This article originally appeared on LBB.
Prior to starting their own business, Connected co-founders Laura and Josh had worked in the broadcast and media space their entire careers. Dealing directly with clients in their respective roles at a global media organisation, they began taking stock of common pain points. It quickly became clear that certain clients who weren’t deemed big enough for the Big Five holding groups to care about, were also not receiving adequate support from smaller agencies who lacked the specialist digital skills needed. For many Australian businesses it felt like a Catch-22 – but Laura and Josh had the solution.
Together, they launched their own independent digital agency, in 2012, building out a dedicated team of experts that would support and accelerate digital growth. Having seen how often strong businesses, strong brands and strong budgets were being overlooked by the bigger agencies, Connected vowed to provide clients with effective and holistic media strategies, backed up by key data.
Setting up shop off the beaten track in Thirroul, on the sunny New South Wales coast, word quickly got out about the digital agency that was refusing to pander to the bad habits of the industry. Connected’s careful and considerate approach has attracted an impressive portfolio of clients over the last 11 years, including big names like Sanitarium, Forbes Australia, Canon, Australian Institute of Management, and Apex Tool Group. The agency’s high staff: client ratio speaks for itself, and the team has grown to a size large enough to include specialist departments and market-leading technology, but small enough to remain flexible, nimble and fast.
Sitting down with LBB’s April Summers, founding partner and CEO, Laura, opens up about Connected’s remarkable growth and the bold decisions that led them to become such a valued digital agency partner to businesses across Australia.
LBB> Connected were pioneers in the independent digital agency space in Australia, what was the background, timing and big idea that led to such a brave move?
Laura> I was across a lot of performance media at Yahoo!7 and I had begun to notice that many medium and large sized businesses who were not quite big enough to work with the Big Five agency groups in Australia really needed someone to guide them across platforms from a digital perspective. I saw a massive opportunity to set up an agency that helps service those clients specifically because there was probably only one or two independent agencies doing this – there certainly weren't many specialist digital agencies at the time. I think there were a handful.
Once set up, the agency quickly grew, purely by referral, at a rapid rate so Josh (Connected partner) came onboard to set up the Search side of the business. Josh’s experiences have always been with big agencies, prior to moving into publishing, having worked in planning, buying, client service and strategy roles at OMD & Mediacom. Just before he joined Connected he was heading up the Paid Search and programmatic team at Yahoo!7 and had noticed there was a huge gap between what the big agencies and holding groups were offering in the SEM space and what the medium-sized clients really needed.
The big groups were too big and moved too slowly, and the existing smaller independent agencies at the time, were generally lacking digital sophistication. We founded Connected to give medium sized clients, who feel undervalued and overlooked, access to big agency smarts housed in boutique agency innovation and flexibility, in order to accelerate business growth.
LBB> As part of a success that has been over a decade in the making, how have you seen the digital advertising landscape change in this time?
Laura> The biggest change has been around transparency and ownership from a client perspective. There used to be a lack of ownership of their ad accounts and data and there were a lot of hidden costs involved. At Connected we made the decision to be completely and utterly transparent with our clients from the offset, so when the market shifted to full transparency across all of digital, we were ahead of the curve. Our transparent approach helped us win accounts like Sanitarium, who want to understand and own their data and have full access to how things are being run, and how they can get the most out of their data. We have seen clients become a lot more curious, and while they are happy to work with partners and agencies, they also want to be across what's actually happening and see how their dollars are being spent.
LBB> Not being beholden to a big agency group clearly offers opportunities to be nimble and flexible for clients, how does this agility reflect itself in everyday life at Connected and what are the ultimate benefits?
Laura> What we do exceptionally well - and probably what we pride ourselves on the most - is commit to constantly evolving our business based on what our clients need now, and in the future. When we work with a client, there are lots of different specialists that work across that plan: we'll have a search specialist; an analytics person; an expert in socials; your client services strategist. We don't work in silos and there's no different cost structures between departments or P&L’s. We literally all come together on a weekly basis to make sure clients are getting the right returns on their investment across all platforms and publisher buys. The main benefits to the way we run our business is that we can make changes quickly. When working for other companies, I noticed how difficult it was to move money from one cost centre to another and ultimately we should be doing what’s best for the client. We are literally here to serve our clients and we do whatever we need to make our partnership successful.
LBB> Recent revelations in the press have seen some larger agency groups being called out for paying less than minimum wages and increasingly pressured working conditions. What is the ethos behind your company culture, and how does it differentiate from competitors?
Laura> One of the reasons we started Connected was to create realistic flexibility. The people that we attract, based on our location, are people that have worked in our industry - really big agency groups or client side - and are burnt out and looking for a more sustainable way of life. We have met with so many people that are actually ready to leave the industry after five or six years, because they don't like the pace of it. Our company culture is built around taking this top talent and making sure they establish a solid work/life balance – this is ingrained in the tenets of Connected. We do this by helping our staff set a more sustainable pace which, in turn, allows them to engage a productive mindset as opposed to purely existing for 12 hours a day.
Our people are team players and work really hard, but it's rare for us to have to work past six o'clock. Members of the team will often head down to the beach on their lunch breaks and go for a surf, knowing they can get back to the office within 5 minutes. Our company culture offers an escape from the big city agency culture that they’re often coming from, and we definitely encourage our team to embrace alternative ways of working that allow them to have good balance.
LBB> Digital marketing moves at an unprecedented speed, as a business how do you keep up with developments like the loss of cookies. And in turn, what do you see as the crucial developments in the near future?
Laura> We work really closely with our publishing partners to make sure that we're across everything that's happening in market. We are a Google Premier Partner which means we’re recognised in the top 3% of vendors in terms of meeting the requirements of our clients brand’s needs.
The other thing we are doing to stay ahead of the curve is our work with Facebook as a Meta Business Partner which is not something a lot of other agencies our size have. We have fortnightly catch ups with them to stay across new opportunities and mitigate any issues. And we stay in close touch with all our publisher partners. Also, we do a lot with analytics and educating our clients on how to achieve holistic results as opposed to the last click attribution, which many clients got in the habit of doing when cookies were the big thing.
We onboarded Datorama and Salesforce for our agency as part of our bespoke analytics offerings which was a huge investment for us. Our clients receive access to reports containing real time data at any point in time via a live dashboard – and they rave about these reports and how they have impacted their business! We strive to provide our clients with holistic access so they can see, at a glance, what's happening. We bring their marketing data together with their site and sales platform data, so that they can actually see the impact of media on their revenue.
We work closely with our clients to maximise the use of their first party data to segment audiences better to ensure they are having real conversations with people in different segments. We've recently just won an account that has access to enormous amounts of data, so we're not just talking about bringing on new customers but we’re talking about segmenting their existing non-active customers in a way that keeps them engaged and loyal. There's so many things that we can do, so we try to think outside the box and not rely purely on retargeting and last click attribution to drive those results.
LBB> Digital marketing is often viewed as strictly focused on performance metrics, however brand and creative is still an important part of the mix. How do you manage creative execution and how important do you see it for ongoing client success?
Laura> It’s huge. Creative is a massive sticking point for us and we've worked with clients who might have amazing organic content that’s not quite ready for paid, and we provide a plan for how it could become an ad for paid. We work with specialty partners that enable us to offer creative solutions to our clients to ensure we are always driving strong results across all channels. Even if our clients don't use our creative service offering, what we do exceptionally well is work with our clients internal teams or creative agencies to optimise their campaigns based on the creative. This means we will work closely with our clients to optimise their creative and show them how to get the most out of it, across each platform and each placement within a platform. We make sure that we're involved with every element of the client’s creative to ensure that we're giving it the best possible chance to work.
LBB> Finally, what are your plans for achieving further growth as a business, in the next few years?
Laura> We really value working with key partners who we can add value to and drive performance across their business. We have such a strong passion for what we do and whilst we don’t have huge growth plans each year, we look to bring on 1-2 mid to large sized clients and then we cap it. We take this approach so that our onboarding process is seamless and so we can sustain growth without compromising our existing partners and over extending our staff. This is one of the reasons why we have long standing partnerships with our clients.