Taylor made for a principal role in the arts

FROM his days as a musician working to develop the local live music scene in New South Wales, to his more recent board role with contemporary arts organisation Awesome Arts, Al Taylor’s anecdotes share a passion and purpose.

At 20, he started out owning and running a wine bar in NSW and working part-time selling newspaper ads (to support his rock and roll dreams), with this latter role pointing his career in the direction of his current position as group managing director of advertising agency 303 in Perth.

Mr Taylor now sits on the council of the Australia Business Arts Foundation’s WA chapter, alongside Rio Tinto’s Sam Walsh and Alcoa’s Alan Cransberg, and is working with ABaF to filter his branding expertise to arts organisations.

His involvement with the arts also runs through 303, which works with arts organisations such as the Perth International Arts Festival, WA Academy of Performing Arts and contemporary theatre company ThinIce.

“You can draw great inspiration from the arts and people in the arts,” Mr Taylor said.

His advertising background also led to a role as chair of the recently formed The Communications Council – a national advocacy body formed from amalgamated creative industry associations.

‘‘Overall it is about proving the legitimacy, contribution and value of the industry to business’’ he said.

When Mr Taylor moved to Western Australia from the east coast 25 years ago, the strong culture of cover bands left him perplexed, so he joined the WA Rock Music Industry Association.

During his time at the organisation, of which he later became president, Mr Taylor worked to nurture an original music scene.

“WARMIA [now known as WAMI] was trying to carve out some space in terms of advice and support for the local music industry and those who were creating music,” he said.

From there the WARMIA awards were created, predecessor to the coveted WAMI awards.

“Progressively the original scene has grown, and now it is the most vibrant original music scene in Australia, without question,” he said.

It’s not difficult to tell that music has long been Mr Taylor’s drive.

“My heart is still very much connected to music, but I have always been very passionate about the arts generally,” he said. “It is only more recently and probably more as a result of my role running this agency that I feel I can really apply my influences and interests and use my responsibilities to contribute back to the arts in a meaningful way.

“I think before I was just doing it and I wanted to do something but didn’t really know what I could do. Now as my professional career has evolved, I feel like I can harness the resources here (303) and contacts and my experience and deliver something.”

During the past five years, Mr Taylor has focused on developing board roles and was connected to Awesome Arts through ABaF.

When he joined Awesome Arts Mr Taylor helped to refocus the strategic direction of the organisation and its branding.

“When we developed the brand proposition for Awesome, which was igniting young people’s imaginations, we needed to be clear about what we meant by young people,” he said.

“Their festival ... when it talked about young people it went beyond 12 into teens. Any marketer will tell you to create something that appeals to non-teens and teens is pretty much impossible.

“One of the things that I believe has fed very clearly into the business strategy is getting back to doing what they do really well. The strategic work wasn’t just about the brand, it was about helping them identify what their true purpose was.

“They are now really sharply focused and have lots of interesting things happening.”

When it comes to the development of the arts in WA, Mr Taylor said while it was a culturally rich industry, there needed to be more government and business financial support.

“I think there needs to be more funding in general and a greater contribution at a variety of different levels,” he said.

“Funding will always be a challenge; the state government needs to really get on board with the vision. At the same time so does private enterprise. It is in all of our interests, you look at thriving sports here and what it does for the community and the arts does the same. The city and state will become magnetic.”