In this episode, we speak to Brian Gallagher, who shared his insight as the Chief of Sales at Australian Media Owner SCA on the changing media landscape and how the pandemic has helped shine a light on localism.

SME businesses were the first to feel the pain of the Covid-19 outbreak in Australia. SCA quickly mobilised a 'Shop Local' campaign on a national basis, with localised campaigns running on social radio shows, where local people could call in and talk up their favourite local businesses.

"...because of the very highly social nature of radio, we were also able to use our morning shows, our drive time shows, and our daytime shows to get consumers to call in and tell stories about great local vendors, what they were doing, and how they'd helped them."

Brian also spoke on the attractiveness and dominance of the big giants Google and Facebook for SME advertisers and why SCA brought in more digital marketing experts to help their customers understand the importance of advertising outside the giants with a blend of mediums to achieve their goals.

"Facebook can operate at any budgetary level. They operate in a dashboarded scenario... It's a slot machine for marketing; depending on how sophisticated a client you are, you can very quickly put a lot of coins in the slot. Cost per acquisition seems to rise inexorably. We feel very strongly that those platforms, while appearing convenient or cost-effective, there's a hidden cost there, and our small to medium advertisers, in the main, don't see how that works. We are fiercely local about our content and our connection with our communities, but we've implemented more and more executives who are experts in digital marketing in these communities so that they can take hold of those advertisers and say, "Yes, you should be in search. "Yes, you should be in social, "but you should be deploying in this manner."