SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

After just seven years in existence, MBM has won two Agency of the Year Awards and a number of high-profile clients. The agency’s core trio talks to Jihee Junn about the highs and lows of the independent media world they inhabit.

Everything has to start somewhere, and for MBM, you only have to go back to 2010. Before all the awards glory, recognition and highprofile clients, Matt Bale was working in a Wellington office just 11 metres squared in total, while his founding partner Sean Mccready was sloughing it out in Auckland, sharing his work quarters with an architect.

Nowadays, there’s a bit more room for the pair to stretch out in, as evidenced by its slick and modern Kingsland headquarters. With

more than 50 staff across two locations, Mccready and managing partner Alysha Delany run MBM’S operations in Auckland, while Bale still bases himself down in the country’s capital.

Recalling MBM’S early years, Mccready and Bale describe the agency’s fast and furious ascension with a tinge of both fondness and exhaustion.

“It was pretty full on. But personally, I really enjoyed that period,” says Mccready, who first met Bale when the two worked at Saatchi & Saatchi in the 1990s.

“It was lot of hard work and a lot of long hours, but it was quite adrenalising. Luckily it all went really well and the momentum came pretty early.”

But building that momentum was no easy feat, with the duo working their way up by doing what they did best: ruthlessly prioritising the projects that played to their strengths.

“Our background meant we were really strong at strategy, channel planning and the creative media aspect of digital, and I've also always had a passion for social,” recalls Bale.

“So for the first while, we really just focused on that because that's where our strengths were. It was only once we got established that we identified that to take the next step, we needed expertise in other areas because otherwise we'd be confined.”

To achieve that objective, the pair brought in Delany from Sparkphd in 2013. Having helped establish PHDIQ during her time there, Delany was operating at the forefront of digital marketing in New Zealand at the time.

“When we brought Alysha on, we made a conscious change to become better and smarter at digital and data, and that's certainly accelerated growth in that part of the business,” says Mccready.

Gongs, they've had a few

Having expanded from three to 13 staff members by 2013, the agency had grown in stature and work. But it was 2014 that really put MBM on the map as it took out Agency of the Year at the inaugural Beacon Awards. And if that wasn’t enough for the four-year old independent, 2015 saw it take home the coveted prize for the second year running.

“I think our awards success comes from two areas,” explains Mccready. “The first is creative and media collaboration, like with Whittaker’s and Griffins. The second is from experimenting and pushing into digital and data, like we have with our work for Fly Buys and Slingshot.

“As an independent company, one of the things you have to be good at is collaborating. Many of our awards have come from working closely with the creatives at creative agencies,” he says.

On this point, Bale concurs, and adds that although MBM functions as a separate media agency, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate content and context, something which he and FCB Media’s Rufus Chuter appear to have in common (see feature page 46).

“I’m a believer that you create magic when creative and media are aligned and have a single vision. Integrated is one way of achieving that, as long as both partners are equal in terms of their contribution at the table, because I've also lived in an integrated environment where the creatives were the masters and the media people were the servants, and you didn't create magic because you were being overruled. But the point of creative and media working together, I'm a believer in,” says Bale.

Speed to market

When it comes to being a local independent, MBM’S core trio agree that one of the key upsides is the nimbleness that comes along with it. With the absence of overseas parent companies and cumbersome decision-making procedures, things at MBM have the ability to move relatively fast.

“The three of us can make decisions really quickly on things like new staff, services and offerings. We can decide that pretty quickly between ourselves and not have to get permission from overseas,” says Mccready.

“It’s speed to market. We can spot opportunities and jump on them, or if there are issues with a client servicing issue, we can fix that pretty quickly too. We also have the freedom to experiment with new products, services and even software, so we're not tied into what the group might be offering through its network. We can develop our own solutions.”

A prime example of this efficiency to market lies in MBM’S analytics and data science division, which the trio insist was done “our own way with our own staff developing our own products.”

Established to help clients understand the performance of their digital properties, the analytics practice was formally set up in April last year. But it took more than 18 months of work building up a number of case studies and doing consistent work for clients for MBM to become certified Google Analytics service and sales partners, which Delany says makes the agency one of just three CCC agencies to hold that capability.

“I think it's fair to say that as an agency, we've been pretty interested in making sure we're data and insight driven. So having a data and analytics business was just a natural extension