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As Lee Hunter walks around the San Francisco offices of YouTube, he is tempted to pinch himself.

Just 10 years ago Lee completed a Masters in Marketing at UWA, specialising in electronic marketing - one of the first degrees of its kind to be offered by a university.

Now, he's the highly creative and dynamic Global Head of Brand Marketing for one of the best known companies on the Internet. Along the way, he propelled a small single product company into a multi-product organisation with an international presence and developed valuable global experience via senior marketing roles in the European divisions of Deutsche Bank and Google.

The list of innovative, high-profile YouTube initiatives and collaborations with his name attached keeps growing.

There's the Google Online Marketing Challenge - an international academic competition he started with former UWA professor Jamie Murphy in 2008 (the inaugural competition was won by five UWA undergraduates); the YouTube Symphony Orchestra which brought young musicians from around the world together to perform at a spectacular week-long celebration of music at the Sydney Opera House last year; and the Olympics partnership which saw YouTube stream the International Olympic Committee's feed of the London 2012 games in 65 countries.

Then there's Life in A Day, the feature-length documentary film produced with Ridley Scott which won a Gold Lion at Cannes, and the YouTube Space Lab, a worldwide initiative which challenged 14-18 year-old students to design a science experiment that could be performed in space. The two winning experiments were conducted aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube last September (NB 2012).

Go back to Lee's UWA days and he was a high achiever there, too. The band he was in, Team Jedi, toured nationally, released several CDs and in 1997 won a song-writing award as part of Unearthed, youth radio station Triple J's competition for undiscovered talent.

The graduate agrees that with his dual passions of music and technology, his career could well have gone either way.

"I did make a big focus of music for a long time," he told Uniview. "I had to be careful to balance the two and make sure my grades didn't suffer. It was a big part of my life and still is a great hobby of mine."

Lee now uses his band experiences to remind himself of what it was like to be a young musician trying to get a break. He has a soft spot for the millions of people creating videos and trying to make things happen on YouTube and says his favourite part of the job is watching people find a platform and let their talent shine through. Sometimes, that happens with spectacular success - as in the case of South Korean pop star Psy and his ubiquitous song, Gangnam Style, which in November became the most ‘liked' video in YouTube history.

"YouTube is just full of opportunities if you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and that's coming back to the things UWA taught me," Lee said.

When Lee chose his degree, he still wasn't sure what he wanted to be.

"I knew I loved technology and that it was something I really wanted to pursue.

"So when UWA offered up this master's degree, I just jumped at it. My thought was ‘Get in as early as you can, be literally one of the first educated on this. If you have a master's degree behind you, something good will happen'. And that was the case. I was able to walk into a lot of places and say ‘I've taken this really forward-thinking view and tried to educate myself as much as possible in this area, because I love it, I'm fascinated by it'. It took me places."

He said the world-class education offered by UWA, along with the University's international focus, were powerful tools. When he first applied to Google - a business highly focused on finding the very best employees - he discovered the company had UWA on its list of top tier universities.

"That made me very happy with the education that I'd got," he said.

"My job now is global and particularly when I moved to the UK and you have to have a very international view, I was set up really well with my studies for that. It wasn't just focused on Australian issues or Western issues - it gave a very complete picture. That was something I was always very grateful for and it's held me in good stead to this day."

The original article by Tamara Hunter appeared in the Summer 2013 edition of Uniview .

Media references

Rhonda Flottmann (UWA Business School)    (+61 8) 6488 2925
Verity Chia (UWA Business School)    (+61 8) 6488 1346