Sage advice for creating and running an excellent agency

CJ Worx is not a household name in the Australian media and marketing landscape, but the independent agency based in Bangkok, Thailand, has recently let the world know that it is not just serious, it’s one of the best in the business.

In 2017 it won Independent Agency of the Year, Digital Agency of the Year and Creative Agency of the Year at the Campaign Awards, SouthEast Asia region. It won three Cannes Lions Awards including the Grand Prix for Design. It won six London International Awards, including three golds. The agency also took home multiple awards at Spikes Asia (including three Grand Prix awards and the title of Asia Pacific Independent Agency of The Year), the Clio Awards, New York Festival, D&AD (including two gold pencils), One Show and AdFest (including Independent Agency of the Year).

CJ Worx has well and truly arrived and shown the world what an independent agency in APAC can achieve.

For the first time ever, managing director and partner, Jinn Powprapai, will visit Sydney to present the headline keynote at Mumbrella SAGE. He’ll discuss the growth of the agency, the challenges and opportunities of running an agency in South East Asia, and what he sees are the strengths and weaknesses of independent agencies in APAC.

Ambitious owner-entrepreneurs are finding that limiting growth aspirations to solely the Australian market may inhibit their ability to achieve maximum equity value for their business.

So how can independent agency businesses achieve scale?

The quickest route is often to find a cross-border partner. Prior to this it is critical to understand the benefits and potential pitfalls of an international partnership; to explore which global market is the best route for business expansion.

In this session, Hong Kong-based Alistair Angus, co-founder of global M&A consultancy, SI Partners, will discuss how leading independent agencies around the world are jumping ahead of traditional and often slower growth models to achieve rapid scale.

He will also address the changing creative M&A landscape and the new buyers in the market, what criteria acquirers use to assess creative businesses and how you can achieve a premium valuation in sale

Angus will also explore the range of international expansion options available to Australian agency businesses and what makes Australian businesses appealing to each particular region.

As an industry we are masters at celebrating the things we get right. An important habit to embrace, as it helps us reinforce successful behaviours. But we have also become fearful of mistakes. Mistakes that lead to ineffective work. Mistakes that lead to client losses. Mistakes that a close-knit industry will discuss.

But making mistakes are an important part of how we learn and evolve. So, if we want to have sustainable, successful and rewarding careers, we need to better learn from them. The small ones that help change an everyday bad habit, all the way through to the colossal fuck-ups that feel like they will break you, but ultimately save your life.

Ian Perrin has fucked up a lot. In fact, he has classified his fuck-ups. So, in this session he will tell you about them, and what he has learnt.

He was a creative at George Patterson Y&R, DDB Needham, McCann Erickson, a board member of the Advertising Federation of Australia and founded national creative agency SMART, which he later sold to IPG. There he would become CEO and Chairman of its agency, McCann Australia, and oversee the creation of the most awarded campaign in history, Dumb Ways to Die, before becoming McCann Creative Leadership Chair for the Asia Pacific region.

Ben Lilley is now an investor with a specific interest in independent agencies. It’s an area he is not unfamiliar with, having made a number of acquisitions when he was running both SMART and McCann. In this session, Lilley will sit down with Mumbrella to discuss his experiences, what he looks for in an independent agency, his transition from independent to network to investor and his views on the agency landscape today.

Independent agencies looking to get bigger will often start to investigate selling either part or all of the business, or aligning with a network. But what about merging, particularly with another independent agency? Can it work? What are the benefits and are there specific hurdles?

For The Elk Group and Philter Group, merging presented the best opportunity to create something bigger and better. In 2014, the two joined to become Tiny Hunter.

Today, branding agency Tiny Hunter continues to grow and has done work with brands the likes of Sydney Airport, Bertolli, Diageo, Dorf and Westfield, among many others. While it wasn’t simple to merge the two agencies, the journey has been well worth it for the team.

In this session, the leadership team of Jodie de Vries (Philter Group), Emma Scott (The Elk Group) and Jo Gossage (Philter Group) will explain the reasoning behind the merger, the journey the business went on since merging as well as the challenges and opportunities in not just creating the new entity but coming to the conclusion that joining was the right thing to do.

Regardless of what type of agency you work for or run, the use of freelancers and consultants has become a significant part of the media and marketing industry as service offerings expand. Yet, freelancing can still feel risky, costly and disproportionately time consuming,

Because of this, how agencies make Freelancing work as a practice is at a cross roads. The old ways don’t scale, nor do they provide the guarantees to build a business model around.

Dave Bentley, co-founder and CEO of freelance marketplace Calvary, and former agency boss of MullenLowe Profero, will present a session with the must-know information to ensure that the way you build and manage your freelance practice delivers better quality and scale with less effort and stress.

Jack and Fergus Watts are not your typical mad men. The former, who is CEO of Bastion Collective – the agency they founded, will recount the journey of how, with no previous experience, he and his brother built Bastion Collective into a 250 person global agency group in 10 years with no external investment.

Watts will cover everything from the early years, making cold calls and having no idea what they were doing, saying ‘yes’ to everything and then figuring it out along the way, to starting to build momentum, making acquisitions and dealing with scale.

He’ll also discuss how they built a strong culture and the importance of this in contributing to the company’s success and dealing with growth overtime.

Stop talking brand, start talking business.

Everyone wants a seat at the big table, but the common refrain from agency bosses is that they struggle to get access to the C-suite. Indeed agencies have fallen into the trap of being pigeonholed for production and delivery of certain services, rather than trusted strategic partners for their clients.

The fact is that what too many agencies are selling isn’t what the client really wants to buy – trusted, strategic business guidance. The ability to provide clients with impartial and independent holistic guidance about where their market and industry is headed has slowly eroded from most agencies in the last 20 years. That has also led to the erosion of the associated opportunities to grow trust, relationships and importantly new projects with that client.

This session will provide you with a framework to start to change the way you are viewed by your clients. Get beyond your short-term tactical service-based thinking and join the consultants in the big leagues, elevate your thinking and demonstrate the true value marketing can bring to businesses.

From custom publisher to a globally awarded content marketing agency that includes writers, editors, strategists, designers, producers, publishers, social media experts, media sales and PR stars – Mahlab, under the guidance of founder Bobbi Mahlab, has continued to adapt its service offering to meet the market.

It’s what has kept the business strong for more than 20 years, and a strategy that has seen both significant wins and challenges.

Led by Bobbi Mahlab, this session will explore the risks the business took, the challenges it had to overcome and the strategies put in place that have seen it gain major clients, build staff numbers and the keep culture intact.

Clients as advocates, an end to the merciless pitching cycle and agencies being treated with the respect a valued partner deserves. Sounds like the holy grail for agencies tired of being treated like dispensable, glorified suppliers. But it is possible and there is a way.

In this session, The Leach Partnership will take delegates on a journey – the path to partnership – offering practical tips as to how to make sure an agency builds mutually rewarding, long-term client relationships.

Drawn from analysis across professional services organisations, the strategies and tactics work for all types of agency whether they enjoy retained or multi-project business relationships and whatever discipline or sector of the communications industry the agency resides in.

At the 2018 Mumbrella CommsCon Awards, the award for PR Leader of the Year didn’t go to one of the big global agency heads. The independent jury agreed that the standout of the entries was Fifty Acres founder and managing director, Jo Scard.

Fifty Acres describes itself as one of Australia’s only agencies providing strategic communications, PR and engagement services – from research and strategy design to rollout.

What’s more, Fifty Acres is a ‘virtual’ agency with a flexible working ethos, allowing employees to work from wherever they want.

Hear all about how the agency was built and how it functions in this eye opening session with Jo Scard. She will detail what principles helped her create the agency Fifty Acres is today and the qualities that won her the Mumbrella CommsCon PR Lead of the Year Award.

Several years ago, Digby Richards and Adam Rose, the two founders and owners of Richards Rose, made a decision to focus their business on building the emotional intensity of brands working to the principle – when we move people, we move business.

This approach inspired the ‘move model’, which has helped their clients, from RAMS to Stan, Helga’s to Mitsubishi Motors, transform their businesses.

While the industry talks heavily about storytelling and emotive narratives, achieving true feeling for brands and encouraging emotional investment from consumers is still a riddle wrapped in mystery.

This talk will expand on the professional approach of putting emotion first and reveal why independent agencies could be in the best position to create work that truly moves people.

Digital is a term so broad today that starting a digital agency wouldn’t mean a whole lot to many people. But starting one in 2003 was not just a big deal, it was a big bet as well, particularly when that agency began in Auckland, New Zealand, a city not known for being a technology powerhouse.

But that’s exactly what Samantha Ramlu and Eugene Eastlake did, creating Method and growing it steadily to become well-known and respected across a number of creative digital specialities including AR, VR, data and analytics, code, AI, voice, and much more.

Today, Method is a team of 15 and has worked with brands including Nespresso, Intel, The Salvation Army, Trade Aid, Torrens, Auckland Museum, QMS, New Zealand Post, Panasonic, Peugeot, WSP Opus, Qantas and many more.

In this session, Ramlu will fly in from Auckland to discuss the strategy and growth of the agency as well as the opportunities it is seeing being based in New Zealand, sitting between larger markets of Australia and the US. She’ll also explain why the agency is still fiercely independent and what future she sees for independent agencies.

New business is a game. There are winners and losers. And the most competitive manifestation of this game is the agency pitch. But the increasing industry call to ‘ditch the pitch’ is not because the game is wrong, but because people are not playing by the rules.

That being said, Mumbrella is turning the pitch into an actual gameshow, live on stage at SAGE, hosted by pitch expert and Trinity P3 CEO, Darren Woolley.

A group of senior agency leaders will become contestants in this winner takes all (and by all we mean nothing, there are no prizes) quiz show based on the debated rules of pitching.

The audience will get great insights into industry leaders thoughts on pitching, get to know Woolley’s rules of the pitch process and get involved in a highly interactive session that may make the pitch more popular.

In this interactive workshop presented by DVM Law, the team will take you on a journey through a fictional campaign and, along the way, will highlight the legal traps that the campaign faces.

This will reveal some tips to avoid these land mines, and highlight best practice for legal compliance, reducing risks and generating value.

All attendees will also be given a legal compliance checklist to keep after the session.

This informative and fun session will not only help to keep your agency and clients safe, but also give them practical and useful guidance on how best to create and protect the business, and to generate long-term value, amongst a complex legal landscape.

Janey Francis presents a highly interactive, dynamic and thought-provoking workshop explaining the power of Emotional Intelligence, self-awareness, and understanding our thinking preferences, in order to enhance relationships and communicate far more impactfully with others.

Janey discloses and demystifies the neuroscience -based ‘Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument’(HBDI)®, a registered quantitative psychometric self -awareness tool which enables ‘Whole brain thinking’®.  Her informative workshop illustrates how insight into yours and your colleagues thinking and communication styles, can result in avoiding workplace conflict, inability to implement change, or achieving commitment from others.

It will lead you to discover how to make the most out of your natural preferences, and break out of self-limiting patterns, in order to approach problems, communications and planning more effectively.

Best practice agencies create a leadership team with commercial intent.

Through her years working with a multitude of big and small independent agencies across Australia, Kathryn has seen how the successful agencies engage and motivate their teams.

Inspired by what works, Kathryn combined the attributes of the best models to create the KMint KPI Program which has been effectively implemented by many creative agencies over the years.

In this workshop: Kathryn will show you how to define core objectives, simple KPI dashboards, and how to implement a robust reporting routine.