17 years across enterprise, agency, and the messy middle.
I've sat on every side of the digital marketing equation: brand-side at ANZ Bank, agency-side at OMD, and enterprise digital performance leadership. That's the lens I bring to every fractional engagement.
Most digital marketing problems aren't strategy problems. They're alignment problems. The brand side wants one thing, the agency wants another, the analytics team is missing context, the leadership team sees outputs but not outcomes. Money quietly leaks through the gaps.
Fractional digital direction exists to close those gaps, bringing senior, accountable ownership to the function without the cost of a full-time hire. After spending the early years of my career inside marketing teams that did this well (and several that didn't), I now do it for businesses that want the same outcome.
It also means doing the work when the work needs doing. Seventeen years in, I still build campaigns and fix tracking myself. That is not a fallback, it is what keeps the direction honest. A strategy written by someone who has not touched an ad account in a decade is a guess.
I work remotely from Perth with clients across Australia and New Zealand, and I keep my client list deliberately small.
Past brands and roles.
A career split roughly evenly between brand-side leadership, agency performance, and senior consulting.
Fractional digital marketing director
Working with mid-market businesses across Australia and New Zealand
IMDEX (ASX-listed mining technology) · ANZ Bank · Skills Group
Senior digital roles in performance, social, and CRM
OMD · PHD · Y&R
Performance media leadership across consumer and finance categories
Kathmandu · Spark · Latitude · GE Money · Holden NZ · Air New Zealand · AMP · OPSM
Project and consulting engagements over the past decade
A deliberate model, not a stopgap.
After 17 years inside enterprises and agencies, I kept seeing the same gap. Mid-market businesses, the ones doing $5M to $50M in revenue, were stuck. Too big for a junior marketer or a set-and-forget agency. Not yet big enough to justify a $180K-plus CMO hire. So marketing either drifted without senior oversight, or an agency ran it with nobody internal holding them accountable.
Fractional solves that. You get a senior director who has done this at scale, for a fraction of the cost, on a structure that fits where your business actually is. I chose this model because it is where I create the most impact, and because good marketing leadership does not require someone sitting in your office five days a week. It requires someone who has done it before and owns the outcome.
What people who've worked with me say.
I had the pleasure of working alongside Dwain for the entire time he was at ANZ. He's been in the game long enough to have made the mistakes of the past but also stays right up-to-date on the now of digital advertising and leveraging social. To say we made big steps forward at ANZ with Dwain there would be an understatement.
An experienced digital marketer who is not only technically skilled but also understands the power and importance of creative within digital. Instrumental in progressing our social strategy. Has built valuable agency and media partner relationships over his career, a testament to his character and reputation as a smart operator.
Dwain helped us out with specialist guidance and implementation on a new product launch. He's a star. Knowledgeable, friendly, patient and gets great results. 100% recommend.
Dwain ran the social media campaign for Season 1 of HyperCinema in Auckland. He's been a brilliant collaborator (friendly, clear, enthused, proactive) and has shown great results with over 770,000 TikTok views achieved.