23
2018
100% remote in GA / FL
Paid Media Strategy, Planning & Buying
24
Weirdo
Prioritizing Individual Client Needs
We do not engage in preferred media partnerships nor do we participate in principal-based buying. We focus every dollar on the holistic impact to the brand’s business and treat every client the same, regardless of their spend. A $500K plan is just as important to us as a $10MM media plan. With no silos, a dedicated team works on your business from start to finish, learning the ins and outs of your specific needs. Each team is put together based on the client’s needs rather than having individual team specialties. We push our team to challenge the status quo - not just relying on the same media plan or a set it and forget it approach. We encourage the team to show thoughts and insight outside of just planning season, even if budgets may not support.
Ensuring Full Transparency
We are big fans of WIP decks and showing thinking behind the thought, not just an end product. We don’t agree in waiting til every detail is baked out, because it may be too late. To ensure everyone is nodding their head, benchmarks are set in advance and measurement is agreed upon in the initial media recommendation, not after the plan goes live, so we know if something was successful. And similar to prioritizing performance over spend, we ensure clients own their data and accounts, while having full pricing transparency into DSP and technology fees, so they have a full view of working vs. non-working media. We don’t test just to jump on the bandwagon and are naturally skeptical and opinionated -- without a fear to push back or ask questions.
Putting People First
This goes for both internally and eternally. Everyone is expected to be treated with respect and as a human. Media partners are partners in this with us -- not just an email that we send on a need-only basis. We have a policy in place to get back to every single media partner request within 24 hours -- they are working hard to provide for their families just as we are for our own. The same goes for our team -- while we’re in the service industry, if there is a request that isn’t reasonable or doesn’t allow for enough time, we encourage employees to say no and showcase the why behind our response.
Constant Co-Founder Access
Monthly one-on-ones between senior client leadership and agency leadership to talk about anything with a co-founder. We come with relevant media landscape updates, while clients bring long-term business plans and ask for perspective on business. Similarly, no dumb questions sessions every week with co-founders for all employees to come and ask any questions they have -- no judgement. Every employee has a bi-monthly one-on-one to chat through anything they’d like with the two co-founders: some use it for personal, some use it for work, others just like to gossip. Junior employees are eligible for CEO for a Day, where they shadow one of the co-founders for the day, participating in all meetings to show what goes on behind the scenes. Every project is assigned to one co-founder. This means, at least one founder will be present in every milestone meeting and oversee any strategic work before it goes out the door.
Mental Health Matters
It’s more challenging than ever to balance work, the changing environment around us and personal lives. New employees receive their first week fully paid off to alleviate financial concerns. When promoted, employees receive a $750 credit for a hotel stay to provide R&R. We have a neuroscientist that has bi-annual meetings with each employee to discuss ways to alleviate workplace stress. We pay for a mental health app subscription for all employees, while new parents receive 12 fully paid weeks of paid time off to enjoy bonding with their little one. All employees, regardless of level, receive fully paid healthcare, vision and dental benefits.
Full Business Insight
It’s important for our employees to understand the macro and micro factors that influence our business. Since part of their pay is through a profit-sharing program, we make sure they are always in the loop. Every Monday we take the team through new business -- what’s going on, where we’re at in the process, the business potential. We want everyone to act like an owner, so we encourage treating them like an owner. During our bi-annual team gatherings, they get updates on company goals and how we’re tracking towards them, so they can hold leadership accountable -- and we share everything, both good and bad.
Speed to Market
By having teams dedicated to each piece of business, we’ve been able to quickly take over an account -- sometimes onboarding and being live within two weeks, rather than being held to a strict onboarding schedule. In doing so, we’re able to make optimizations and get our suggested changes live quicker -- resulting in increased performance for brands we’ve worked on. For one brand, we have been working less than four months on their business, but have seen conversion rate increase by 30%, while in the first quarter working on another brand, their media mix modeling company told them it was clear a new media agency had taken over. When a piece of business was impacted by return to work policies, they asked our team to take over portions of their business as a temporary solution while they hire.
Flexible Relationships
With our long-standing tenure with most of our clients, we’re able to flex up and down within our SOW based on current needs -- a process that would typically take months at a larger agency. Both co-founders have monthly calls with the key client leadership that has created a safe space to talk about more sensitive issues and flex quicker than we were previously able to. Since we only need agreement from the two co-founders and the team working on the core business, this allows us to increase our organic growth rate more quickly than other agencies and has led to numerous clients awarding us new pieces of business or portions of the business we previously did not handle to help alleviate any issues clients are having with other agencies.
David became Jessica's intern at CP+B, marking the beginning of their professional relationship. Nearly a decade later, in December 2018, after years of collaboration and freelancing, we took the leap to co-found our own agency, hunterblu media, in just four days. With a background across both creative-led and media-led shops, we hated the red tape that came through holding companies and decided to take the perks we loved, while getting rid of all the bureaucracy.
Two come to mind: convincing our first employees (well, really their parents) to leave a real job to come work for a start up agency with just two co-founders and landing our first larger AOR client.
We have always been a little bit of control freaks. So we wanted to do everything ourselves as long as we could before giving up some of the control -- and we had to make sure we had the resources to do so. We refused to hire a single employee until we could pay ourselves and that employee for a full year, if we lost every client the day they were hired. So we had some time to build things up, but also were turned down multiple times prior to our first employee starting. Ultimately, we had to place a gamble on someone that a friend recommended -- who was just looking to start getting into media, so we needed to train the employee on everything they needed to know. We took it head on and started to train all employees ourselves in the beginning, until we could bring on talent that came from other media agencies to handle training.
Similarly, in the beginning, we took anything and everything people threw our way. We were in survival mode, so we worked on 32 clients in our first year of operations and 39 our second. As we evolved, we knew we needed to work on larger accounts to be able to sustain a core team, so we did a good ol’ fashioned agency road show -- and started to partner with creative shops as an extension of their team initially, followed by being pitched as their preferred media partner. This led to the beginning of several creative agency partnerships that still exist to this day, including our friends at Erich & Kallman and Fortnight Collective.
We are seeing the hold co model crumble around us -- trades are starting to talk more about indie success, and we’re all here celebrating one another. Moving forward, we see the potential for indies to become in-house agencies at brands, operating within their walls and truly becoming an extension of their team -- unlocking less project-based work and longer-term relationships that don’t just span creative or media, but full strategy across all facets of the business and reporting into the brand’s CMO. While we don’t want to be a part of the in-office, we like to think through the open dialogue, not being shy and our transparency with brand partners, that we’re already offering some of that support for longer-term partnerships built on mutual respect and trust.
