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 the founder of Adholics, Jake O’Donnell.
At 22, O’Donnell is the youngest member of the IMAA and is one the youngest agency owners in Australia, he said his journey started a 15 when working in the fast food industry.
“I was working as a manager at McDonald’s, and one of the regular customers was a publishing company owner and we got talking. When I was 15, he recommended I give sales a shot and he got me selling advertising. I worked my way up and eventually went to News Corp, and was selling advertising for the Qantas Magazine company director and various different publishing titles, and digital stuff. I then left there and went overseas, and travelled the world for 12 months.”
O’Donnell said that the decision to launch Adholics was made in March of last year, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning to come into full affect.
“I thought it was a great idea to create a media buying agency that was purely focused on saving clients money. I created a pretty cool model that we use where we take a 50% commission of the money that we save the client. We don’t charge any agency commission or any agency fees. If we can’t save the client money, we don’t make any. We’ve got some pretty large ASX listed companies and we’ve also got smaller brands. And we’re rapidly growing and have a team of five now.”
The agency’s launch was about as bare bones as they come with just $50,000 in billings in its first three months, but it has experienced significant growth since then, now making up to $700,000 a month.
“We launched with no clients. We just had a name, a website and an agency deck and an offering. I went and approached all my previous contacts that I had been selling advertising to and saying I know you’re paying x amount and we’ll be able to get it for x and it’s going to cost you nothing. You’re going to save money and we will manage it and save you time.
“One of those companies is a major insurance brand in Australia listed on the ASX and they are spending in the millions. We’ve expanded from there. We’ve got political clients. We have done big IT brands. We have also done smaller stuff along the way like home builders and bits and pieces.”
O’Donnell said that one key to Adholic’s success is the need to be flexible with vendors as well as with clients.
“I have got that philosophy that you treat the media owners with as much respect as you show your clients. Because at the end of the day, we’ve only been able to achieve such good growth from the recommendations of media owners. We’ve now got a portfolio of 12 actively spending clients, spending on a monthly basis. We launched exclusively as media buying only, but this particular model gets us a foot in the door. And from there we expand our offering to media planning, and then onto digital and programmatic and whatnot. So we’re really putting a very key focus on our digital offering.”
Another key component to the Adholics model is an emphasis on making business easy with less red tape than the average agency.
“Our biggest motto is we just make it easy to do business with us. There is no contracts, there’s no agency agreements, there’s nothing. Our clients are not obligated to spend with us and they’re not obligated to not spend with us either.
“It’s just a very simple offering. We spent a significant amount of money building a custom, media management software tool. We offer our clients a client portal. Even the tier one agencies do everything off Google spreadsheets. But what we’ve done is turn that Google Spreadsheet into an interactive client portal where the clients log in and can track their spend and they can track performance, they can track everything in one convenient pool and it cost them nothing.”
Adholics: IMAA member
O’Donnell said that the main draw to join the IMAA was initially the trade credit insurance scheme set up by the organisation, but since joining he has enjoyed the other benefits of the group.
“Its good to see that peer to peer advice. Sure there’s some commercial competitiveness in there. But I’m also confident that if I had a unique issue, whether it’s a legal issue or an issue with whatever that I could reach out to some of those members and aks what would you do? We’ve been in a few instances where we’ve almost been scammed out of money with financial fraud and other members have warned us about it so we can be careful.”
