Leadership interview series: Nik Thompson

Our CORE Leadership Series documents the perspectives of influential and inspiring industry figures.

Here, we are speaking to Nik Thompson, Chief Marketing Officer - Night Owl Entertainment Group

Could you share a brief overview of yourself, your career journey and how it has brought you to your current role?

I'm the CMO at NightOwl Entertainment, covering marketing, outbound sales, and inbound sales. We run a portfolio of hospitality and entertainment venues across Australia - everything from nightclubs to premium bars to competitive socialising concepts to large-format entertainment destinations like Dave & Buster's, which we're launching in April. The running thread is experiential F&B - venues where people come for more than just a drink or a meal. They come to create long lasting memories with friends.

In the 2 years I've been here, I've built the marketing, sales, and customer service systems that have enabled a 4x acceleration in venue growth rate. We're opening 4 more this year, and we expanded nationally for the first time - from WA-only to locations in New South Wales and Victoria, with more national expansion coming next year. The systems, the tech stack, the processes - they let us run 15+ distinct brands while keeping creative standards high and customer touchpoints sharp.

I came up through music performance, hospitality events, systems automation, then agency life where I was employee number one at a company I helped grow to 12 staff and multi-million-dollar revenue. Then took on a role as Marketing Director at a promotions company, where I introduced international brands to the Australian market and built national brands that became genre-toppers - at the same time others were attempting comparable brands and failing. NightOwl asked me to step into the CMO role, and that's where I am now.

What initially sparked your interest in pursuing this career?

I studied music first and played in bands - working with major and indie labels. Why are four people hitting a drum set, a bass guitar, a telecaster and a microphone so exciting in that one specific moment? We've heard all those sounds before. The instruments aren't new. But sometimes it becomes something really special.

I'm still chasing that. This career allows the moments to be more varied and more predictable. Some scripts, some copy, some pixels on a screen, some food, some drinks and some tunes - none of it is new. But you curate them just right - and people remember where they were for decades to come._

What do you see as the biggest challenges currently facing hospitality?

The obvious answer is margins, labour, cost of living pressure on discretionary spend. That's all true. But I think the deeper challenge right now is the dangerous middle ground we're in with AI.

The risk isn't job loss or even efficiency - it's homogenisation. I already see contemporaries putting out directives without even reading what their AI wrote them. Where is the curation of business when the curation itself is handed off?

Being hands-off is being celebrated right now. But it's belligerence with no benefit. Maybe one day AI puts fantastic things on our platter and we can trust it. But right now, the tools aren't ready for fully delegated thinking. And in hospitality especially, where the whole point is a human experience, you cannot afford to have your customer touchpoints feel generated.

The same thing is happening with creative. AI is genuinely helpful at making creative processes more efficient and more fantastical - you can explore ideas faster, wrap up menial work, iterate more. But some people are using it to fully remove the humanity or cut corners, and the customer ends up with a worse touchpoint. That's disrespectful of your creatives and disrespectful of your customer. They can tell. People have a fantastic sense of uncanny valley.

The challenge is knowing when to use AI to enable better work versus when you're just outsourcing the thinking because it's faster.

Where do you think the most promising investments should be focused?

On the "why" of doing things.

It's easy to invest in tools. It's harder to invest in the systems and the thinking that make those tools actually work. You need your team working heavily on systems that enable them to work better - not just buying software and hoping it fixes things.

For us, that's looked like detailed project management templates that synchronise across specialties. It creates a hybrid agile and waterfall process - forcing creative and innovative solutions while still dotting the i's and crossing the t's across 15 brands with complex media needs. The system doesn't just encourage good work, it forces the structure that makes good work possible.

My success with complex CRM implementations comes from the same place. You have to decide your path with force, but then have the perspective to know when to be flexible. The only way to achieve that is with a deep understanding of why you're doing it in the first place.

In industries with small margins like hospitality, technological ineptitude isn't just a weakness. It's existential. You need to understand the why, and you need to speak enough of the language to communicate that why to the people building it.

What skills or mindsets will be most important for the next generation of hospitality leaders?

Literacy. Not "learn to code," but genuine literacy in both technology and creative.

AI is bad at telling you you're wrong. It's confident, it's plausible, and it'll lead you off a cliff with a smile. So you need to get into the weeds enough to understand the limitations of your own knowledge and know when to bring in experts.

The good news is that experts are now incredibly efficient. You can get massive bang for your buck if you choose the right developer, the right creative director, the right strategist. The skill isn't doing their job. It's knowing enough to ask the right questions, spot when something's off, and not get in their way when they're doing good work.

That means understanding both sides. Developers and creatives. Systems and craft. Too many leaders are fluent in one and dismissive of the other. In hospitality, you need both. The experience is technical and human at the same time.

Are you expecting consumer expectations to shift this year?

Yes. I'm AI, algorithms and automation positive. But these must be carefully applied products, not fix-all stickers. And I see consumers are starting to feel that instinctively.

People want to be served a drink by a person. They have a fantastic sense of uncanny valley and they know when something feels off, even if they can't articulate why. They don't want all their music taste to be just what they already like. They want surprise. Curation. A point of view.

The role of old-school account executives who actually build relationships, warts and all community-driven content, the creative giving you an unfamiliar art style - all of that is going to get stronger. New adults have spent their childhood watching brain-rot and now are making the decision to descend into full Wall-E consumption, or pick up a sketchy fashion zine.

When everyone else automates the human element away, having humans becomes the differentiator. The brands that remember that are going to win.