Susan Coghill Lost 5-10 Years by Settling For “Best Supporting Actress in the Oscars of my Career”

Susan Coghill thinks she robbed herself of 5 to 10 years of career progression by believing that good things come to those who wait.

The Tourism Australia chief marketing officer was joined by FINCH CEO Rob Galluzzo and film producer Camilla Mazzaferro on a SXSW Sydney panel exploring the lies they tell themselves, the axioms they hold true, and those they disregard. Susan urged the room not to “sit back and wait for things” professionally.

“I sort of wonder if maybe the reason this resonates with me so negatively is because I'm probably battling my own inner Catholic school girl who wants to behave, and I want to be obedient, and I want to play by the rules,” she said.

“Maybe it's because I'm the youngest of six, and I spent a lot of time waiting around to get my opportunity to do things.

“I feel like maybe I put myself on the back burner a little too much. I was waiting for opportunities to come my way. I described my attitude at one point as being happy to be Best Supporting Actress, not Best Leading Actress, in the Oscars of my career ... I feel like I maybe cheated myself of 5 or 10 years of progression, because I was waiting for things to fall into place.”

Rob thinks “curiosity is just for babies.” It doesn’t require action. Adventure does. He took issue with SXSW Sydney 2024’s tagline: “The future belongs to the curious.” 

“Unfortunately, South By has let you walk in with a lie around your neck,” he argued of the slogan printed on delegates’ lanyards, because that’s “a very dangerous way to think.”

“You can be curious from behind your desk. I don't think the future even vaguely belongs to the curious. It belongs to the adventurous. The bit that's missing there is curiosity plus action is adventure.”

Adventure has served Rob well. He told stories of presenting at the UN General Assembly as a “dyslexic and probably ADHD”, forced to write a script he knew he wouldn’t be able to read.

“I know I can't read from a script, so I had to just write a fake one, then make it up on the spot,” he said.

“I stumbled on a little sentence that I ended up writing on my desk, which was, 'Don't worry, Rob, you'll be dead soon enough.' So it's okay to bluff the UN.”

‘You’ll be a long time dead’ is a line Rob thinks about often, and finds motivating. It’s given him the courage to launch initiatives like 36 Months - “an old fashioned Italian shakedown” of the government, lobbying to legislate a minimum social media age - and Lion’s Share, the reason he presented to the UN. He discovered almost 1 in 5 ads use animals to make a profit, and founded an initiative for brands to donate a small portion of their media spend to charities dedicated to those animals. 

It’s also the spirit that led him to roam the MCG alone after ditching Shane Warne and Ed Sheeran. Shane Warne invited him to see the musician, but Rob had already bought tickets to go with his family the following night. The cricketer convinced him. Rob didn’t realise Shane meant they’d be meeting Ed Sheeran. They had VIP lanyards confirming they had an all-access pass to the MCG.

“So I thought, I'm not going to stay here,” he said, telling the story for the first time ever in front of his family, who still didn’t know he’d seen Ed Sheeran twice in two nights.

“I'm going to go and explore the MCG. I'm going to spend maybe an hour literally looking in cupboards. I'm looking under things, exploring the whole of the MCG, still listening to Ed Sheeran

“The point is, yeah, maybe just check your lanyard. Wonder, what am I allowed to do? What could I do? And if you ever get the chance to push and try and learn and go and explore, I would say, do it. It's really served me well, it's served the company well.”

Camilla made a film which required dismissing all worries of access and permission. The film crew sent cameras to Ukraine so artists who’d stayed behind to fight when Russia invaded could shoot footage. “They were porcelain artists and oil painters, and they basically found this shared language through creativity and arts.”

The result, the Sundance-winning Porcelain Wars, is a co-directed project between an American director and a first-time Ukrainian director. They made it in secret over the course of a year.

“We were a little scared about getting hacked by Russia, but we just decided to keep our heads down,” she admitted.

“It's a beautiful, artistic reflection of what Ukrainian culture is, and really reminds you that there are real people there dealing with that conflict.”

Susan said that risk taking in creative work is about finding “the balance between the magic and the logic.”

“We think through absolutely everything, from our weather delays to talent issues or whatever it may be, but we try and make sure that we keep both sides in balance. And if you're going to take a risky decision, we have to be able to articulate what that upside is.”

This week, she’s presenting new Tourism Australia work to the board, and “I have to think about, 'What's the feeling I want to leave them with? What's the excitement that I want them to feel? What's the confidence I want them to feel in what I'm presenting?' So I know that they will listen to my stories, they'll listen to the idea, and ultimately, they're gonna walk out of that room and go, 'Was Susan confident? Is she passionate about this idea? Do I believe in it?' And that is what will help get it over the line.”

She warned the industry against speaking in absolutes. We’ve lost nuance in a search for grabby headlines, she argued. For example, “the idea that TV is dead is absolute nonsense.”

“TV's absolutely not dead, and people are interested in saying things like that to be provocative,” she added. 

“‘The brand era is over.’ Are you kidding me? I know Scott Galloway likes to say that, but in the same breath, he'll turn around and say, the one skill he would love his sons to have to be successful in business is storytelling. My god, what's branding if it's not great storytelling for Christ's sake.”