Jason Barnard at DMA Melbourne 2020: Conversations That Foreshadowed the Rise of Brand-Centric Digital Strategy
In February 2020, the Pullman Hotel in Melbourne filled with more than 1,000 marketers, agency teams, entrepreneurs, and business leaders for the Digital Marketers Australia Conference. It had quickly become the country’s largest marketing and business growth event - three days of packed rooms, hallway conversations, and the kind of networking energy that tells you the industry is shifting faster than most people realise.
Across February 12th to 14th, while attendees moved between talks, social nights, and the DMA networking app, Jason Barnard sat down with four practitioners whose expertise stretched across affiliate marketing, legal protection, personal branding, and video production.
Here are some of the insights that emerged.
Affiliate marketing with integrity - Dejan Mladenovski
Jason’s conversation with Dejan Mladenovski challenged one of the conference’s unspoken assumptions: that affiliate marketing requires compromise. Dejan wasn’t interested in shortcuts. He’d been hit by Penguin years earlier and rebuilt by focusing on clarity, transparency, and genuinely helpful content.
It was, in hindsight, a pure example of Understandability.
No noise. No manipulation. Just content that makes sense to humans and is therefore simple for machines to interpret.
When Dejan said, almost casually, “If you want to rank #1, ask yourself who would recommend you - because that’s what Google is doing,” he cut right into what we now describe as recommendation signals inside Kalicube Pro.
Protecting your digital identity legally - Rich Goldstein
In a conference full of funnels and ad strategies, Jason’s interview with Rich Goldstein took an unexpected turn. Rich spoke about patents and trademarks not as legal clutter, but as brand stability.
This was early Credibility thinking.
If the legal identity behind your brand is unclear, inconsistent, or unprotected, every digital signal becomes vulnerable.
Google notices.
AI Assistive Engines notice.
Customers notice.
Rich framed it in legal language, but the implications were unmistakably strategic. It’s the same reasoning behind Kalicube’s Credibility Audits today - stabilise the foundations so nothing downstream cracks.
Owning your narrative - Kate Toon on personal brand
Between sessions, Jason and Kate Toon found a quiet moment to talk about personal brand. Kate didn’t glamorise it. She described it as pattern-making - the repeated signals that teach the world (and search engines) who you are.
This is exactly how Understandability works today in The Kalicube Process™.
Kate spoke about stripping away everything unnecessary until what remains is unmistakably yours. That clarity becomes your digital footprint, your Entity Home, your brand echo. Listening to her, you can hear the precursors of the Digital Brand Echo framework we now use with clients.
Filming without frustration - Joyce Ong’s six-step video playbook
At a conference full of marketers and founders, Joyce Ong brought the conversation back down to the ground. Video shoots, she reminded Jason, don’t fail because of cameras - they fail because of poor preparation, unclear expectations, or inconsistent execution.
Her six-step method was an early expression of Deliverability.
It wasn’t flashy, but it was operationally clean - the same principle we now apply to a brand’s digital ecosystem.
Joyce’s perspective confirms something we see with clients every day: video is not “content,” it’s a signal. It can reinforce a brand’s reliability or erode it instantly.
The through-line: a brand-first digital future that was already forming
Even though Jason wasn’t speaking on stage at DMA Melbourne 2020, the conversations he had there became seeds for what later matured into The Kalicube Process.
Across all four interviews, the same fundamental questions emerged:
- Understandability:
Does the world - and do the machines - know who you are and what you stand for? - Credibility:
Are your legal, reputational, and factual signals stable and consistent? - Deliverability:
Can you reliably show up across every platform, every format, every touchpoint?
These conversations, held over the three days of the DMA event, cemented the fact that The Kalicube Process needed to be a holistic system that unifies every aspect of digital strategy to successfully bridge human perception with algorithmic reality.
If you recognize your own story in the challenge of fragmented digital strategies, exploring our approach in The Market Leader Program could be a valuable next step. Book a call with Jason Barnard today.
