Agency clout without the wallop.

When you think of the word ‘advertising’, often the next word that comes along is ‘agency’. (Probably followed by ‘long’, ‘lunch’ and ‘suit’ but that’s best kept for another day). It’s a common perception – that of a suite of offices packed with designer furniture, pinball machines… wait, maybe that’s just Mad Men.

Make no mistake; a lot of good work comes out of those agencies. On the other hand, a lot of good people come out of them too – some who love the work but who’ve grown tired of the agency life and business model. They have the skills, and the contacts (and most probably the awards) and are more than happy to use them, on a freelance basis… but these people end up scattered all over the place!

This gives rise to tremendous opportunity – if you know where to find it. You need to spend time working out who’s where, who’s good at what – how they best like to work.. and for how much.

Now, enter the realms of the ‘skills network’ – a marketing communications portal for strategic creativity and technical support, all on tap. You might think of it as a ‘virtual agency’. And yes, we’ve spent a couple of years carefully piecing it together, bit by bit, and it’s called: ‘UNDER the RADAR’… and it is!

On each assignment we hand pick people (even specialist companies) from within our network, based on what best suits the task – not the agency billables to cover overheads. With no overheads or account managers of our own, we’re able to bring to the project people who are working for themselves (and the client of course) through a well-orchestrated management process.

This approach doesn’t suit everyone. Those with large production and media-buying requirements will be better off at a full service agency that has the in-house scale to meet their needs. But if your marketing isn’t quite as demanding as a Coca-Cola, Spark or ANZ, our skills network model can work very well indeed. In fact, it opens the door for businesses to access agency-grade services, often for the very first time.

Typically we work for:

• Smaller businesses that occasionally use regional or national advertising channels
• Mid-sized businesses that need expert advice and support, but are unwilling to pay traditional agency fees
• Businesses that need help to operate and find greater cut-through within new digital channels
• Businesses with an in-house marketing team who need help with a substantial project, or access to a specialist creative or technical skill-set
• Anyone else

To find out more about our ‘UNDER the RADAR’ skills network, talk to Rob at Generate Insights.