The IMAA, the national, not for profit industry association for independent media agencies launched last year.
Since then it has continued to grow its membership base and make a series of big announcements, including its trade credit deal and a number of new media partners.
Mediaweek has been profiling members of the IMAA – previous features can be found here. This week we spoke to Darren McKenzie the CEO of McKenzie Partners.
McKenzie founded the agency in 1999 and has also been a full-service agency since day one, which he said went against the trend at the time.
“Everyone was kind of heading towards the bespoke individual areas where you were either a creative agency or just a media agency. Over time while still being a full-service agency, we transitioned ourselves to spending a fair bit more time focusing on the digital aspects and eventually bringing all digital in house with implementation. So, everything is now in house.
“We were very focused on retail, and we cut our teeth on automotive initially. But then from that we’ve kind of changed and shifted. And we’ve moved into so many different aspects of business. Someone once said to me, if you can handle automated advertising, you can do anything.”
McKenzie Partner’s founding client was Sutton’s Motor Group who is still with the agency to this day over 20 years later. Although McKenzie said that the agency also continue to pick up new clients as well.
“We just picked up NextSense, which is the Royal Institute of the Deaf and Blind. Their campaign will commence this month. In the last probably two months, we’ve probably had 10 new business wins.”
When asked why he thought it was so important that McKenzie Partners was a full-service agency, McKenzie said that because everything changes so quickly agencies need to have their finger on the pulse across all mediums and all platforms.
“When you see one medium coming in or out of the market, you need to be across it. That’s why we class ourselves as one of the most nimble or responsive agencies is that we move with creative and media really quickly.
“From an optimization point of view with digital implementation these days, a lot of people are taking it offshore. I know it’s probably a more expensive exercise to have it in house through our Sydney head office, but it’s paramount for success. Nothing gets lost in translation, and we can move on things really quickly. Account managers and account directors can look over the shoulders of the implementation team and work with them on learnings and optimising accounts. It’s really important the moment because there are so many changes.”
A word that McKenzie likes to reference is nimble, which he says is aided by the backgrounds of the people in his team.
“A lot of our team comes from all kinds of different walks of life. Some have had entrepreneurial backgrounds, so they can understand the business that they’re talking to from an entrepreneurial point of view, not necessarily just a marketing point of view. That cuts us above the rest a lot of the time, we can talk in their language.”
The IMMA
McKenzie Partners is a founding member of the IMAA when it was formed by four agencies during a media junket in Wolgan Valley, with the organisation’s GM Sam Buchanan coming from the agency.
“When Sam was with me at Mackenzie’s, he was fairly heavily involved in the IMAA, to the detriment of McKenzie, to a certain extent because he was so involved in the IMAA. Hence, we just found that there was a need for him just to head that up and he’s the right person for it.”
McKenzie said that the group has done an exceptional job but there is still more room for growth.
“The beauty of it is we can be really responsive. For example, with the Covid lockdowns, we can get independent speakers in to talk to us and educate us as a group, whether it be about financial support or resources or any other element. If you were an individual agent you wouldn’t necessarily invest money into people assisting in those areas in this time. You probably want to be as tight as possible. With the IMMA you get the opportunity because you do it as a collaborative.”
