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 of Next&Co John Vlasakakis.
Vlasakakis, 34, has worked in the digital space now for over 15 years after receiving one of the first e-commerce degrees that were on offer at universities.
He started out by selling items on Ebay before entering the world of SEO, then two years later opened his own shop on the 1st of February 2010.
“There was some intellectual property and some trade secrets that I ended up developing back in 2009/2010 which was the genesis of starting the business with the other co-founder Nick Grinberg.” Vlasakakis told Mediaweek.”
Next&Co has since evolved from being an SEO only agency in its first two years, before moving into other performance media channels and then becoming a full-service performance agency in 2014.
“We make sure that for our clients we can take accountability end-to-end, so if a client gives us a budget and has a certain commercial objective that we can hold accountability end-to-end to actually deliver results.”
Clients
Next&Co’s second and third clients were Promotion Products and Brand House Direct who are both still with the agency. Vlasakakis used their examples as companies that started small but have grown from a staff of two to between 40-50.
“We have scaled those businesses to be 30-40x to where they were 11 years ago when they first started with us. It shows that they are darn loyal customers and we did something really good to make sure that those businesses grew alongside us.”
Next&Co’s client list is now up to 100 clients of different shapes and sizes but primarily made up of nationwide businesses. Recently the agency has won new accounts including Maven Dental, Healthia, and Cannadoc.
Specialisations
When asked about what Next&Co’s specializations are, Vlasakakis specified acquisitions as an area that separates his agency.
“We call ourselves the kings and queens of customer acquisition. If someone has a budget and want to acquire new customers whether that be more leads, more app downloads, more new customers or an increasing share of existing customers in performance media, organic search and conversion rate optimisation we trounce the competition.”
One reason why Vlasakakis is confident in his agency’s results is that Next&Co has built a proprietary media auditing tool, called Prometheus.
Prometheus allows advertisers to find out the efficiency of their digital ad spend across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Bing. Next&Co is also negotiating with TikTok and Snapchat to integrate with the platform. It can be used across any digital publisher with an API (application programming interface), including catch up TV.
Prometheus has been used by more than 300 companies – from SMEs to large multinationals and ASX listed companies with multi-million-dollar advertising budgets – and an analysis has found that almost a third of digital media ad spend across the 300 advertisers is wasted.
“We say to clients In three to six months we can get you an uplift in customers of X because here is how our system and technology is built to identify that.”
IMAA
Vlasakakis described his agency’s membership of the IMAA as a game-changer that was over due.
“It has really elevated the status of our agency over the past couple of months.
“The independent agencies are the lifeblood of the industry. What appealed to us was that there was now an organisation with other liked-minded businesses where we can group together in an environment where we can all help each other grow and support Australia owned and operated businesses that are employing people with profits staying in this country.
“That is one thing that keeps me up at night, you have all these brands who have in their mission statements how big they are on supporting local businesses but they are all with global agencies where these profits are shifted towards France, Japan, New York and god knows where else.
“The IMAA champions to cause behind independents. We tell clients you want to work with us? I am one of the co-founders of the business, your profits are going to help employ more people and help the economy.”