It couldn’t be said that Kane Reiken has taken the conventional route into advertising. At 16-years-old, the Aussie began his career as a chart countdown presenter on a radio station in Brisbane. By the age of 18, he had secured a prime-time slot and was set for a career in the limelight, on the entertainment side of the media.
Kane continued presenting while studying at university and earned enough money to travel the world. But it was through contacts he made as a stand in presenter on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! that Kane landed a job in advertising in Britain.
Six years later and Kane has won a slew of gongs for his work on a number of high profile campaigns. After learning of his landslide victory in a competition that had 17,000 media professionals from around the world cast their vote, Kane was humble. Asked how he secured the win, Kane said: “I was quite lucky to have a big network in the Omnicom family of supportive countrymen helping me get over the line!”
Kane has worked on a number of high profile campaigns including the Pepsi Max Unbelievable series, a set of low-budget, high-impact videos that went viral. Kane says: “We were looking at how we could use traditional media placement, such as an outdoor bus shelter, and how we can turn it into something we can use as content. It was a really cool experience.”
But it was a project in his first job in advertising that stands out as a career highlight. As an account manager at XCOM Media, Kane worked on strategy and management of the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign for Tourism Queensland.
He readily admits now that at the time he wasn’t sure if it would fly: “We worked on it for weeks and weeks and I just thought I don’t know if it’s going to be good or not. I didn’t really tell anyone but was I just like, I don’t think this is going to work. To finally see on the day it launches that it goes massive, has 25,000 entries and breaks all records.
“It made me laugh thinking I was the guy who was thinking, no this is a crap idea, it’s not going to work!
“It was just the start of the social movement with campaigns and to see all the different platforms come together in a really international campaign was great.”
Asked about what marketers are getting wrong now, Kane points to dark social – messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Snapchat, that have become vast networks for sharing between friendship groups but do not allow publishers to track their content.
Kane warns: “It’s not suitable to just get your 30 second commercial and send that to every platform. The actual content needs to be really customised to how people use that app or use that service and how they share and want to share that content.”
He adds: “A lot of brands aren’t even set up to use WhatsApp behaviours. So if I’ve got a piece of content on desktop there’s no way I can share that on WhatsApp. I need to access that on a mobile device to share it. It’s about having those plugins to be able to actually tap into those dark sharing behaviours.
“A lot of brands that are really digitally savvy don’t tap into all of the benefits of dark sharing. It’s getting bigger and bigger now, especially with the rise of the Asian messaging apps, Snapchat and the others in the US.”
In addition to the day job, Kane has been developing a socially-driven mobile gaming app called Handsome. He says: “I’ve always had an interest in consumer gaming and consumer apps and I identified a bit of a gap in the market in terms of mini games and the social element to them. It’s self-funded by me and a developer and focuses on shareable, personalised mini games or snackable content that you can share with friends.”
Where does he see himself in two years time? “I would love to say working on my own project, having a number of apps or services across whatever kind of device it is by then – wearables maybe.”
And at the end of his career? “On a really nice boat somewhere would be awesome. But I don’t think I’m the sort of person who can fully switch off so doing what I can.”
Kane adds: “I don’t want to get bored.”
Nominations for this year’s Rising Star competition should be sent to eumarketing@outbrain.com
You can see the full list of 2014 nominees here
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