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 Alfie Lagos, the founder and director of Lexlab.
Lexlab has been in operation since 2018, and follows Lagos’ 15 years in the industry, specialising in digital media implementation, which he describes as the heart of his passion.
“I don’t know if I was dropped on my head as a baby or something, but I really have a passion for digital paid advertising implementation, and building strategies. Having done that both locally in Australia and in the UK as well really made me realise how undervalued the doing part of digital advertising is. Understanding that is one of the largest pain points for agencies and brands, Lexlab was specifically created to focus on supporting teams with a paid digital strategy implementation piece.”
Since the agency’s launch, it has been doubling its revenue year on year after refining its business model to be more specific. This started with Lexlab signing IGA as one of its founding clients.
“We had IGA on as a digital partner doing some media buying to supplement a few of their stores to drive engagement and put bums through the door. That was a really foundational client of ours, we also worked with a couple of agencies. We’re very much a word of mouth business. We don’t actually do any prospecting advertising ourselves, we really lean on word of mouth to drive our business. Outside of IGA, through agency referrals, we got a run-in with some fairly major movie distributors around the country. Clients like Rialto Distribution and Umbrella Entertainment is where we’ve gone recently.”
His identification of the issues around digital advertising implementation is what led Lexlab to create its own digital planning platform.
“We’ve developed our own digital planning platform called Lablogic which uses historical data and results to predict and plan digital strategy. We use that internally at the moment, but we are planning in 2022 to roll that out to be a platform that our clients can use. So they can leverage our data that fuels all the results of our business for themselves. We’ve got a big footprint of agencies that use us as a turnkey solution.
“We know it works because we got the number one box office theatrical release in Australia for two weeks running last year with its predictions. We have a fairly decent client base of movie distributors that use Lexlab for movie releases, both cinema home entertainment and the rest.”
Lagos said that the company’s proposition ultimately boils down to digital implementation and the doing piece of digital advertising.
“There’s a lot of talk around being full service and we tend to complement any existing offline creative agency and we can actually be that piece that bolts on to them. That’s the difference between us and other agencies is that we can actually partner with them to do digital better.”
The IMAA
Lagos is a big fan of the IMAA. He said he initially joined due to the trade credit insurance deal, but feels that Lexlab and the organisation go hand in hand.
“I’ve got huge respect for people who own and run digital agencies. My historical bread and butter have been dealing with agencies, and so Lexlab joining the IMAA is such an alignment of collaborative based values. They are there to help agencies and Lexlab is here to help agencies. We know a lot of the agencies that are already on the list, but we’re really looking forward to working more with some of the other ones.”