Australia’s largest independent media agency broke several personal bests in 2023. The agency hired 79 staff, in part due to opening a new Brisbane office after winning media duties for sports betting group Entain the year prior.

This helped Atomic 212°’s roster swell beyond 150 team members for the first time in its history.

Its client book also grew, with 10 new accounts, including Craveable Brands – the group that consists of Red Rooster Oporto and Chicken Treat. The agency’s most notable victory was retaining and expanding its remit with the BMW Group to also include New Zealand, while other retentions (Spirit of Tasmania, NT Government and Tourism NT) added some shine to a year in which Atomic 212° retained 90 per cent of its client roster.

Atomic 212° said it grew billings by a respectable 17.2 per cent to $265 million. This places Atomic on the cusp of the top 10 largest media shops by billings, according to COMvergence.

Perhaps more importantly, Atomic’s revenue growth soared by 23 per cent with atomic bomb-sized lifts in its profit. 

These are personal best figures for the agency set up by Barry O’Brien as a performance media buying business in 2007. 

Today, captain Claire Fenner presides over an agency culture that is universally liked by its employees, promotes heavily from within, is committed to development and performance through its Academy 212 program, and has generous parental leave policies and flexible working arrangements.  

It’s a culture that is built on working smarter – not necessarily longer – rolling out several industry innovations to power performance. These include the research platform SONAR, a new proprietary planning tool that takes data points from media mix modelling ROI, attention, audience reach, indexation and usage and cost to work out the optimal media mix. The business has set up its own in-house MMM that uses machine learning to forecast future sales.

It has also found a solution to eliminate invalid (bot) traffic and automate laborious manual processes so employees can focus on the higher value work.

A highlight of the year was its Tourism NT “Memorable Media Moments”, where media executions showcasing the Northern Territory hijacked events such as Vivid.

To cap it off, Atomic 212° picked up a huge accolade in winning Campaign’s Global Independent Media Agency of the Year.