About
Twenty years. One discipline.
I'm Dwain Douman. I've spent two decades making digital marketing accountable. First inside enterprise marketing teams and media agencies, now as a fractional director for businesses that need the seniority without the salary.
I've sat on both sides of the table. I know what agencies say in the room, and what they say after you leave it.
I started in Cape Town and built my career across New Zealand and Australia. Agency side at OMD, PHD and Y&R, brand side at ANZ Bank, IMDEX and Skills Group. Enterprise budgets, board-level reporting, and the discipline that comes from defending every dollar in a room full of people who didn't want to spend it.
What I kept running into was the gap in the middle of the market. Businesses doing $5M to $20M with real budgets and nobody senior owning the marketing number. They'd hire an agency and get activity. They'd hire a junior and get effort. Neither is leadership.
So that's what I do now, from Perth, for clients across Australia and New Zealand. I take on a small number of retainers at a time, usually four. Attention is the thing you're paying for and it doesn't stretch. I set the strategy, I own the reporting, I hold the vendors to account, and when the work needs building I build it myself.
Outside of client work I'm building a leather goods brand with my wife, made by an artisan in Bali. It's a useful reminder that marketing is easier to talk about than to do, and that every business decision eventually shows up in a number.
Four things you can hold me to.
One set of numbers
Not the agency's version and yours. One report, one source of truth, readable without me in the room.
The answer you need
Including "don't spend that", "that channel won't work for you", and "you should hire someone full-time instead of me".
Four clients at a time
A deliberate cap. You're buying senior attention, and attention doesn't scale past a small number of businesses.
No lock-in
Quarter to quarter. If the work isn't returning more than it costs, you shouldn't be paying for it.
Where the twenty years went.
- Now
Fractional digital director · Dwain Douman Digital
Retained digital leadership for mid-market businesses across Australia and New Zealand. Strategy, performance ownership, vendor accountability, and hands-on execution where it's needed.
- Brand side
IMDEX · ANZ Bank · Skills Group
Senior digital roles in performance, social and CRM, including ASX-listed mining technology at IMDEX. Multi-million dollar media budgets, first-party data programmes, and reporting that went to executive committees.
- Agency side
OMD · PHD · Y&R
Performance media leadership across consumer and finance categories. This is where I learned how agency incentives really work, and why client-side leadership is the difference between spend and results.
- Other brands
Kathmandu · Spark · Latitude · GE Money · Holden NZ · Air New Zealand · AMP · OPSM
Project and consulting engagements over the past decade.
- Foundation
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Marketing, Cape Town. Started in an era where digital had to justify its existence against print and television. The habit never left.
The stack I actually use.
If it's on this list I've built in it, broken it, and fixed it.