BIZARRE BEGINNINGS TO COMPLEX SUCCESS

“Simplicity is when it’s inherently clear what its function is – something that’s so clear that you don’t even need to think about how it works.”

As the executive customer experience director at AKQA in Melbourne, Tracy Brown’s role is to prepare organisations for the future. AKQA is a complex agency that delivers simplicity for its clients. Unlike a standard digital agency, its functions also include marketing automation, artificial intelligence and research and development. The campaigns it runs are martech or data led, and creative and design are interlinked. Brown explains that her role as executive customer experience director is focused on organisational design, helping clients to work out how to structure their own teams.

So far, she has completely redefined experiences for healthcare, finance and tertiary education. “The end game is to deliver experiences, and those experiences are really complicated. So, we will design what we think the future experience is, but the hard work is figuring out how to get there. We have to help them understand how to support technology, but they also need to change their teams and their capabilities to be able to deliver on it.”

This is the way that Brown talks about everything, like it’s no biggie, when in fact it is