About Christian Ganaban

Where it started

Before any of this was corporate, I was one of four co-owners of a pizza shop in Chelsea, Victoria. I bought in after starting out as a delivery driver, and we closed less than a year later once the gap between revenue and profit made itself known. Read the full story →

My first real jobs after that were part-time: selling for Foxtel out of a call centre in Moonee Ponds, then working the floor at Sensis, then part of Telstra, in Richmond. Carsales.com.au, which I joined not long after, was the first place I'd call a full-time corporate career.

I joined carsales.com.au when it was fifty people in a shared office, long before it became the ASX-listed company it is today. I started in entry-level roles (customer service, dealer photography, installing equipment on dealer lots) before moving into the field team and eventually into ERG International (later Data Motive), the arm of the business that took carsales' technology into markets outside Australia. I represented the business at conferences in Singapore, was selected for the Future Directors Program, and was mentored directly by a senior figure at the company. By the time I moved on, worn out after years at that pace, carsales had grown past 400 staff.

Read the full story of my six years at carsales.com.au →

Sports and entertainment media

From there I moved into sports and entertainment media, running sportsdelivered.com and the AFL's Name-a-Game program for Visual Entertainment Group, in partnership with Eddie McGuire's McGuire Media, then heading video production and social media for Legends Football League Australia, where I was at the forefront of social media marketing in its early days and helped grow the audience to over 400,000 followers nationally.

Read the full story of the McGuire Media years →

Taking over the Ladies Gridiron League

Working inside Legends Football League Australia (originally the Lingerie Football League) put me close enough to the business to see trouble coming. When the league's US owners lost their broadcast deal and cancelled the 2014 season with barely two weeks' notice, a group of us had already seen it coming and built a takeover plan. We launched the Ladies Gridiron League as an independent, Australian-run competition the moment LFL's season was called off. I secured a national broadcast deal with FOXTEL's Aurora channel, negotiated venue deals with QSAC, nib Stadium and Viking Park, and took the league from that standing start to a stadium event alongside NFL great Terrell Owens and AFL legends including Corey McKernan, Wayne Carey, Jonathan Brown, Brendan Fevola and Nick Maxwell. Along the way I wrote, directed and produced Gridiron Girl, a seven-part web series.

Read the full story of the Ladies Gridiron League →

Entertainment Management Services, today

Since 2014 I've led marketing and strategy for Entertainment Management Services, working with the ownership group across a multi-venue portfolio that includes The Men's Gallery and Centrefold Lounge, and developing and launching Private Eyes Gentlemen's Club and What The Putt Mini Golf from the ground up. I manage a team of direct reports and external agencies across content, campaigns, photoshoots, podcasts and live events. I've hosted international conferences with major corporations in Asia Pacific and have been an invited guest speaker at industry conferences in the USA.

Super Intelligence One (SI1)

Twenty years in marketing has meant twenty years of watching new tools reshape how businesses find customers, and lately that's mostly meant AI, automation and agents. I've been applying that hands-on inside my day-to-day work at EMS, where heavy restrictions on paid and social advertising pushed me toward search, owned content and AI-assisted marketing instead. That experience is what became Super Intelligence One (SI1), an AI consultancy I founded to turn it into systems other businesses can use.

Read more about SI1 and my role there →

Elsewhere

For links to LinkedIn, Substack, YouTube and the rest, head back to the homepage.