Dynamic Duos: ‘the Aussie bogan to my blue-blooded Brit’
This week in Dynamic Duos, partners at Connecting Plots and Infinity Squared, Dave Jansen and Tom Phillips, reflect on their Emmy Award-winning work, how their partnership fell into place, and their shared passions.
In Dynamic Duos, Mumbrella each week asks two colleagues with a professional and personal affiliation to share with readers the importance of workplace relationships in an increasingly hybridised world of work.
Dave Jansen:
Back in 2008 I worked for an agency called TCO, one of the original content businesses in the country. It was run by a chaotic visionary which made it incredibly challenging but also incredibly rewarding and formative period in my career.
When Tom joined the company from the UK, he was your typical, polite Englishman – he couldn’t believe how archaic Australian creative and media was and still wore jeans from the 90s. We got on immediately. We were both passionate about our work and used each other as therapists for the daily rollercoaster of life at TCO.
What we really connected over was bringing his comms planning background and my creative and production thinking together. Although we never worked on the same clients, we’d always solve briefs over lunch or after work and it genuinely felt like we were doing something different to the industry norm.
I left TCO in late 2009 to start my own business, Infinity Squared. For the next 4 years I ran and grew Infinity’s reputation for being the go-to content and branded entertainment business in Australia. We brought in a roster of world class film directors, as well as a creative partner Nick Boshier who was the brains behind some of the country’s most famous YouTube creations including Beached Az, Bondi Hipsters and Trent from Punchy.
During those years Tom and I stayed mates, having beers, exercising together and always chewing the fat about work.
In 2014 I EP’d a TV show deal with ABC to make the world’s first crowdsourced multiplatform TV show. It was ambitious and needed someone to coordinate the participation of the audience who would, in essence, dictate what each week’s episode would be. The timing for Tom was perfect.
The show was a huge success, winning an international Emmy Award but more importantly, it showed Tom and I that there was something in telling stories in a non-linear way.
So Tom joined Infinity Squared and the rest is history.
Like any relationship it takes work. It’s a bit like a marriage. There are ups and downs, there are times when you could (and do) lose your shit. But I think we’ve grown to understand each other and what drives us.
Tom loves channels and media and I love creativity. And I think that’s the secret sauce. Neither of us are as strong as a solo act.
Tom Phillips:
Dave and I met back in 2009. I’d just moved to Australia from the UK and joined The Conscience Organisation, one of Sydney’s original social and content agencies. We met at training and were asked to introduce ourselves with a fact. Dave’s opening line was less than savoury but it made me laugh. 14 years on and not much has changed. He makes me laugh a lot.
My background was in media and planning while Dave’s was in content and production. From the get-go, we had a healthy balance between planning and creativity. Dave’s approach was so refreshing from traditional ad peeps I’d worked with in the past. He was dead set on creating entertainment not ads and he didn’t care about what channel it was going in as long as it made someone laugh or cry. It was all about the ‘gooseys’. My challenge was helping him channel this in a way that would build brands and sell shit. I think it’s been the key ingredient to our success working together.
Dave’s always been the Aussie bogan to my blue-blooded Brit. He’s dick jokes, I’m dad jokes. He loves Metallica and HipHop, I love musicals and WSFM.
In 2010, Dave left TCO to start Infinity Squared and I stayed on to grow it from a 9 to 30 person agency, getting companies like Coca Cola, Westfield and Nestlé onto social.
When I eventually left in 2013, Dave and I partnered up on an influencer agency called The Creators Network, signing top beauty, food and comedy YouTubers. Dave likes to leave this part out of our story because it was a massive flop – we had some success launching Bondi Harvest but it turned out managing 19 year old YouTubers was a little soul destroying…
It did get us into business together though. The next year, Dave brought me on to help with #7 Days Later – a world first social TV show that made a weekly episode based on suggestions from an online audience. The problem was they had no idea how to find and build that audience. That’s where I came in. The show went on to win an Emmy Award and we realised this approach to connected storytelling was something brands weren’t getting from traditional agencies.
From there I joined Infinity, building it into a full service creative remit, winning businesses like Lion, SEEK and Maccas. In 2018 we divided the full service and production offering and officially launched our creative agency, Connecting Plots.
Our relationship is not without its fair share of tension. There are times where I want to kill him. But there’s also a lot of good times. We’ve created businesses and a whole lot of work we’re incredibly proud of.
Dave on Tom:
Most memorable moment with Tom: Definitely winning an Emmy Award.
Best word to describe him: Optimistic (eternally and unshakably).
Most annoying habit or endearing behaviour he has: Tom’s overly-considered, which is the antithesis of me. I’m impulsive and impatient as hell.
Tom on Dave:
Most memorable moment with Dave: Being on a conference call with a client and Dave having road rage not realising he wasn’t on mute…
Best word to describe him: Feisty.
Most annoying habit or endearing behaviour he has: He doesn’t like being told what to do… but then does it anyway. Most of the time (annoyingly) with blistering creativity.
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Lauren McNamara is a journalist at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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