David Roddick of Active International

David Roddick is GM of Active International Australia. David’s career in sales spans four continents, working predominantly in the media and communications sector. He started out selling advertising space for an obscure national newspaper in the UK called Today which had just been acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Thirty years later, he has built sales functions from scratch, led teams from three to two thousand heads and run sales effectiveness programs in cultures as diverse as Singapore, Poland and Brazil. In the process, he has introduced trading and operational innovation which have since become standards for their industries. There’s a theme amongst the media businesses David has worked for. Every one of them including News Corporation, DMGT, Clear Channel and most recently at Adshel, has faced the challenge of maintaining relevance as the business changes at incredible speed. As a result, being clear about what you stand for so that it can guide you through uncertainty has been a theme of . By working with some of the most controversial brand identities, from The Sun, News of the World, Daily Mail, for example) and then worldwide, as well as some of the most anonymous, he has learnt that businesses which grow with a unifying thought about what they represent to their customers, are the most resilient against potential disruption and challenge; and they turn out to be the most fun to work for.