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 director of Media Republic and director for the IMAA, Stephen Fagan.
Fagan has worked in the industry for over 30 years after starting at DDB Needham, he spent almost 20 of those years working for Harold Mitchell, before starting his own business with Matt Kelly.
“That is where I learned about independent media agencies and the true art of media planning and buying. That’s where it gave me the appetite to run my own business, so when Harold sold his business finally to Densu in 2012, that’s when I set up my agency.
“I think during those formative years, particularly working at Mitchell’s, Harold had the best senior media people working within his business so we were able to learn pretty much from the best in the Melbourne market during the ‘90s and the first decade of the 2000s. Harold would pick the eyes out of the Melbourne market in terms of his competitors and was able to bring them across to lead teams in that agency, and that helped make him the biggest in the country by a fair margin.”
Fagan’s business wasn’t always known as Media Republic, originally launching under a different name.
“In the early days we were known as Collaborate Communications, but we morphed into Media Republic a few years later. We specialise today in traditional media planning and buying, but also online and digital planning and buying services in-house.”
Client wins
Despite coming out of a pandemic Media Republic has managed to secure some key wins for the business.
“Recent wins would be Hume Bank, a nice regional banking client, and I can’t disclose the other one which I’d really love to but it’s a bit early days yet.”
Specialisations
When asked what his agencies strengths were, Fagan pointed to media buying both traditionally and digitally.
“I think we’re very experienced TV buyers or traditional media buyers, but I also think we’re playing to our strengths in that digital programmatic and social space as well. Our strength is the ability to bring channel-agnostic, and to deliver or provide our clients with the best solution.
“We can hang our hat on the fact that some of our clients have third party media auditing. When it comes to television buying we’re consistently beating the pool according to mad clarity. So that’s something we can certainly hang our hat on as an independent agency, when we’re beating clients in the holding company pool. “
Being a member of the IMAA?
Fagan described himself as a proud IMAA leader, after being announced earlier this year as one of the group’s new directors.
“We’re trying to grow the agency membership base here in Melbourne to balance out that national profile, but after 30 years within the industry, I’ve got plenty to share and plenty of passion to put back into the industry, and to see it continue to flourish.”
Despite the IMAA making some big announcements and growing its user base, Fagan said the organisation is just getting started.
“The IMAA is quite vocal in its support of the independent agencies, garnering the media support at the same time. So there’s a number of initiatives that we’re undertaking, and Sam’s (Sam Buchanan, IMAA GM) been vocal in the media when it comes to trade credit insurance providing an opportunity for independent agencies to generate some savings through that.
“Also, to become more prominent with marketers, independent agencies are more passionate and agile when it comes to client service. A lot of us have come out of multinational agencies and know what it takes to be able to provide expert advice and levels of service and buying capabilities to these clients, and we can do that almost on a one to one basis as opposed to one too many.”
