Sydney marketing and creative agencies merge to create full service shopper specialist
A new full service agency, Extravert, has been created from the merger of face-to-face marketing agency Demo Plus and creative agency Artel in Sydney.
The two agencies have been working on the merger for the past eight months based on the idea that a full service agency with a focus on shoppers would be able to offer brands stronger connections with consumers.
Demo Plus has built a base of more than 1000 brand ambassadors, and linking with Artel, which has been working largely in point of sale, under the Extravert banner will see the agency offer an end-to-end solution from design and strategy through to activation.
The new company will be a division of Blueprint Group, which also runs Retail Insights and Powerforce.
Zed Elliott, creative director of the newly merged agency, said after working together the two agencies saw a merger as a natural progression.
“We probably started working on this about eight months ago. In September last year the noises started being made and it seemed like a bit of an obvious thing,” Elliott told Mumbrella.
“There was a disconnect from marketers employing Demo Plus just to sample something without actually attaching it to a brand message. We have got stats that actually say if you do a price promotion on a product the very next week there is something like a 60% drop-off on purchase in the places that the price promotion was. But if you do a demonstration that is strategically targeted and creatively executed the drop off is only about 15%, which is massive difference.”
Zed Elliott, Liv Pultar, Fleur Farrington, Louise Compton, Daniel Cormack
He said that shopper marketing should not just be tasting a product and walking away, but the brand had to use the moment creatively to forge an emotional connection.
Elliott said one of the benefits of the merger and the move to a new brand was breaking away from the mindset of Demo Plus clients that the agency was just about in-store promotions whole the Artel side of the business could move into having a face to face relationship with consumers.
“They were not really realising that they could deliver on insight and data, experiential, conferences, exhibitions – a bigger scale of things,” he said.
“When we started talking to them about Extravert they said they had no idea we actually had creative guys and agency guys up to doing the thinking side of things as well.”
The agency will be be led by Elliott and client strategy director Louise Compton and bolstered by a senior team including operations director Fleur Farrington, senior account director Daniel Cormack and account director Liv Pultar.
Simon Canning
Note: the writer originally reported that the agency was based in Melbourne. This has been corrected.
Excellent idea. Great concept. Best of luck.
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Closer to the shoppers’ coal face has got to be a good strategic move for marketers who normally stand back after the image has been presented in conventional or social media.
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Getting closer to the shoppers’ coal face has got to be a good strategic extension of conventional or social media communication.
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boring “me too” guys
it has been done already by several leading agency groups…..
the strategy looks like a jumble of brands thrown together ….again…as a pre sale process by the private equity investors
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‘Full service shopper specialist’
– what? *Yawn*
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Wow, the new DemoPlus logo has orange kryptonite in it!
Where is Superman?
In the deli section handing out cheese on toothpicks to hungry shoppers.
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