AdNews' Sydney L!VE Indie-pendence Day unearthed the latest developments, opportunities and challenges for Australia's independent agency landscape in a half-day conference at the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Chris Howatson, founder of Howatson+Company, opened the day with an inspiring presentation about the benefits of saying no.
Ben Lilley, creative chairman of McCann Australia and founder of HERO, then questioned can an agency be both a multinational, independent?
On a panel, Justin Hind, ex-CEO of CHEP Network, Simon Ryan, RyanCap founder, and Justin Drape, Exceptional Alien and a The Monkeys co-founder discussed how economic uncertainty is actually an advantage to independent agencies.
Rebecca Stambanis, Special Group partner and CSO, talked on the importance of gut instinct in the advertising industry.
Virginia Hyland, CEO of Havas Media Group, spoke about scaling and building her own independent agency before selling it to a multinational.
On the marketer panel, Myer’s GM of marketing Gemma Hunter, Tourism Tasmania CMO Lindene Cleary and Uber’s international head of partnership marketing Rebecca Kemp tackled whether agencies should be charging for the time and cost involved in pitching.
Another panel with agency CEO’s - Jack Byrne, Hatched Media CEO, Chris Parker, Awaken CEO, David Phillips, Deloitte Digital’s partner in marketing, data and technology and Dominic Pearman, Pearman Media managing director - discussed how agency acquisitions outway the advantages of traditional recruitment.
To round out the jam-packed day, Pubmatic director of advertising solutions Brittany Lefave, Amobee and Unruly director of growth Lenten Reddy and StackAdapt senior manager of client services Louise Hutley, discussed how the independent agency sector has developed in recent years and where the market is moving next.
Thank you to our supporting partners: AMOBEE/UNRULY , Foxcatcher, PubMatic, StackAdapt. Associate partners: blis, JUSTEGGS, MIQ, Quantcast. And friend of AdNews: IMAA.
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