How to Launch a New Agency by Using Fancy Buzzwords

Every now and then, we hear noise in our industry about a new agency launching and making bold claims of being a new breed.

Experienced founders conjure up some clever positioning that promises clients that they’ll do things differently, usually underpinned by a technology trend or something negative happening in our industry that they can rally against.

In 2018, we saw hundreds of new players emerge, espousing big words such as “blockchain”, “artificial intelligence” and “transparency”, among other buzzwords, shaping their own brand and core to their offerings. Surely, marketers know better. After all, we are often on the hook for inventing such terms for the purpose of building buzz with something different. Yet, it’s what lies underneath the buzz that what will determine long-term success. As they say, talk is cheap.

So, with buzz in mind and to maintain this industry tradition, I’m excited to reveal the buzzwords that Podean has been founded upon.

“Marketplace Marketing”

We are purpose-built and designed to help brands navigate and capture opportunity within the consumer marketplaces of now and in the future. As seasoned digital leaders and brand marketing professionals, we are perfectly positioned to help clients navigate the complexity of today’s media, data and technology marketplaces. Never before have marketers had access to such an array of on-demand infrastructure, audience data and infinite inventory, giving brands the ability to scale experiences and capture attention at a level you would only have dreamt of a few years ago.

It is also important to acknowledge that media, data and talent are now sourced and engaged with through marketplaces. Whether it’s buying media programmatically or securing the best specialists from the cloud, marketing service providers are now operating in a radically different environment compared to a few years ago. Advertising and marketing agencies must quickly adapt their business models to be successful in these marketplaces, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Amazon Agency

Amazon is a PR machine, and it is hard to not go a day without seeing an announcement of some sort sending shockwaves throughout our news feed. It is currently the most influential force on consumerism and continues to disrupt industry after industry, with its known goal of making our lives easier along the way.

While aligning Podean to Amazon to simply elicit some buzz would be a useful launch tactic, we are going long on Amazon and its potential impact on both retail and culture. Amazon is now the dominant interconnected consumer ecosystem, but there is still a colossal opportunity that is yet to be captured by marketers. The paradigm shift that is now essential for brands to adopt is that Amazon is not just a platform to sell products and place advertising dollars; it is an entire ecosystem for building brands while still driving positive commercial outcomes. How quickly brands embrace this mindset will likely determine their success on Amazon and other marketplaces in the future.

On the topic of alignment, I am also proud to admit that Podean’s approach to business and our core values align very closely to Amazon’s Leadership Principles. It has been suggested that these principles have been key to the company’s incredible success, being loyally adopted and demonstrated in every way possible across the organization. We aren’t duplicating these word for word, but those who know us will agree that most of these principles reflect both who I am and those I employ.

Brand Performance

Traditionally, we have seen brand and performance media strategies, budgets, divisions/teams and agencies siloed, with minimal integration leading to inefficiency and Return on Investment (“ROI”) that is far from optimized. Indeed, big agency groups have separate teams and many clients use completely separate agencies.

Podean is pioneering a new marketing approach that can only be executed by adopting a holistic Marketplace Marketing strategy across the Amazon ecosystem. We are calling this Brand Performance. Our belief is that brand marketing investment should be fully accountable to sales and Amazon is of the same belief. No other walled gardens, publishers or ad networks can deliver a Brand Performance solution without the injection of dubious third party measurement and attribution. Driving performance isn’t just about running product or display ads – it’s about holistic consumer engagement across all touchpoints. Importantly, this extends beyond advertising and into content creation and optimization, logistics, demand forecasting and more.

Cloud Agency

For several years I’ve had a vision of an agency that was based in the cloud, expertly utilizing technology to enable talented and experienced specialists to seamlessly collaborate.

My belief is that empowering flexible individuals that may be geographically separated will deliver exceptional solutions for clients. It also means our clients will have fully-staffed teams of experts rather than overpaid, under-equipped and stressed employees who are not motivated to give their all for their clients.

Podean is a cloud agency, with our global headquarters down the road from Amazon HQ2 in New York and our team of experts working flexibly and remotely wherever they desire, allowing us to attract and retain the best marketing talent in the marketplace. I’m extremely proud of the team we’ve assembled – an unparalleled Marketplace Marketing force consisting of strategy, data, media, creative and innovation gurus.

The Pose

If you’re launching a creative agency, you need to be photographed in black and white, wearing a black t-shirt and looking into the distance like you were randomly caught in front of that perfectly graffitied wall. It’s always a solo shot – they like the focused attention.

When launching a media agency, put the new starter in the middle, but be sure to include any other bosses who haven’t had any coverage lately and who need to maintain a profile of sorts.

And if it’s a digital agency then you must be photographed while laughing; laughing like you’ve just heard the funniest thing in the world. You must be on a long leather sofa, ideally with a dog in the foreground and an abundance of people just chatting in the background.

As we’re a blend of the above, here I am:

Mark Power – Podean Founder & CEO

Podean

This is a buzzword that you will always remember after reading this post, but what is the meaning behind it? Pronounced ‘poh-dee-un’, our own buzzword can be linked back to mean “the opposite” and it is a concept that is deep-seated in who we are.

We are big believers that challenging convention, doing things differently and continually adapting to change around you is how brands are built and how companies achieve greatness over the long term. But how many of us can say we live and breathe a similar ethos? While there is no doubt that the marketing landscape is as complex as ever and tough to navigate, can we all look each other in the eye and say that we are constantly pushing our professional boundaries?

At Podean, we’ll be challenging our clients, partners and each other in many positive ways each and every day. We’ve learned a lot from our time at the big agencies working on the world’s biggest brands. We know what clients want and what they don’t – and that includes trust, reliability, exceptional skill and transparency. You’ll never find those words on the walls of the large agencies, but they’re on ours.

So there you have it folks, a few buzzwords to announce the dawn, a new breed, a future era and the next generation of agency.

Podean – the marketplace marketing agency.

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