Clive Dickens launches TMT advisory firm The Meliora Company
Media veteran Clive Dickens has launched The Meliora Company, a new consultancy firm which will support business transformations in the TMT sector from bases in Sydney, London and Los Angeles.
Clive Dickens previously held senior leadership roles at Optus, Seven West, Southern Cross Austereo, and Yahoo among other prominent media organisations, having earlier co-founded the Absolute Radio radio station in the UK.
For his latest venture, Dickens will partner with former Absolute Radio senior colleagues including Anthony Abbott and Tony Moorey, with an initial team of nine soon set to welcome additional partners and associates across the EMEA, Asia-Pacific and the Americas.
“This is more than a new business; it’s a response to the fatigue I’ve seen from legacy consulting models that are struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change,” Dickens stated. “The Meliora Company is a call to build better. With strategy, creativity, and technology, anchored by real world experience, we’re here to help bold leaders navigate what’s next.”
The pursuit of better
The Meliora Company, which takes its name from the Latin for “the pursuit of better”, will operate around three istrategic pillars, an advisory line focused on AI transformation and boutique product development for companies in the telecom, media, and technology (TMT) sector, a ventures division investing in early-stage CTO-led startups, and an IP fund supporting rising creative talent.
“We’re not just here to ‘advise’ in the traditional sense,” Dickens continued. “With strategy, creativity, and technology, we roll up our sleeves and help our growth partners build the future, whether that’s new AI-powered products, human-centred design, or totally rethinking the customer experience from the ground up.”
Dickens has spent the past half a decade as vice president of television, content & product development at Optus, before which he spent a similar period of time as Seven West’s chief digital officer. He has also served on the boards of and as an advisor to, among others, Airtasker, Freeview, Yahoo Australia, Audioboom, and Shazam.
Speaking on his experience, Dickens said: “The arrival of LLMs and Gen AI in 2022 marked a seismic shift, arguably the most transformative moment since the iPhone and the App store. But many businesses are still stuck trying to make sense of this future. Meliora was created to meet that moment with hands-on expertise and actionable thinking.”
According to the firm, The Meliora Company will bring together a team of experienced ‘innovators’ across the digital audio and video, telecoms, and ecommerce spaces, with former Fairfax and NewsCorp digital and video head Ricky Sutton and ex-IAB chief executive Vijay Solanki, who are both entrepreneurs, among the advisory start-up’s locally-recruited associates to date.
While global in its agenda, Meliora has taken on the “Yolla” – a migratory seabird which primary breeds in the Bass Straight – as its founding emblem, which in the words of the firm’s marketing spiel reflects “Australia’s entrepreneurial DNA” in its bold and purposeful spirit of exploration and international ambition marked by resourcefulness and quiet confidence.
“We decided that we really wanted to go off and shape a wider range of businesses across a wider set of jurisdictions in the categories where we have experience,” Dickens told online industry publication B&T. “It’s an incredibly exciting time to be in technology, and we see the fusion between human intelligence and AI as something that really drives us.”
