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 Tom and Joe Frazer who are the co-founders and managing partners of Half Dome alongside Will Harms.
Half Dome has had a busy year with several key announcements, the first being the acquisition of independent media agency Consumedia to create a full-service media agency, working with enterprise level clients across Australia. It was a development that the pair said was a long time coming.
TF: “For us, it’s been about bringing to life our vision of being a full-service media agency, but also making media smarter. When we try and think about bringing brand and technology together, not having offline media capabilities didn’t allow us to bring our vision to life. We identified Consumedia and have been working with them for some time on a number of different clients. It was just a bit of a match made in heaven, it’s been a really easy transition. Michael Harms has come on in a board position at Half Dome and we’re really appreciative for his mentorship and support in an ongoing nature. So it’s, it’s been a really positive mood for Half Dome and allowed us to turbocharge our growth and aspirations.”
Another recent announcement was that Half Dome became the first independent media agency to receive the Gold Mental Health First Aid Skilled Workplace, with more than 80% of its employees now trained in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA).
TF: “Two or three years ago we identified that one of our main points of difference that we wanted was our people. Mental health has also been a big focus for us throughout COVID but also from the start of the company as well. There’s a number of different initiatives which we take up at Half Dome with having the gold standard for mental health in the workplace which is something that’s part of our culture and part of our day-to-day. We’ve got a big focus on feedback, vulnerability, being open, talking about where you’re at both professionally and personally, and this is what we think creates a culture in a place where people want to work.”
How Half Dome started
The pair are brothers so joked that they have a long and storied past together, Joe had a background in programmatic trading while Tom came from the corporate finance world.
JF: “Tom was the one that really grabbed it by the horns and said I can probably jump in and run this business and we can really give it a crack. It is almost four years ago to the day now.”
“We’ve been through three or four offices, we’ve grown from the three of us, literally sitting in a two by one metre shared space office. and working on top of a printer to after 18 months we’d grown to 15 people, and a year later, we’re 25 and now we’re going on 32.”
Half Dome clients
While the pair cite a growing list of clients they identified one early signing as integral to the company’s success.
TF: “The first high-level client that we were successful in bringing across was Maurice Blackburn lawyers. We pitched against McCann at the time and a few other different agencies. And that was really the impetus to start creating what has now become a fully-fledged agency targeted towards enterprise-level clients. We have been through a bit of a transition in the types of clients and the way that we operate over the last four years. We’ve built a model in our business now that is targeted towards servicing enterprise-level clients. We think that we can add the most value to those types of clients which is why we structured our business to have deep specialisation across the channels that we operate as opposed to other potential independent agencies our size or smaller that have generalists set up to service SME clients”
The agency has been able to add some other top tier clients alongside Maurice Blackburn in the last 12-18 months with the pair pointing out some key examples.
JF: “About 12 months ago we started working with The Good Guys. We won all digital media, media planning and activation for them. They are now I’d say one of our strongest relationship level clients.
“About two years ago we also started working with a company called Bet Easy which was subsequently acquired by Sportsbet. On the back of that acquisition, we actually managed to transition our relationship with all of the individuals that were at that Bet Easy across to PointsBet. Their marketing team almost just sort of lifted and shifted. We’re able to kind of fast track some of the learnings that we generated for Bet Easy over that period of time.
“Recently, we started working with 28 by Sam Wood, a real high growth fitness app in the Australian market. They’re a super innovative business that I think really plays into our strengths as an agency that is wanting to be fast-moving.”
Half Dome Specialisations
When asked about Half Dome’s specialisations, the brothers said that they are trying to build the smartest paid media agency in Australia.
JF: “To buy paid media really smart, we have some services that sit within our fold that maximise our ability to do that. Like every media agency, at the moment, we’ve got a massive focus on data and analytics. And our bent on that is really building a data and analytics function that can maximise our ability to measure the success of paid media. And bridge the gap between media reporting and business reporting. We can sit in boardrooms and really start connecting the dots between what is usually up there with the biggest expenditure on a P and L, which is paid media spend, and the returns that a business is seeing from that.
“And we’ve also got a creative production arm, which we identified as being an opportunity and a needs gap for some of our existing clients, especially in a digital format. We often say to use creative as an optimization lever to maximise the performance of digital channels. We’re really looking to work with clients that understand that paid media is such a huge expenditure and that there’s a huge opportunity, to drive cost-benefit by doing it smarter by being more efficient, by having really solid plans.”
IMAA
Half Dome has been a member of the IMAA for the last 12 months, with Tom also joining the leadership team six months ago. Both brothers say that they are are massive advocates for independent media agencies as a whole and support the work of the IMAA.
TF: “Some of the initiatives that the IMAA is pushing forward to allow independent media agencies to fight alongside the holding groups is is awesome. The stuff they’re doing around tools, training, insurance and access to people is something that myself and Half Dome are massive advocates for. I think that we’re really starting to, as a collective, push the initiatives that we set out to at the start of the year and started when the organisation kicked off.”
