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Ex ZO boss Ian Perrin launches Australia’s first real time marketing agency – Speed

The former boss of media agency Zenith Optimedia Ian Perrin has reemerged to launch a new offering focused on helping brands hone their real time marketing strategies.

speed logo

The Speed Agency, which launches today, is majority owned by Clemenger Group, with Perrin holding a minority stake.

Perrin, who left his previous role at ZO at the beginning of the year, will work from Clemenger’s offices in Sydney and sister agency CHE Proximity in Melbourne. He will also tap into the resources of Omnicom Media Group, whose agencies include OMD and PHD.

Perrin, left, and Clemenger boss Robert Morgan

Perrin, left, and Clemenger boss Robert Morgan

Perrin was CEO of ZO for four years and before that spent five years at media strategy hotshop Naked.

His new agency seeks to tap into the increasingly fashionable move towards real time marketing, in which brands deploy and update marketing campaigns and new creative day-by-day or even hour-by-hour as a campaign unfolds and the data points towards its level of effectiveness.

According to the announcement: “Speed will merge media and message as an integrated offer for clients. It will use a dynamic approach of real time data sources, adaptive planning techniques and flexible investment strategies to achieve this. Speed will always be integrated into the creative process, and never divorced from it.”

Perrin will initially be Speed’s only employee. He told Mumbrella that while the agency has no foundation client, he has been speaking to a number of potential future clients. The agency has pledged to limit itself to just four major clients with Perrin actively involved in all clients’ business.

He said: “Technology has fundamentally changed the way brands are built, and because of this marketers need a genuinely different approach to communications. We are therefore creating an agency built on agility, utility and simplicity that will deliver faster results than legacy models. Faster creative integration, faster digital transformation and faster procedural automation.”

Perrin said he had the idea for the agency, and its name for some time, and spoke to a number of agencies and potential investors before deciding he needed the resource of a major network behind it.

Clemenger Group executive chairman Robert Morgan said in the announcement: “It is important for us to continually evolve our offer to meet our client’s needs. With Speed, we see a wonderful opportunity to do something in the market that no one else is. Plenty have talked about merging channel planning inside an ad agency, but no one has done it with a media agency. This is not about re-bundling, it’s about creating new models.”

Among the services Speed will offer will include helping set up in-house programmatic technology and helping clients trade directly with media owners.

OMG boss Peter Horgan said, “We are absolutely committed to providing clients with solutions that work best for them, and in some cases that means looking at different approaches and operating models. We believe that Speed is unique and adds a great deal to our media portfolio.”

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