Dentsu Aegis Network sports and lifestyle marketing agency MKTG's national managing director Matt Connell has revealed plans for the agency to make the move into sports marketing and sponsorship consulting.
The agency, which focuses on lifestyle marketing, sport and, most recently asset management for sporting codes such as football and AFL, is already engaging with clients with a similar service and plans to ramp up its consultancy offering over the next six to 12 months.
"We're already working with one of the biggest FMCG's in that space to help them actually reinvent how they use sport as a really powerful platform that drives commercial results for their business." Connell says.
"I can't name who that brand is just yet, we hope it will be our big foundation to be able to show our credibility in the space of consulting."
Connell says the new service will become a "critical" offering of MKTG, with hopes that the market will be willing to tap into the agency's understanding of the sports marketing landscape.
MKTG's focus will be on using its credibility as a "leader" in sports brand investment, as well as recent deals with the Football Federation of Australia and the acquisition of B2B enterprise software Klip Desk, to provide new opportunities for clients.
"I hope they see the value of the rest of our business in actually executing against that, from delivering live experiences, brand activations, experiential campaigns linked to their investment in sport, through to activating in a stadium," Connell says.
He adds that the plan will then be to drive clients back to the agencies retail offering, which MKTG believe is sometimes overlooked when compared to its sports capabilities.
"We've got one of the most respected and capable retail marketing offerings that can deliver against this end-to-end strategy around how brands leverage their association with sport," Connell says.
"Consulting enables us to unlock that full-service capability for a particular brand."
Connell says the end goal for MKTG is to use the consulting business as a "complete package", allowing the agency to develop a complete marketing strategy for a brand from the ground up.
This will vary from brand to brand but MKTG believe the key challenge to overcome is having clients understand the importance of overlooked assets in a marketing mix, such as in stadium advertising, an area the agency has been investing heavily in.
"We're taking a far more strategic approach in terms of how we represent those assets to brands. It's less of a hard sell, much more about how do these assets play a role in their marketing mix and their wider communication strategy," Connell says.
"If we go back to the very start, if we build out a consulting business, we will start at the core of the problem and help brands understand what they should do and how they should do it.
"Through the capability we have in live and retail, the plan is to become a 'one stop destination' to be brands' core sponsorship or activation partner, for whatever they're doing across sport and entertainment or any sort of lifestyle marketing."
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