EXCLUSIVE: The fast-growing, big-spending health and wellbeing brand Swisse has bankrolled the startup of a new full-service agency in Melbourne, whose partners include former Nine Network group sales boss Paul Waldren and Ten Network’s just-departed commercial director, Adam Hilton.
Swisse has become a darling of the media sector with its aggressive spending behind major mainstream TV sport and entertainment properties – its annual budget is north of $50 million.
The massive, high-profile spending remit of Swisse has resulted in the company’s sales rocketing from $12 million to $170 million in three years. Its marketing and media budget sits at nearly 30% of sales and now Swisse, headed by chief executive Radek Sali, has purpose built a group of agency partners which have merged to become a full-service shop called NoisyBeast.
NoisyBeast will have its own media buying and planning arm headed by partner Adam Hilton, a creative unit (previously bcreative) run by Stuart Byfield with digital coming from Waldren’s former company Abundant Media. All these businesses have been folded into NoisyBeast.
Waldren, who is managing partner, told AdNews there was no question increasing numbers of clients were looking at a return to full-service agency partners in order to deal with the growing complexity in the media and communications sectors. Other foundation accounts include TEAC, Pedders Suspension and NQR.
“I was never a great champion of media agencies but like most I just accepted that was the way of the advertising world,” Waldren said. “There is a bigger theme here and it was Swisse who convinced me that a full-service agency for most clients is the most sensible solution. That’s how well they have coordinated their activities between product development, retail strategy and launch marketing.
“They’ve done that very well in-house themselves but now they’ve grown to such a size Swisse realises it needs help. But it’s not as simple as assigning a lot of money. It’s the end of what is a very well coordinated marketing process. Sometimes those of us who work in media confuse marketing with an advertising solution.”
NoisyBeast, unlike many independent agencies, will not feed its media billings through one of the larger buying groups, opting instead to handle all of it in-house.
“We are going to buy ourselves,” Hilton said. “Full-service agencies became a bit unfashionable as everything unbundled but my conversations with clients are really that they would prefer to have one key point of contact to deliver solutions across multiple media. We want to position ourselves in the strategic end of that.
“We’ve got some pretty aggressive growth plans for strategic media placement. I’ve had a couple of chats with media owners in the last couple of days with distressed packages in the market but I’m not sure we’ll do too many deals.”
This article first appeared in the 18 May 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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