After three years of marketing reinvention at Domain Group, Rebecca Darley stepped into a new challenge as Group CMO at TPG Telecom. While her current tenure at TPG is just beginning, her impact at Domain set a benchmark for what bold, strategic, and commercially grounded marketing leadership can deliver.

At Domain, Darley wasn’t just following a rulebook, she was rewriting it. Taking on a marketing function known for being reactive and fragmented, she transformed it into one of the most technologically advanced and customer-centric marketing teams in the country.

Effective marketing strategy 

“There are marketers who follow a playbook, be that globally or locally defined, and there’s marketers who create the playbook,” Darley acknowledges.

Certainly, Darley’s tenure at Domain has been marked by bold strategic thinking in the face of formidable challenges.

“Domain had historically been guilty of a tactical, reactive focus. It was lagging its major competitor who had a 2x larger marketing budget and who’d created the category playbook driven by vanity metrics. At a category level, the complexity and drama of the property industry was adding to an already overwhelming experience for consumers,” she admits.

But playing “to the category” wasn’t going to cut it. The property industry was already a complex, emotionally charged space for consumers. For Darley, the real opportunity wasn’t in matching spend or chasing superficial wins. It was in reframing the entire conversation.

“The solution lay in challenging the category rather than the major competitor. Shifting from playing the category numbers game [i.e.: most, biggest] to owning a long-term positioning built from the insight that, in a complicated category and a challenging economy, there’s no one place to go for guidance and information in their property journey,” she says. 

That meant abandoning the numbers game - being “most” or “biggest” - and instead carving out a differentiated, insight-led position. At the heart of her strategy was a clear understanding: in a turbulent economy and a chaotic category, what buyers and sellers needed most was clarity and trust.

In 2023, Darley launched ‘Know What We Know,’ a bold and enduring brand platform backed by a fully integrated marketing strategy. The campaign brought in Hollywood couple Rose Byrne and Bobby Cannavale to elevate Domain’s brand presence and resonate on a more human level. The work was smartly orchestrated across all channels, ensuring that every customer touchpoint delivered relevant and timely information, reinforcing the brand’s new promise.

It wasn’t just the high-profile creative that delivered results. Darley’s team drove innovative partnerships – including a highly effective collaboration leveraging ABC’s hit children’s show Bluey – to ensure Domain’s message reached Australian households in fresh and authentic ways.

“The rebranding was underpinned with an integrated marketing program ensuring every touchpoint was delivering the right information in the right moment to support the customer and bringing to life the brand promise,” says Darley. “These elements, plus ground-breaking partnerships, saw Domain outstrip both the category and its major competitor in monthly unique audience growth, a key category metric, alongside growing marketing’s contribution to revenue [key internal metric].”

Business influence 

What was once a legacy ‘spots and dots’ operation – selling basic ad placements to reach Domain’s audience – has been transformed under Darley’s leadership into a high-performing media business built for the future.

Historically, Domain Media functioned as a conventional ad-sales arm. But with the foundation of marketing already being reshaped through investment in data, martech, personalisation, and content, the opportunity emerged to evolve Domain Media into a 360-degree media platform that could unlock scalable, sustainable revenue growth.

“Domain has a long-established media business, Domain Media, historically selling ‘spots and dots’ placement across its platforms to advertisers wanting to reach Domain’s audience,” she says. “Leveraging Marketing’s transformation of data, martech, personalisation and content, the Domain Media business could be repositioned as a 360-degree media offering to deliver scalable revenue growth.” 

Darley saw the potential and led from the front. Based on the early success of this transformation, she was appointed Managing Director of Domain Media in September 2023. From there, she shifted the business away from its traditional focus to a bold new strategy grounded in delivering intelligence-driven media outcomes for partners.

A highlight of this success came in July 2024, when Domain - working closely with Google and Meta, as well as its internal product, sales and tech teams - launched an Australian-first product: Domain Audience Boost.

This innovative solution gives advertisers the ability to extend the power of Domain’s audience data across external channels, redefining how property-related advertisers connect with high-intent audiences. The product has already delivered strong results, including a 23 per cent increase in quality listing views, reinforcing the impact of precision-targeted media on buyer engagement.

This shows how Darley didn’t just evolve the media business; she sought to rewrite the rulebook.

Data-driven decision making

In the property ecosystem, data is abundant, ranging from property listing attributes and dynamic market trends to Domain’s vast troves of first-party behavioural data collected from millions of daily user sessions, alongside rich third-party consumer insights.

But for Darley, success hasn't come from using one data source in isolation. Instead, Domain’s advantage has come from building a far more sophisticated data engine - one that intelligently aggregates and connects these disparate datasets to form detailed, real-time consumer and customer profiles.

“The ‘secret sauce’ has been the aggregated build of something far more sophisticated at Domain, which brings together these disparate sources to inform consumer/customer profiles. The output being the most efficient onsite/offsite targeting capabilities throughout the lifecycle, driving down paid media spend,” she says.

The result? Hyper-targeted, efficient audience engagement across the entire property journey, both onsite and offsite. This data sophistication has not only sharpened targeting precision, but has also materially reduced paid media costs - proving that smart data integration is as much about performance as it is about savings.

Discerning decision making

Darley’s marketing vision at Domain was anything but modest.

Take the personalised marketing team, for instance, where data scientists, technologists, and campaign managers collaborate closely with the internal 'Content Hub', a multidisciplinary team of designers, writers, videographers, editors, and motion graphics specialists. Together, they strive to achieve the elusive ‘holy grail’ of marketing: delivering the right message, at the right time, through the right channel.

“And in a property sales cycle of up to seven years, that level of deep engagement and known, repeat visitation is key,” she says.

Domain now produces tailored content series, five weekly digital magazines, editorial content through journalists embedded in the Channel Nine newsroom, and bite-sized social and digital content.

After three years of transformative leadership, Darley’s impact is unmistakable – setting a new benchmark for bold, strategic, and commercially savvy marketing in the property sector.

Customer-first thinking

Darley knew at the heart of Domain’s marketing evolution lies a deep commitment to understanding and serving its customers better.

This began with a complete overhaul of the company’s marketing technology (martech) stack, revamping systems and processes to unlock a sharper, more actionable understanding of the needs, behaviours, and preferences of its diverse audience groups.

Key to this transformation was the creation of the Personalisation at Scale Centre of Excellence (CoE). By uniting expert technologists, data scientists, and campaign managers - and empowering them with best-in-class tools - Darley led a movement to deliver truly personalised experiences: the right message, to the right person, at the right moment, through the right channel.

“The formation of the Personalisation at Scale CoE brought together leading technologists, data scientists and campaign managers with the best of breed technology to deliver the right message at the right time through the right channel to the right customers. Whilst that might sound simple enough, there’s a complex ecosystem of moving parts to ensure ‘We ‘don’t leave the Ferrari parked in the garage,’ it’s a reminder that when you have the tools to drive exceptional customer experience, you have to put them to work.

Indeed, it’s a deceptively simple vision, but one that requires synchronising a complex ecosystem of data, technology, and talent.

Commercial delivery

For Darley, marketing has never been just about creative or campaigns, it’s about commercial outcomes. She’ll be the first to tell you: “An attribute I expect modern marketers to have is commercial acumen. You gotta know the numbers that drive your business.”

What’s more, she firmly believes marketing must speak the language of the boardroom: Revenue, ROI, and CAGR. And while many marketers still struggle to connect their work to financial impact, Darley has made it a non-negotiable standard.

Throughout this story are clear examples of marketing’s contribution to Domain’s commercial growth – from revenue gains to media efficiency. But what sets Darley apart is her ability to articulate these impacts with precision. She can tell you exactly what Domain gets in return for every marketing dollar spent, when that return will be realised, and how the marketing investment is compounding over time.

“I can clearly articulate marketing’s contribution to revenue – for example, for every $1 spent in marketing, what is the return and when will it be realised. Moreover, what is the compounding annual growth rate of marketing investment over the past three years. This level of commercial acumen should be a minimum standard for modern marketers,” she says.

Underpinning this rigour is a custom-built Market Mix Model (MMM), developed under her leadership. This isn’t just a tool for tracking effectiveness - it’s a strategic engine. The MMM informs every marketing investment decision and performance report across the business. More than that, it’s become a business-wide capability embedded at board level, turning marketing into measurable growth.

“It’s a business super-power which I’ve embedded in the boardroom and at the most senior levels of the organisation,” according to Darley.

People leadership

One of Darley’s greatest strengths lies in her ability to build high-performance teams and redefine how marketing operates within a complex organisation. She’s not just a people leader, she’s a capability architect.

“Three words I’d use to describe my style as a CMO are brave, curious, commercial,” she explains.

Certainly, her ambition was clear from day one: To build a customer-led, tech-enabled, fully scaled marketing team within her first year at Domain. She delivered it - without business interruption and within the existing budget.

The result today is one of the most technologically advanced marketing teams in the country, designing around customer needs and delivering quantifiable business outcomes in real time. Domain’s Marketing team was recognised as a finalist for Marketing Team of the Year (2023 & 2024) and won PR Team of the Year (2024), with team members regularly called upon as respected industry commentators.

For Darley, she recognised the inefficiencies of legacy silos, and led the creation of cross-functional Centres of Excellence, replacing generalist models with future-focused, by-discipline specialists and dedicated technologists. This move unlocked stronger collaboration, accelerated delivery, and elevated executional standards across the business.

“A common pain point for large matrix teams is how to collaborate, share projects and enable decisions cross-functionally. I broke barriers implementing regular, structured Steerco’s and showcases, keeping initiatives in-sync, ensuring opportunities are realised,” she says.

Meanwhile, the quarterly Marketing Exec Series sees global thought leaders brought into challenge and inspire the team.

Darley’s leadership extends deeply into culture. As the team has expanded, so too has her commitment to in-person connection and team cohesion. She established new forums to support face-to-face collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community building, reinforcing Domain’s culture as the business grows.

“With an expanding team, in-person culture is imperative. New regular forums created opportunities for socialising, presenting, sharing and collaborating; building a sense of community in real life,” she notes.

At the same time, Darley’s approach to external partnerships is equally progressive. She views industry partners not as suppliers, but as an extension of the team. This mindset fosters deeper collaboration, creative ideation, and access to best-in-class thinking across the marketing ecosystem.

Beyond her business impact, Darley dedicates 15 per cent of her time to lifting the wider industry, advocating for higher standards, stronger leadership, and community impact. She has served as an IAB Board Director (2023–2024), is a member of the inaugural APAC Fellowship cohort for The Marketing Academy, sits on the ANZ Meta Client Council (2023–present), and continues to mentor emerging leaders, judge awards, and speak at industry events. She is also a long-time UnLtd Board Director and Co-Chair (2010–2024), championing social impact through media and marketing.

Indeed, it’s this blend of internal excellence and external advocacy that defines Darley’s leadership, elevating not only her team and business, but the broader industry.