Grill The Marketer 2025

Grill The Marketer

Ok - cat's out of the bag! For our next Grill Guest we're heading back to the client side with the incredible Melissa Osterhage, who heads up the marketing department at Spudshed.

With a career spanning major retail brands, Melissa has honed her expertise in strategic brand positioning and consumer engagement through storytelling. 

As the Head of Marketing for the Galati Group, she plays a key role in shaping the voice and identity of Spudshed, one of Western Australia’s most recognisable and disruptive fresh food retailers.

In a retail landscape dominated by three corporate giants, Spudshed has become an institution, carving out a loyal and passionate customer base, not by outspending the competition, but by out-storytelling them.

She specialises in crafting authentic, compelling brand narratives that don’t just build trust, but also drive long-term consumer loyalty and measurable sales impact.

Before joining the Galati Group, Melissa held senior marketing roles at Coles, Stockland and Gull Petroleum, where she developed regional campaigns and consumer engagement strategies that that delivered tangible results and strengthened market positioning.

Come and ask Melissa about retail marketing, new product launches, and what it's like behind the wheel of one of WA's most iconic brands.

The Event Background

Grill The Marketer, in partnership with the Australian Marketing Institute welcomes all marketers, business owners and managers, and marketing students - if you have marketing questions, come and ask them. Don't have a specific question - but you want to chat marketing with people who LOVE to talk about marketing? Great! Come along.

Are you looking for a marketing role? Maybe we can introduce you to your new boss. It's happened before.

Our community is generous with their time and skills and believe that when it comes to marketing, the better you do, the better we all do. That's why so many awesome projects and collabs have been born from this event. We LOVE connecting our networks.

We don't enjoy events with pitches, boring PowerPoint pressos, and upsells. So Grill The Marketer is simply our marketing brains directed at your challenge or topic. What would go for a bundle in consulting fees or training dollars, comes to you in this fun package for less than your Tuesday night Uber Eats order.

The Marketer will let you grill them on their areas of expertise, and those of the guest panellist/s, and MC Jacqueline will keep us all on track.

Some of our previous guests include; Tim Woodsmith - Strategist from Rare, Nikki Atack from Pentanet, Matt Oakley, CSO of 303 MullenLowe, Kate Kirwin from She Codes & Young Australian of the Year, Hannah Muirhead, Chapter, Amber Martin of Hypnosis Creative Agency, David "DG" Gardiner from DGPR, Crown's Kelly Townson, TikTok sensation Seva Mozhaev (@sevspics), Cory Gale from Tourism WA, MD and Co-Founder of Rare Callum Mackenzie, and Pretzel founder, Brittany Garbutt.

So you KNOW no matter the guest or topic, we bring you the most interesting people willing to put themselves out there to answer whatever you throw at them.

You'll love the informal format and awesome community vibe while we help you explore your marketing curiosity with passion and the odd tangent.

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Cost: $48+bf (includes snacks)

Date: Multiple

Where: The Court | Verdict Bar (upstairs)

Time: 5.30pm - 8.30pm

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How does this all work anyway?

Come along, grab yourself a drink at the bar and mingle. Our crew's super welcoming and friendly so you'll be totally fine to rock up by yourself.

Our MC will let you know when it's time to start. We'll introduce ourselves, outline the event, and intro your marketing question answer-ers.

If you're called on to ask your question, please say your name and the business/industry your question relates to and we'll do our best to tailor our answers to you specifically.

Once we’re done feel free to hang around for drinks and to chat more about marketing 🙂

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Grill The Marketer came about from talking to marketing event attendees who really just wanted their questions answered without the fluff and sales agenda.

Grill The Marketer is presented in partnership with the Australian Marketing Institute, and affords those who hold the Certified Practising Marketer (CPM) certification to collect points towards maintaining your CPM status.

We provide membership ticket pricing for PADC members and a student discount, contact us for more info.

Want to make sure we answer your specific question? Send them in advance to hey@themarketer.news