Having taken the helm of Spark Foundry Australia last December, CEO Matt Turl has quietly gone about helping the business grow and keeping clients and staff happy. He sat down with B&T to explain by Spark Foundry’s three-pronged market proposition is resonating with clients and staff alike.
Spark Foundry has increased the billings it handles by 24.5 per cent to north of $450 million – which is a strong performance in a market of largely flat growth.
The agency has scored market-leading staff retention scores in a recent survey and been able to reward dozens of its employees due to the rapid growth.
Spark Foundry Australia CEO Matt Turl said the agency has consistently grown in the past 18 months and puts this down the agency’s market proposition, which is based on three pillars.
The first is that clients need certainty on their media investment by measuring the return on a key business metric, not media metrics.
The second part is that Spark Foundry tries to strike the right balance between brand and performance but doesn’t view it on those terms. They look at the helping brands connect with the audience that is going to buy their product today and the audience that will buy their product tomorrow, driving lower funnel activity and building the memory structures for future purchase opportunities. Turl said that having the ability to control these two pieces is critical.
The third part is about creativity in channel optimisation in an era where brands need to do much more than run ads that interrupt a viewer’s experience.
“In order to make those things happen, it’s our belief that you have to have all of the disciplines that service those outputs under one roof,” he said.
“So Spark does all those things, all the performance marketing, channels, analytics, offline activation, planning, strategy, technology, SEO, we do it all. When we sit down with a client in a pitch situation, we can build them a super tailored model.
“Our proposition is predicated on the depth of discipline expertise that we have. So we have more than 80 digital specialists, we have a team of 25 analysts, we think that’s probably the biggest in-house agency team in the country.”
Turl says that because of the way Spark Foundry and Publicis Groupe operates, with a single P&L across the ANZ group, “it eliminates a significant piece of friction that our competitors have to deal with – who gets the money”.
“If you put someone in a silo, they are inclined to stay in their silos and less inclined to create linkages to the folks who work alongside them because they’re not engaged in the same delivery outcomes,” Turl said. “You could try and bring a number of agencies together but if you don’t remove that singular barrier around the way that the money flows, I’m not sure you’re ever going to get there.”
The agency’s recent success indicates that clients are leaning into Spark Foundry’s modus operandi.
Turl said the agency has had a pitch win rate of 70 per cent in the past 18 months and several of its clients have been with the agency for 10 years or more.
Its clients include Ancestry, Arnott’s, HCF, Hello Fresh, Macquarie Uni, Oroton, Peters, Toyota Motor Corporation and the Westpac Banking Group.
Spark Foundry scored top marks for staff retention in Sydney and Melbourne in the latest Media-i survey in May. According to the survey, the agencies staff are the least likely to leave in the next six months, and in the past year Spark has dished out promotions to 51 staff.
Driving diversity
Turl was promoted to Spark Foundry Australia CEO last December while at a time previous boss Imogen Hewitt take up leadership of Spark Foundry ANZ. Hewitt was also given a group role as chief media officer for Publicis Groupe, and takes on more of a regional focus.
A 10-year veteran of Spark Foundry and its predecessor agencies, Blue 449 and Match Media, Turl is responsible for the day-to-day operations of Spark’s Australian business.
The pair are both advocates of diversity; women represent eight of its 12-member senior leadership team and 27 per cent of its workforce speak a language other than English at home. Turl believes the industry still has a ‘Caucasian feel’, and is not as diverse as it needs to be to reflect the needs of clients.
Spark also offers staff flexible working arrangements, such as ‘Work Your World’, which allows employees to live and work abroad for six weeks each year. This allows expats to spend more time with their families abroad. The agency has also rolled out a program to help new mums and dads return to the workplace after parental leave.
Aside from mandated Mondays – a global directive handed down across Publicis Groupe – Spark operates a flexible workplace but is still able to attract an average of 60 per cent of its workforce into the office.
A ‘heartbreaking’ time
There are two issues that are top of mind of Spark Foundry’s clients: inflation and a stagnant economy, and preparing for the depreciation of third party cookies and signal loss.
Turl spoke to B&T just before Google announced it was backflipping on a commitment to deprecate cookies across its Chrome browser, but helping clients navigate signal loss is an issue that sill surely prevails.
In terms of the economy and advertising market, the Spark Foundry leader believes the advertising market would do well to keep ad spend flat this year before “neutral to positive” in 2025.
“The view across the second half of this year is probably still very much sitting on neutral at the moment and only to a few more data points. I mean, SMI tells us the advertising market is back 2 per cent year-on-year, which is only a couple of significant swings in a couple of big spending categories,” he said.
“The economy is at a point where there is something of a pressure cooker and I think many businesses have over the last 18 months been able to increase their pricing and defend their profitability, and inflation has pushed on as a result.
“We’re now at a point where the economy will not bear further increases in pricing and most businesses are therefore looking for efficiencies.”
For the media, Turl admits that it has been “quite heartbreaking” watching rounds of redundancies at the major media companies in recent months, including “folks we have worked with for two decades”, but believes there has been an air of inevitability about ongoing shifts in ad spend towards digital media platforms that are “good at proving that they work”.
“The challenge has been the ability of other channels to match that level of certainty in outcome, and to better connect themselves to that outcome,” Turl added.
“It is unlikely we’ll ever get to a single industry funded piece of measurement. There are just too many conflicted parties who hold chunks of valuable data that they’re simply not going to be prepared to share. Our job is to help our clients navigate through that and unpick some of that complexity.”