Media man’s take on the Middle East
Top media industry guru Rowan Dean will address this month’s NSWJBD plenum.
Rowan Dean
What do Veet hair removal, Fosters, Nurofen and Hamlet have in common? They are all subjects of award-winning advertising campaigns under the direction of media industry guru Rowan Dean. Dean will be guest speaker at next week’s NSW Jewish Board of Deputies plenum, to be held in the Benefactors Hall on Tuesday evening February 18.
In addition to his success in the creative industry, Dean is a familiar figure to Australian television audiences, regularly appearing on Sky News, The Contrarians, The Gruen Transfer and The Drum. He has also made his mark in print as a highly regarded expert in media advertising and politics, writing a regular marketing column and political satire for the Australian Financial Review.
Of particular interest to the Jewish community are Dean’s frequent opinion pieces on the Arab-Israeli conflict and on the way it is reported. He described the Australians joining the Freedom Flotilla 2 for Gaza as “a flotilla of fools” ”clearly suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome”, “pursu[ing] the popular Marrickville pastime known as Jew-baiting (sorry, I mean ‘’protesting against Israeli aggression and Zionist expansion’.)” Dean has also suggested that running a truthful advertising campaign for each country in the Middle East would solve the conflict as “virtually every man, woman and child in the Middle East will want to move to Israel.”
Dean’s first book, ‘Beyond Satire – Julia Caesar & the Kevin Sutra’, a satirical exploration of the Gillard/Rudd government, was released late last year. Dean will address the plenum on the use of humour and irony in political discourse.
“We are pleased to start the year with such a high-calibre and entertaining speaker, who will bring his own personal brand of humour to the evening,’ said Board of Deputies CEO Vic Alhadeff. “We encourage members of the community to take this opportunity to hear from a leading exponent of the art of political satire.
