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 and CEO of flow, Jimmy Hyett.
The agency has grown an impressive 500% in the last 18 months after an aggressive period of growth during the pandemic.
“At the start of COVID last year we won the pitch for the TPG and Vodafone merger, which brought in the brand Felix,” Hyett told Mediaweek. “And then off the back of that, we picked up another seven or eight health clients through the back end of the year. We won 1800-GOT-JUNK? and at the start of this year, we picked up Coca-Cola Amatil. We have won work wears groups such as King Gee and Hard Yakka. We also won Before You Speak Coffee, Riverina Dairy, and Liquefy as part of Pharmacare.”
This success didn’t come overnight for Hyett, who has worked in the media industry for over 20 years across small and big companies that included PHD and Zenith.
“Five years ago I started flow. I started with the idea of merging the best bits of big agency and the best bits of small and mashing them together. We could really make sure we had that small agency service, but also deliver like a big agency and have the processes and the energy and the tools that a big agency has. We spent the first couple of years really just building the foundation and making sure everything was really buttoned down from a work perspective and a delivery perspective. The last three years we found our personality and what we stood for and started to develop a really strong offering in market.”
Care Pharmaceuticals was flow’s founding client when they started buying the company’s media, two years later they picked up all their creative as well. Shortly after that, they picked up the Sydney International Boat Show. Both founding clients are still with the agency.
From these early days, Hyett said that flow always ran as a lean team before substantial growth in recent years.
“It was just me, and it took a year and a half for me to bring on my first employee which was a wild time because I was doing all media planning, buying, and creative at that stage by myself. What it allowed me to do is set all the processes and how I wanted things to work and to create something from nothing. As we started to bring on staff that obviously opened up opportunities for us as well.
“We bought all of our digital media in house two years ago. That was a really big move for us because that allowed us to really expand and manage the whole media output in house from start to finish. We have a relationship with Omnicom Media Group in terms of how we go about our billing, so that gives us a little bit of the big agency side of things. And we are also connected through an affiliate partnership with Stagwell Group, which is a global holding group that gives us a global footprint. We are basically their media agency, as an affiliate partner in Australia and New Zealand.”
When asked what sets flow apart from other full-service industries, Hyett said that they are the positive impact agency.
“It’s something that we have developed over the last five years. We’ve got six pillars of impact through the business. There are three internal ones which are our people, process and product. There are three external ones, which is the clients, consumers, and community. Under each pillar, there’s a whole suite of things that we do to try and drive the most positive impact in each of those areas. We’ve built out a full planning process, which is all around that positive impact as well. That we’ve built with a collection of strategists and planners, over time, and that came fruition and it’s been really successful for us.”
The IMAA
Hyett sits on the board of the Media Federation of Australia and said that he has grown up with the MFA through most of his career. He is now also a member of the IMAA, joining the organisation six months after its launch. Hyett said that the new group has been great for the industry.
“They’ve been great, we have a little bit of a different story to some of the independents because we had access to a lot of media and reps and key salespeople particularly through OMG. I and most of my staff come from big agencies as well. There’s a lot of connections already there but my role on the MFA board is to represent independent agencies across Australia. The IMAA is doing a great job from what they’ve been able to deliver with media partners as well as total agency independent groups and what they’ve been able to drive has been really impressive. And it’s really starting to come to light now, and particularly there is a lot of independents that will really benefit off the back of that.”