‘They’re kind of built to kill ideas, right?’: How Telstra CMO Brent Smart influenced creativity at corporations

When Brent Smart made the move from agency world to a big corporation like Telstra, he knew it’d be a significant culture shock, but it also gave him a massive opportunity to influence and inspire.

Appearing on a new episode of Mumbrella’s one-on-one podcast series, the Telstra chief marketing officer discussed making the jump to the telco and one of Australia’s biggest brands in 2022 and his first impressions coming in, having worked at agencies all around the world, including Saatchi and Saatchi in New York.

“There’s such a meeting culture inside corporations. There’s also a big adjustment in [that] every category has got its, sort of, jargon. I worked in insurance, which speaks a whole different language that you’ve got to get used to. Now I work in telco – it’s a whole other language that you’ve sort of got to get your head around,” Smart told host Neil Griffiths.

“So there’s also that adjustment you go through too, which is learning the category dynamics, learning the category language, understanding how the category works.”