I found something this week.
A slightly battered, black-and-white magazine article from March 2005. There’s a very young photo of me in the corner, an enormous headline that reads Marketing: The Reason, and underneath it, several hundred words written by a much younger version of me explaining why people buy things.
And I smiled.
Because apparently, I’ve been banging on about marketing for quite a long time.
At the time, I was working in economics and market research in Townsville, North Queensland. I loved research. I still do. I loved understanding why people behaved the way they did, what influenced their decisions, what the data was telling us and what was happening in a market.
But I wanted to do something with it.
I didn’t just want to produce the research. I wanted to turn it into ideas, strategy, communications and, ultimately, results.
So I started moving myself into the marketing side of the agency.
Around that time, CityLife Townsville was launching. There was already a CityLife Cairns, and anyone familiar with North Queensland will understand that Townsville getting its own version was not an entirely insignificant development. Townsville and Cairns have always enjoyed a healthy little rivalry.
The magazine approached the agency about contributing content.
I saw an opportunity.
Not simply to promote our clients, but to demonstrate what our marketing department could do. And, if I’m being completely truthful, to demonstrate what I could do.
I think I was about 19 when I started writing these columns.
The one I’ve rediscovered is called “Marketing: The Reason.”
Reading it more than 20 years later is fascinating.
Some of the language is very 2005. Newspaper classifieds get a mention. So do television and radio commercials. There is not a Meta pixel, algorithm, TikTok strategy or AI agent in sight.
But the thinking?
That hasn’t changed nearly as much.
Know your audience.
Understand why they buy.
Understand the difference between reaching someone and actually influencing a purchase.
Use the right combination of channels.
Be consistent.
Connect marketing activity to commercial results.
Twenty-something years later, I could still walk into a strategy meeting and say many of those things.
And that brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about.
I’ve never fitted particularly neatly into one box
For most of my adult life, I have worked in marketing and advertising while also pursuing acting.
And, over the years, that combination has generated a surprising amount of scrutiny.
There were times when I asked for a promotion, a salary increase, flexibility or different working arrangements and the question underneath the conversation seemed to be:
But are you really serious about marketing?
I was.
Very.
I just happened to be serious about something else as well.
Long before working from home became completely normal, I was asking employers to let me do it. I knew I could deliver the work. In fact, I knew I could over-deliver.
When an acting role came along, I negotiated unpaid leave.
And I became extremely good at making two seemingly incompatible worlds work together.
Anyone who has spent time on a film or television set knows there can be an extraordinary amount of waiting around. While other people were chatting, reading, playing games or finding increasingly inventive ways to kill time, I was often sitting somewhere with my laptop open.
Answering emails.
Writing strategies.
Reviewing creative.
Writing copy decks.
Doing the work.
Not because somebody was forcing me to.
Because I genuinely love it.
And then I moved to Los Angeles
I thought, perhaps, I had finally moved beyond having to explain the combination.
My work could simply speak for itself.
And mostly, it has.
I’ve built businesses, advised businesses, developed brands, created strategies, run campaigns and worked with clients across industries, countries and stages of growth.
But something interesting still happens occasionally.
I can be talking to someone about marketing and they’re completely engaged. We’re talking strategy, brands, consumers, business problems, growth.
Then I mention that I’m also an actor.
And sometimes I can actually see the moment something changes.
There’s a tiny recalculation.
Oh.
It used to bother me.
These days, I find it more interesting than anything else.
Because I no longer see the two parts of my life as competing with each other.
They have fed each other.
Acting taught me to understand people from the inside out. To listen. To observe. To understand motivation, emotion, tension, language and subtext.
Marketing asks many of the same questions.
Who is this person?
What do they want?
What matters to them?
What are they afraid of?
What will make them act?
Research taught me to look for evidence.
Advertising taught me to turn insight into an idea.
Acting taught me to understand the human being receiving it.
And entrepreneurship taught me that unless all of that eventually creates some kind of result, it’s mostly just interesting conversation.
I don’t think I would be the marketer I am today without all of those things.
Which brings me back to this article
There’s something lovely about finding evidence of yourself before you knew where everything was going.
I look at that young woman in the photograph and she has absolutely no idea what the next 20-plus years are going to look like.
She doesn’t know where she’ll live.
She doesn’t know the companies she’ll work with, the campaigns she’ll create, the businesses she’ll help build, the people she’ll meet or the risks she’ll take.
She certainly doesn't know she’ll one day be living in Los Angeles, running her own marketing consultancy and publishing her teenage thoughts on marketing on its website.
But I recognise her.
She was curious.
She wanted to understand why people did what they did.
She wanted research to lead somewhere.
She wanted ideas to have a commercial purpose.
She wanted to create.
And apparently, she had quite a lot to say about marketing.
Some things really don’t change.
The final line of my original article was:
“Do your marketing activities hit your target market?”
Twenty-one years later, I’d probably ask a few more questions.
Did we understand the problem properly?
Did we find the human truth behind it?
Did we create something people actually care about?
Did it change behaviour?
Did it grow the business?
But the fundamental question is still there.
Why?
Why this audience? Why this message? Why this channel? Why would somebody care? Why would they choose you?
That was the point of Marketing: The Reason in 2005.
It is still at the heart of the work I do today.
So, after more than 25 years of research, strategy, advertising, branding, content, clients, campaigns, pitches, wins, mistakes, reinventions and an awful lot of words…
I think it’s probably safe to say:
I’m pretty serious about marketing.
Jana Wilkes is the Founder of Prosperiam, a brand and marketing consultancy helping businesses turn insight into strategy, and strategy into growth.
