Meg Gossert is the Managing Director of independent media agency Multi Media Buying and Planning Services, a founding member of the Independent Media Agencies of Australia (IMAA). Meg shares her experience running an independent media agency, helping clients grow, developing a stable and experienced team and building long-term client relationships based on respect and trust. A business model many agency managers would envy.
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Transcription:
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we talk about the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. Today I’m sitting down with Meg Gossert, Managing Director at independent media agency Multi Media Buying and Planning Services. Welcome, Meg.
Meg:
Thank you so much, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Darren:
Well, thank you because it’s a great opportunity for me to have a conversation about something that I have noticed, that there’s a trend happening and that’s about independent media agencies. There seems to be something going on in the marketplace that the idea of being independent is starting to be seen as a real plus.
Meg:
I agree with you, Darren because last year when the IMAA established itself there was a bit of noise about the fact that the multinationals weren’t as efficient as perhaps they could have been and that the independents were doing quite a fine job out there. And when the Independent Media Agencies Association was formed I jumped on it.
I was the 2nd one on the line to pay my membership and I was in it boots and all because independents can feel like we’re alone. We don’t have the mentorship and the ability to discuss the industry because we’re on our own. We don’t have a big group or branch of other offices in other states necessarily.
So, it was a wonderful opportunity for us to all get together as a team and have some discussions about things that concern us.
Darren:
And in your own case, you’re not an overnight sudden appearance of an independent agency. You’ve actually been running your own agency for several decades.
Meg:
Absolutely. I think I’m the oldest one—33 years old. Don’t ask me how old I am because I won’t tell you.
Darren:
I would never ask, I’ve been brought up well. But there’s a trend amongst marketers away from the idea that bigger is better when it comes to their media and they’re really looking for an alternative to that approach. You have to say most of the multinational media agencies are positioning themselves on bigger is better and we have all these resources, which has often worked against the idea of the smaller or independent agency, hasn’t it?
Meg:
That’s true. The big global agencies do have some fabulous resources and they can march in a very impressive pitch team and produce wonderful documentation but that doesn’t necessarily end up being the right answer for the client. And the service they necessarily get is not what they expect.
So, there’s a big opportunity for the independents to step up to the plate and they can produce equal work.
Darren:
And as someone who has been an independent media agency for so long, have you noticed a trend in the last few years that there have been a lot more people setting up independent agencies?
Meg:
There are certainly a lot more of us. Some of them are professional and some of them aren’t and that’s why the screening process that the IMAA has is a good thing. You’ve got to have a good reputation with media. You’ve got to have credibility. Your record of trading has to be extremely good so there is a screening process. And I think that’s a good thing. Some of the small one man band situations may not necessarily be reputable.
Darren:
And with the demise of accreditation because when you set up your agency you would’ve had to have been accredited to trade in media which was incredibly difficult. There were quite onerous cash reserve requirements or bank guarantees that would cover multiples of the amount of media that you were going to be buying each month.
Meg:
It was a very hard hurdle to jump over and set up and get your accreditation. It was very difficult which is why a lot of people ended up placing through other arms that were accredited. But these days with the MCRL it is a little easier to get accounts with the media.
Although with the big television stations and conglomerates you do have to have a pretty huge bank balance to be able to get a rating.
Darren:
You almost need to be able to secure their payment. They will not sell you media on credit unless they know they’re going to get paid, right?
Meg:
Absolutely.
Darren:
But is that why we’ve seen a lot of 1 and 2-person shops pop up? They call them media agencies from the lounge room.
Meg:
It’s basically people who have perhaps been working in the bigger shops that become disgruntled and think, “I can do this myself”, and they’ve gone out and set up their own business. Some of them are doing well and doing a good job for their clients. And a lot of them cannot afford to have all the resources that are required to support themselves like the research and the tools that we all need to have at our fingertips.
But then they tap into that resource through a larger agency, maybe Dominic at Pearman or someone like that who offers that service.
Darren:
Apart from the accreditation needs, there are quite a lot of expenses with setting up a media agency—all the research tools and things like that. It’s not a cheap enterprise.
Meg:
No, it’s not, it’s very expensive and I know when I first started out it was, “how am I going to get through this first 3 to 6 months of trading”. I was extremely lucky in that I had some pretty solid clients quite quickly. But I had 3 children and I was a single mother. I fed them on mincemeat for 6 months.
Darren:
Just to make the media payments.
Meg:
Just to make sure I had enough money in the bank.
Darren:
You talked about the disgruntled staff from some of the bigger agencies, especially the network agencies. That’s one of the issues that the media agency categories had; the high turnover or churn of staff.
I remember seeing numbers from the MFA of 30 to 40% as an industry average for a lot of these agencies.
Meg:
I think it’s a real shame because all the kids go in with high hopes and they’re really excited to get involved in the industry and it is an exciting industry. I look back and think wow when I first started out we had all these fabulous things we could do and competitions you could go into, public speaking things that the AMP used to sponsor for media agencies and things like that.
It is an exciting industry because not many industries you can go into and learn about different categories in the business world like you can in a media agency. You get exposed to different categories. But there’s this incredible workload that they’re given. They have to work long hours, they get paid very little and they burn out. It’s a real shame that exists because it is a great career for young people to get into.
I know I’m very lucky at Multi; we don’t have staff attrition. It’s fantastic, my team has been with me for a very long time. And it is like a very close-knit family and the clients love that too.
Darren:
And that’s one of the complaints clients have; that there’s a new person on their business every couple of months and they’ve got to relearn the client, re-teach the agency.
Meg:
And it’s an expense to business when that happens—the same for the agency that’s employing them. They have to retrain someone, get them up to speed and it is an expense. They need to have a hard look at how they treat their people.
Darren:
One of the issues has been that the structures of a lot of the really big agencies (100 plus people) are that they’re incredibly flat. So, you’ve got a large number of very junior, almost recent graduates/ entry-level, coming in and because it’s so flat they’re not getting a lot of mentoring.
Meg:
That’s true.
Darren:
But there’s also not a lot of places to go. After 2 or 3 years, if you’re particularly good you might be lucky to get a more senior job in one of these agencies or you have to leave and there not a lot of places to go to.
Meg:
The problem is the young kids get pigeonholed into an area of that media department where they just learn about one thing. They might have to work on print or radio or they could get pigeonholed into one platform. And they don’t get the overall media experience that a valuable media person needs to have. I look back and we had to deal with radio, TV, print, magazines; you got taught the whole gamut and you were responsible to the client for every facet of the media plan.
And that’s why I think my staff are so valuable because they have deep knowledge about everything that’s out there. Digitally we’ve been very lucky that we’ve had this wonderful man on our staff who has developed a product called Liquid Artificial Intelligence and it is going to set the world on fire in terms of its capability.
And that’s because we’ve had the time to develop that and give him the flexibility to spend the time and do the maths.
Darren:
The whole digital area has expanded rapidly, exponentially, the number of options available and the huge amount of data that gets thrown at agencies but also advertisers around that. Yet, I notice on your website you offer the full gamut; you’ve got everything, display, search, social, the whole thing.
Meg:
I think our website is one of the most informative media agency websites, with a lot of the big global ones, there’s nothing on them about media. There’s stuff about themselves and their staff. But we’ve tried to put things on our website, good content so that people who are looking for information can find it.
Our most popular frequently asked question is what is a TARP? We get a lot of traffic just through our website asking that question and getting the answer.
Darren:
So with a team that is clearly quite stable how do you go about recruiting, training, upskilling your team?
Meg:
Through this COVID process we’ve had a lot more ability to do that because there are so many more publishers doing webinars and training online and that’s been fantastic. Jaz, one of our younger girls, she’s listening to something every couple of days, which I think is fantastic.
I can only congratulate the media for doing things like that. They haven’t been able to get out and about to see us but they have taken the time to put a lot of good stuff together to talk about what they can do, the capabilities, the research and the data they’ve got available, is fantastic.
Channel 9 Digital has been very good; they’ve spent quite a lot of time and money putting things together.
Darren:
It’s probably, from their perspective, an investment in the very near future isn’t it?
Meg:
Absolutely. And people like Verizon they’ve had some good sessions. And The IMAA is doing some good stuff too and they should be congratulated for doing that because it just gives us credibility.
Darren:
From my perspective, the IMAA has been an absolute boon because there are 6 major holding companies all with their own media brands. But the IMAA has now about 30 members—30 independent media agencies. These are the ones that have been vetted and have established themselves as real players in the marketplace
Meg:
Absolutely and some of them aren’t small. They are pretty big enterprises so I think it’s a great thing.
Darren:
Except that they seem to have flown under the radar for a long time.
Meg:
We all do. That was something that I did deliberately for a long time in my business. I would not release a client list. I just kept a very low profile. But I did use my business network to attract clients. And a lot of our business was obtained by word of mouth and recommendation, … but I just flew below the radar. It was a deliberate move on my part.
Darren:
Was that so you didn’t become a target for other agencies wanting to try and pick off your clients?
Meg:
Absolutely.
Darren:
But that’s not just confined to you. Lots of agencies do that for the same reason.
Meg:
Absolutely.
Darren:
What about the idea, big agencies, big clients; small agencies, small clients?
Meg:
That’s not necessarily true. We’ve got a whole range of clients from small to large. If you’ve got experienced and professional people who work for you on your team you can do any job whether it’s large or small. You have to resource up probably to manage the larger ones but that’s fine; you’ve got to be astute in picking your staff and keeping them.
Darren:
A lot of the big agencies will say they’re not interested in clients under 1 or 2 million dollars.
Meg:
That’s a myth in my opinion. I think they’re the best clients to work on because you’ve got the ability to help them grow and show them some in-depth information that perhaps they haven’t known about before.
We’re working on a little client at the moment that came about via that interview in Mediaweek last week. They rang me and said we read that and liked what you said. So we’re doing a strategy for them and turning something around. It’s a little budget but we’re spending the time and putting the effort in to give them what they need because they weren’t happy with what they got on a direct basis.
Darren:
They were working directly with the media and now they’re transitioning to working with you as their agent? What about clients that have been with big agencies and have come to you? Does that happen much?
Meg:
No.
Darren:
So you’re more a grower?
Meg:
That was always my passion. I always wanted to get the little ones and help them grow. That was the reason I started the business in the first place and that’s worked for us. But finding those small ones these days that are prepared to take the leap is just that little bit harder.
Darren:
But the other problem is AdWords, Facebook and Google have been set up so that they often feel like they can do it all themselves. They’ve built these online interfaces that allow them to directly buy their media online.
Meg:
Of course and Channel 9 offers that as well and all those sorts of things that the media do that makes it a little bit more competitive in terms of getting the smaller clients.
Darren:
Do you think there’s a sweet spot where suddenly they realise they’re not getting all the value in a self-serve marketplace? They’re sitting there with their Google budget, Facebook budget, press budget; that actually having an agency that can pull that all together becomes an advantage?
Meg:
I think it does but it depends on how astute the client is. Some of them don’t have a lot of experience at all and they can’t see whether they’re getting a good deal or a bad deal. They just think they’ve got a cheap deal and that’s what they can afford and it may not necessarily do the right job and they get disappointed.
I think that clients have to trust in the knowledge you can provide to them and I think that a lot of small clients have been burnt very badly by the agency business in the past hence they decide to do it themselves.
But one of our policies is to be honest. If we can help them we tell them. If we can’t help them and give them what they think they need we have to walk away from it. If a client isn’t going to take your advice there’s not a lot of good you can do for them.
Darren:
And also if you make a promise you can’t keep or deliver all you’re going to do is burn them again, aren’t you?
Meg:
Exactly and that’s not what we want to do.
Darren:
I’d imagine there’s not a lot of business you’d have to pitch for if they’re these types of clients if the majority of your business is coming from clients that are finding you, phoning up and having a conversation. They’re not putting you through that formal pitch process.
Meg:
We get involved in pitches. We had a beautiful client, we had them for 4 years and they pitched their business every single year. That was their head office policy. All of their suppliers had to go to a pitch every year. We retained that business 4 years in a row and we took them from nothing, a launch company in Australia to where they are now.
And in the pitch last year we didn’t retain the business and I know exactly where we went wrong but they’re absolutely struggling with a large agency now. So come the end of this year we’re going to be back on their door and knocking real hard because they miss us.
Darren:
We see that with so many organisations that pitch regularly—not every year–I’m not sure that’s a good practice—but every contract period. There will always be someone who makes a promise that seems better on the surface. But once you’ve awarded the business it’s very hard to hold someone to a promise, isn’t it?
Meg:
Yes, it is. And we’ve watched from a distance what’s happened. COVID 19 has certainly not helped this company. It has not helped the fact that they manufacture from a certain country—that’s not helped them at all.
But the big idea they were presented with, fell flat on its face, so they’ve gone to a very hard place in terms of their product and marketing. Maybe a lot of clients are suffering through the whole process of the COVID 19 pandemic but it’s not going to stop us from marching out and knocking on their door because I’m a true believer that you’ve got to keep your name out there in this climate.
The ones that are marketing strongly are going to come out of it in a better position.
Darren:
I said there are agencies that are not interested in clients under $1 million. There must be some clients that start off with a relatively small amount of money that in a big agency would just get completely overlooked?
Meg:
Yes, they do and I’ve seen it.
Darren:
What’s the smallest client you’ve ever had come through the door?
Meg:
$2,000.
Darren:
Unbelievable.
Meg:
That client is now a $300,000 client and we still have them so there you go.
Darren:
That’s an amazing positioning. You could position yourself as the agency to grow and have all these case studies.
Meg:
Exactly. I think it’s a great challenge to help a company grow.
Darren:
Sorry, $2,000 in media.
Meg:
Yeah, little classified ads in local papers—that’s how it all started. And now it’s a very different company.
Darren:
And with media becoming so much more accessible, especially digital media, do you find some clients are inclined to think they know as much as your team do?
Meg:
No, I don’t. I think clients are very overwhelmed by the digital space. They might think they know but then you get a really experienced digital person talking the talk and they’ll sit back and listen. The digital thing is changing all the time. It’s a very exciting space but I think there’s data overload.
I think you’ve got to keep it simple and guide your clients through the process because if you can help them understand it you’ll have a better relationship and they’ll understand why they need to do it.
Darren:
Which makes it more like the traditional partnership. A lot of people in agencies talk about having a “partnership” with their clients but in fact, it either tilts one way or the other. It’s either the person with the most information is in power or the person with the money is in power.
Meg:
You can’t necessarily buy yourself out of stuff these days. Big budgets don’t necessarily mean you’re going to succeed. You’ve got to be smarter. These days media consumption is so much broader, everyone taps into so many different platforms to get their information so you’ve got to be wise about how you manage that money to make it work in the best possible way.
Darren:
Harold Mitchell was the most famous independent media agency owner in Australia and Harold was always pushing bigger was better because he was the biggest independent.
Meg:
Well, he’s not my favorite person.
Darren:
He’s not the favorite person of quite a few people in the industry; you’re not alone there.
Meg:
I’m not but the example you’re raising – he was an extremely successful and wealthy man. But I’ve worked with a lot of people who have come out of his agency and I don’t believe that the right ethics were always applied or the right strategies are given. I’ve got a client who has been on my books for a long time now who came out of Harold’s agency. Different strokes for different folks.
Darren:
I remember, as a new person in advertising, seeing him give a talk and to paraphrase it he said ‘all you need to in media is to get the client’s money, load it into the media cannon, aim it towards the audience and keep firing until you get a result. It was such a simple and very visual metaphor but not particularly smart because it was all about firepower rather than what has always underpinned media; the smartness.
Meg:
The ideas.
Darren:
You need to be smart enough to be able to select media in the right combinations at the right time with the right message to hit the right audience. That’s the core and it sounds quite simple but it’s actually quite complicated and becoming more complicated because there are so many more options now.
Meg:
Absolutely. Years ago I worked at an agency that was Fortune Australia, one of the largest Australian-owned agencies back in its day. And we had the Australian Government Advertising Service and we placed all their radio and television. We didn’t do their print; it was just the air media contract.
They had an edict that every television station had to buy equal TARP weights on each station. Each station had to get the same value. And I thought this is ridiculous and a waste of taxpayers’ money because we’re not really buying this in the right way. The Channel 10 audience was always younger; the Channel 9 audience always skewed more upper echelon ABs.
And I put a document to the government, the advertising service agency, saying that we have to buy by demographic. We have to buy the audience. We don’t need to buy equal TARPs on each channel. If we want to have people in the Defence forces or the army reserve we’ve got to target this, this and this and it’s not on that station. And they changed the whole way that television was bought.
That illustrates the point you’re making that you’ve got to buy the correct audience.
Darren:
Absolutely. And probably also overcame a huge political thing which was they wanted to give the right amount of money to all the media proprietors so they’d all report well on them in Canberra. But apart from my cynical observation, I’ve noticed a lot of companies are moving to short-termism.
What I mean by that is planning media to get short-term results. And the use of a lot of the digital channels actually feeds that because they provide huge amounts of information around who clicks on your ad whether it’s a Facebook or a Google ad. But there’s still a need to fill the top of the funnel.
Is that one of the transitions you find with some of the clients that come to your agency? That they think of media like the sales force of their investment.
Meg:
Clients went through a stage a few years ago where they lost confidence in the television platform. They thought no one’s watching television these days and it doesn’t have the power it used to have but now we’re seeing the reverse of that situation. And people have come back to a more equal equilibrium in terms of the thinking.
They know that television is the mainstream, it’s where you are going to create your awareness and then you’ve got to underpin your buy with all the other things they tap into. And digital, whatever it might be, you’ve got to have the ability to use all of those things to capture your audience.
It’s back to that old getting the right mix of media and being able to support it and report on it and make sure that it is performing. We have a structure at Multi whereby we do post-analysis every fortnight and we upgrade ourselves and we’re constantly watching our buys to see whether they’re performing and delivering as to how we expect them to.
I think it’s important and big agencies don’t have the time to do that. I can remember when I was at a large agency and post-analysis was the last thing we wanted to do because we were too busy running, trying to catch up, to do the stuff that had already happened.
Darren:
A lot of clients complain that post-analysis is almost non-existent. Now it’s a data dump out of a lot of these platforms, just pages and pages of numbers that don’t really have any insights.
Meg:
Well, that’s not what we do. We have a fabulous post-analysis system and our clients are very grateful for it.
Darren:
How can you improve in the future if you don’t constantly review your performance in the past?
Meg:
Absolutely. You’ve got to be able to purge what’s not working and move on.
Darren:
Otherwise, you’re destined to repeat it over and over again. The other thing is it doesn’t matter what the brief is, for a lot of media agencies it feels like it’s just the same response over and over again; same strategy, same media plan, same buy.
Meg:
You get what you give. A good brief; you’ll get a good result. And I think clients need to provide better briefs. The onus is on them to give a good brief so that we can work better. We’ve got a briefing form that we provide to clients if they don’t have the ability to write a brief.
Most clients do have the ability to write a brief these days and briefs are important. As I say, you get what you give.
Darren:
It’s hard to get the result you want unless you know what the results are that you want and unless you communicate that. As far as remuneration goes, some people are talking about a return to commissions, others work on head hours, and overheads and things like that and some are working increasingly on performance base. Are all those on the table with you? Do you have a preferred remuneration model?
Meg:
To be honest, Darren, we’ve always worked on the commission system. It’s not often that we’ve gone into a head hour model. We did to an extent with Mirvac some years ago but it was only where perhaps a buy didn’t eventuate or where it was a non-commissionable transaction that was involved and we’d charge head hours.
But I’ve found that the commission system works well. You get remunerated for what you’ve done and what you haven’t done in terms of if you have to cancel a campaign—well that’s the luck of the game. But we’ve always worked on a commission-based system.
Darren:
I find procurement people especially when they’ve done a retainer model will then always compare it to the total media expenditure to work out the effective commission rate as a benchmark.
Meg:
Exactly. We’ve had situations with a client where if we’ve done a post-analysis campaign and that campaign has delivered them extremely good value and we’ve doubled their budget there’s a bonus commission placed on the added value that we’ve acquired for them. We have it audited and the value is definitely there, and clients are happy to pay a bonus at the end if you’ve given them great value. And that’s worked for us as well.
Darren:
That can work really well where there is complete transparency in commissions, especially some of the digital channels—the old 10% commission, 11.1% mark-up but now digital channels are offering multiples of that. And unless that’s declared and it’s completely open it’s incredibly difficult for clients to know whether they’re getting a good deal or not.
Meg:
Exactly. I think the digital space has been a bit of a money spin for a lot of global agencies. They’ve been able to mark it up.
Darren:
I think it’s called tech fees rather than mark-ups.
Meg:
If we’re given a budget by a client in that digital space then that budget gets spent in that digital space and the commission is retained by us or we have another arrangement whereby there might be a rebate placed on their spend. The money gets spent where it’s supposed to be.
Darren:
It’s still quite a neat approach especially when you’re dealing with media only. A lot of the major network agencies came out of creative agencies.
Meg:
Absolutely.
Darren:
When I started it was the week that Mindshare popped out of JWT and suddenly being able to separate the old commission and service fee became quite problematic because they were two separate entities.
Meg:
Exactly. These days we don’t have a lot of small agencies on our books. Days gone by we used to regard the small agencies we did work for as our sales force. They’d go out and bring clients in and they’d put a service fee on. I don’t have an agency on my books now that charges a service fee.
Darren:
And that’s because the media has become its own business. Though we are seeing increasingly creative agencies re-bundling media back in there.
Meg:
Full service.
Darren:
I noticed on your website it says full service but you mean full-service media agency. You’re not offering creative?
Meg:
No, we’re not. If a client asks us if we know a good creative agency we’ll steer them to that agency if we think they’ve got experience in that category.
Darren:
If you were asked to put a case for independents what would you say are the 3 best things about being independent?
Meg:
From my perspective, most independent agency proprietors and management are pretty hands-on with their clients. We’re involved in the day to day client operation and servicing of our clients. The clients get wisdom and experience from an independent agency that may not necessarily exist in a global shop because the once a year phone call from the MD is all they get. That’s not necessarily how independents operate.
We’re much more hands-on and involved in terms of the service of an independent agency can be more agile. We can work faster. We get back to clients a lot more quickly because you don’t have all this bureaucracy to go through so we’re more nimble-footed.
And the 3rd point is that the independents have a personal passion to offer, that might not necessarily exist in a big shop.
Darren:
You certainly have skin in the game. Your agency, Multi Media Buying and Planning Services, has had the same managing director for 33 years.
Meg:
That’s exactly right.
Darren:
I’m not sure how many other agencies, especially network agencies could say they’ve had the same CEO or managing director for that amount of time. So you’ve personally been involved in every single client that’s gone through.
Meg:
Absolutely. And I’m still involved with all of them. And I’m not ashamed to answer the phone and say ‘good morning, can I help you’ because that’s what it’s all about. That’s something we make sure we do, not just clattering away on the email, we speak to our clients every day and that’s important to maintain those relationships.
Darren:
And watch them grow.
Meg:
Absolutely and that’s the fun of it. It’s a great thing when you can look back and say I helped them do that and we came up with that idea or integration and it was successful.
Darren:
Do you think that contributes to your staff’s sense of purpose?
Meg:
Definitely. Like this morning we had this task for a new account and we were all really enthusiastic—it’s not a big budget—when do people do that? What time of the day do they use that? So we were all immediately thinking about when they needed to use it. So should we look at that placement or the front end of the week in terms of the structure of the buy? The involvement is fantastic.
Darren:
Meg, I’ve just noticed the time. This has been a great conversation. Thank you for making time to come and see us.
Meg:
It’s been my pleasure.
Darren:
A question before we finish up. If you could have any client in the world walk through your door tomorrow and give you their business who would it be?
Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley and special guests. Find all the episodes here