Midnight Oil’s Jack Appleby on Digital Lessons From His Extensive Career

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From video games to hit television shows to Beats By Dre, Jack Appleby has created and executed digital campaigns for some of the biggest brands in entertainment. A manager of bands in his younger days, Appleby moved into the digital and social world shortly after his college graduation.

Appleby spent over five years with Ayzenberg Group before moving on to Laundry Service and then Petrol Advertising before shifting to his current job at the end of 2018. In that time, Appleby led the content and social engagement strategy for the sitcom “Community”, video games like “Injustice: Gods Among Us” and “Minecraft”, and worked on activations brands like GameStop and Nexon. Through it all, Appleby has prided himself on pushing the envelope and being willing to try new things in as digital pro.

Currently the Director of Creative Strategy at Midnight Oil, Appleby chats about his observations on the current digital landscape and gaining experience within the agency space. Plus, the group compares the differences and similarities of working within sports versus other entertainment properties.

Edited highlights appear below:

On spending a significant portion of his career within video games (15:50)

“Gaming clients really understand the need for content and to reach existing communities outside communities and use paid media budgets to create content for potential fans. It’s funny, the year or two I spent outside of gaming, I came sprinting back because I was having to justify my content budgets elsewhere. Whereas in gaming it’s like no, this is the most important thing. What are we going to make to promote this thing? So we’ve got to do some really fun, crazy stuff. ”

Advice for managing social teams (27:10)

“It’s hard to remember sometimes that this social media is still in its infancy. We’re what, a decade into paid social media budgets? … My thing is just always be very open to experimentation. Something I’ve preached with every team I’ve worked with is we’ve got to be willing to try stuff. We have to be willing to mess up. Not on a drastic scale, but if we’re not willing to experiment, we’re going to get stuck in a rut and we’re going to do very safe stuff that at some point will stop moving the needle.”

Social on the Sidelines is Presented to You By:

On measuring success in social and digital (34:08)

“At the end of the day there’s going to be some mixture of engagement followers even though it’s kind of not great to think that way…In gaming, one of the key metrics is preorders how many people are buying the game before it even comes out. It honestly becomes a mixture of things throughout every campaign… I’ve also worked on campaigns where it was really just about awareness, um, which can mean a lot of things…We want to align very clearly with our client’s business plans. We want to get our clients promoted because we’re helping them accomplish their boss’ business goals.”

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Advice for people looking to get into the industry (39:38)

“Do as much as you can on your own outside before you get the job. One of the unfair realities of a lot of social media jobs is they expect you to have years of experience for entry-level positions. I have seen social media internships that expect experience, which is insanely frustrating. But it is a reality. If you want to get into the space, you need to be fairly educated before you even start. The good news is there’s a lot of really wonderful ways to do that. To not use Twitter to both build connections and to learn, you’re just missing out on like just completely like free career growth in many ways.”

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