner, Barnaby has a team of 30 and six direct reports that encompass both PR and marketing. “I am a firm believer that PR and marketing should all pull together: all routes lead to the same market,” he says. “When people don’t speak to their counterparts, mistakes happen.” A lot of the work he does involves children’s programmes, something he has never done before and finds very interesting. He also runs the creative team, and they do all their own on-air promotions. Though he has no children of his own – in 2006 the Independent named him the 99th most infl uential gay person in Britain – he is from a large family. The youngest of six children, he has 12 nephews and nieces. Barnaby likes to talk about his passion in career terms, but I would add to that his compassion – though that is something he would never dream of mentioning himself. When he ran those marathons, it was to raise sponsorship money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, which has been treating his niece since she was born in 1991. “ Their dedication and hard work is both inspiring and humbling,” he says. Dedication and hard work – something he knows a fair bit about.
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