The Brand Agency launches specialist Destination Marketing division

Former Tourism WA CEO Gwyn Dolphin has joined The Brand Agency to head up their new Destination Marketing division, created to provide strategic guidance to organisations operating in the tourism, events and entertainment sectors. Gwyn brings with him extensive experience in these sectors. Over a six-year period at Tourism WA he ran both the events and international marketing divisions before becoming CEO and overseeing key marketing agreements with Qantas for its London-Perth flights, and Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce platform.

Gwyn and his team will be backed by the full resources of The Brand Agency and WPP, giving it access to more than 100 specialists in The Brand Agency’s Perth head office, including the largest in-house digital, event management and activation, strategic, creative and content production teams in the market.

“We’ve looked at the market and there’s no-one locally with the expertise and understanding to provide effective strategy and marketing communications to this sector. Tourism is a complex, global industry and to deliver results for tourism businesses in WA you need both the scale of an international network such as WPP and the depth of services from a business such as The Brand Agency. There’s a clear gap in this market for an offering like this and we are now filling it,” said Gwyn.

“Tourism generates $11.8 billion for the state and employs 104,000 people, yet there isn’t any agency of note specialising in this area. We want Perth and Western Australian businesses and organisations to have the ability to access best practice services locally to enable our tourism businesses to better compete nationally and globally.”

Gwyn has previously worked in the events, marketing and entertainment sectors as Marketing Director of the Welsh Rugby Union, owner of the multi-purpose Millennium Stadium, where his role encompassed all commercial, marketing and event attraction functions including the 2012 Olympics, Rugby World Cup and major music concerts.

He also managed multi-national marketing and sponsorship campaigns for Vodafone (Formula One) and Ford (football & James Bond) as part of the WPP Group’s integrated agency structure. He joined WPP after six years in marketing communications at Toyota.

Links below to articles regarding the launch on Campaign Brief and Mumbrella.