‘We want to be the most connected agency’: Hello officially relaunches
After teasing its relaunch last month, Hello Social has officially become Hello – a full-service offering designed to challenge traditional silos and alter the existing agency village model.
At an event on Wednesday afternoon, Hello’s managing partner, Sam Kelly, unveiled the relaunched agency, which will now encompass creative, social, media, events, PR, influencer, and strategy, all under one roof.
Based off the philosophy of ‘creative intelligence’ – meaning ideas that are built for their environment and the jobs that need to be done – Hello is described as not just a name change, and not just a cluster of businesses under one banner, but one group, one strategy, one P&L, one team.
“There isn’t an offering like this in this range of services in market at the moment,” Kelly explained. “We’re going to use creative intelligence to deliver a brand experience for the digital era.
“Every agency leads with insights, but what we feel we can bring to the table is cultural-led insights – we’ve grown up on social, we know what travels. We know the ideas. We want to be the most connected agency that isn’t limited by our capabilities,” he said.
Kelly said too many agencies try to solve problems based on what they can do – and that’s not always the answer. Moving forward, Hello has been created with “all the levers available” to solve problems with the right solutions instead.
“Under one roof, there’s a lot of possibilities and potential there.”
Kelly speaking at Wednesday’s relaunch
The relaunch also comes as a response to the “broken” agency village model and the pain points that come from those experiences.
“We believe the current system, it’s not broken, but it’s not optimised for the digital era,” Kelly continued. “There are frustrations with activating agency villages. We know we can do it by working with five or six different agencies, but speed and turnaround times are a problem, cost too. It shouldn’t take a year to get a campaign out the door that’s got multiple touchpoints.
“Something needs to change, we need to progress.”
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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Hello’s rebrand as a “connected” full-service agency is a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering before they’ve even started. The idea of bringing social, PR, and events under one umbrella sounds great in a pitch deck, but in reality, it’s a flawed model that fails to acknowledge how fundamentally different these disciplines are.
First off, social is not PR, and PR is not events—trying to lump them together into one “connected” model underestimates the expertise, relationships, and craft each discipline requires. Just because an agency understands engagement on Instagram doesn’t mean they can navigate the nuance of earned media or pull off high-stakes live experiences that leave a lasting impact.
Then there’s the issue of skill dilution. There’s a reason the best PR people aren’t running social media accounts, and the best event producers aren’t writing press releases. These disciplines demand different instincts, networks, and execution styles. Trying to do it all often means doing none of it well.
And let’s talk about client perception. Brands don’t want a one-size-fits-all approach from a team that claims to do everything—they want specialists who are the best in the game at what they do. Hello’s model risks turning them into a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
Finally, this isn’t a new idea—it’s a tired one. Countless agencies have tried the “we do everything” model, and most end up backpedaling when they realize it’s impossible to maintain excellence across such different fields. The industry doesn’t need another “connected” agency; it needs experts who understand their lane and dominate in it.
So while Hello’s ambition is admirable, the reality is that trying to be everything to everyone often results in being nothing to anyone.
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One of Hello’s clients here. Not sure if Hello deserves the beat-up you gave them just now given how many other agencies claim to “do everything” too. Why this agency in particular? Sounds personal?
Agency villages will always exist. Agencies that make ideas that get people talking will always exist. Evolving from social and into PR and events and creativity feels naturally integrated to me: Earned-media driven thinking is where good ideas live. No one is saying the same account person is implementing social at the same time they’re doing PR either.
The level of vitriol from you is wild, it must be a negative place to be living inside your head. The fact is Australia’s campaign ideas are boring as batshit with only a few good ones popping up here and there, and I wonder if it’s because people like you who keep tearing our industry down and then I bet you go off and blame clients for the state of the industry. Take a good hard look at yourself.
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If Hello’s stance is that agency village models are “broken,” then what exactly are they trying to build? Because from the outside, it looks like they’re just repackaging the same concept they’re tearing down.
And let’s be real , why are they so publicly attacking agency village models when they’re actively working within them for clients like Uber and Paramount, collaborating with Special and Wavemaker? If these models are so flawed, how does that work? Are they happy to take the benefits when it suits them but trash the structure when it’s convenient? That’s not thought leadership. it’s hypocrisy.
No one’s saying PR, social, and events shouldn’t work together, but you can’t dismiss agency villages as a failure while simultaneously trying to create one. The reality is, the best earned-media thinking comes from deep expertise, not from bolting PR onto a social agency and hoping for the best. If Hello thinks integrating these disciplines is the answer, then they should at least acknowledge they’re following the same model they’re criticising.
And if calling out contradictions like this is what’s “tearing the industry down,” maybe the real issue isn’t criticism, it’s selective memory. Agencies don’t get better by refusing to acknowledge when a structure is fundamentally flawed. If that’s too hard to hear, well, that’s on you.
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You: “why are they publicly attacking agency models”
Also you: “acknowledge the structure is fundamentally flawed if that’s hard to hear that’s on you”
Good lord.
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