Digital Adelaide.

Digital Adelaide started in 2015 as Social Media Day Adelaide. A few Google Hangouts, one face-to-face seminar in a University of South Australia tutorial room, and after-work drinks. About 40 people.

I co-directed it from day one. Over the next decade we shifted it into a fully in-person conference, partnered with UniSA, broadened from social to all of digital, pivoted virtual through COVID, and rebuilt it on the other side at the National Wine Centre. From 2024 it lived at Adelaide Oval.

At handover in 2025, it was the largest marketing conference in South Australia. 200+ delegates, working practitioners only, real campaigns and real results. No vendor pitches. Ever.

Programming. Speaker scouting and curation. Sponsor and partnership conversations. Venue negotiation as we outgrew each one. Marketing and ticket sales for every event. MC and host on the day. And the unglamorous middle: running the committee, setting the calendar, and the year-round community work that made each event feel inevitable rather than a launch.

In 2025, Jen Evison and I signed off and handed the reins to Ryan Jones, who runs it now as sole organiser. I still speak there. The 2026 event has me on the lineup as Head of Marketing at 90 Seconds.

Most marketing leadership CVs list one employer at a time. Digital Adelaide is what I did on top of those, for a decade, unpaid. It is the clearest signal I can offer about how I work when no one is making me: build the community I want to work inside, stay close to working practitioners, and keep doing it for long enough that compounding does the heavy lifting.