Experience as Head of Digital, reporting to CEOs and CMOs. Agency and in-house, across performance marketing, analytics, websites, SEO, media, data and strategy.
Working across all of them taught me the most useful thing I know. Digital problems rarely sit inside one channel or one team. The tracking problem turns out to be a website problem. The media problem is usually a measurement problem. The growth problem is often an operations problem. Most of the useful work happens at the joins.
How it built up
I started agency side, at the major holding groups, eventually leading a media planning team of six. That’s where I learned media: how plans get built, how money moves, and why a channel is not always in the plan because the data put it there.
- Universal McCann
- MediaCom
- Maxus
- Mindshare
- M&C Saatchi
- Dentsu
- Havas
In-house, the question changed from what the client should do to what we were going to do, and whether it would work. At GenesisCare I built the first centralised digital team across more than forty clinics and brought media buying back in-house.
- What Ability
- IPF Digital
- GenesisCare
- Thredbo Resort
- West HQ
At IPF Digital I owned digital growth for the Australian market, launched its first national brand campaign in Australia, and ran acquisition against a target measured in loans, not leads. That role shaped how I work more than any other, and made financial modelling central to it: acquisition cost, customer value and return, worked out before the budget is committed. With risk, operations and finance all in the room, a marketing result only counts if the whole business can carry it.
Along the way the work kept pulling me towards the systems underneath: the data, the measurement, the tools. A recommendation is useful. A system that shows whether it worked is more useful. So I learned to build them.
What I’m doing now
At What Ability, an NDIS provider operating across four states, I lead digital and performance marketing. I set the strategy across paid search, SEO, conversion and web, then build most of what it needs. An events plugin written from scratch. Looker Studio reporting on BigQuery I write myself. Ad spend now runs through to first bookings, which gave the executive team its first reliable view of which spend creates clients.
Directing AI coding agents is what makes that practical with a small team. When a problem needs more people or more budget, I make the case for it.
Background
Advertising (Hons) at Charles Sturt University. Eleven platform certifications, current and lapsed, including StackAdapt Advanced Programmatic.
Why W3 Digital exists
Good work is worth writing down. Most of mine sits inside organisations, under NDA, or in a dashboard someone else now owns. This is the record of it.
Alex Wong
Get in touch
Send a note below, or find me on LinkedIn.
