Resolution Digital, the Omnicom-owned digital agency, celebrated its 10th birthday earlier this month. Kate Gamble, the agency’s chief customer officer has been with the shop the entire time and told B&T how it and the market have changed dramatically since 2013.
“We originally started out as Bruce Clay Australia,” said Gamble.
“That was a business that Des Odell [current Resolution Digital CEO] started with Jeremy Bolt. I joined them about nine months in. For four or five months, it was just the three of us kicking around in this tiny little office above Wynyard Station. I remember when we won CareerOne and it was the first big client, we thought ‘Oh my god, this is going to be a big deal!’”
From there, the agency doubled in size annually for the next four years. At the time, Bruce Clay had a narrower business focus than Resolution does now and was working on building a name for itself as a 100 per cent white hat search agency. That might sound slightly unspectacular these days but, as Gamble explained, the internet has changed a lot in the last decade.
“There weren’t a huge amount of organic marketing businesses out there. Whereas now, there are so many and a lot of different types of agencies do organic marketing as well,” she said.
“Back in those days, it was a bit of a Wild West! I mean, Yahoo’s search engine still had market share, so we’re talking about a long time ago. In those early days, there were lots of ways to get rankings. Some of those were through more shady tactics — buying links and white text on white backgrounds which made white hat businesses look bad”
In 2013, Omnicom acquired Bruce Clay and integrated it into its digital media offering, re-branding Bruce Clay as Resolution Digital.
“We had a few interested parties at the time but we really liked the culture at Omnicom which was a big thing for us. Des and Jeremy had come from a professional services background – suits, collared shirts and quite formal, quite different to an agency environment,” said Gamble.
“Then we came to the Omnicom offices and everyone was very relaxed, friendly, open and warm”.
Bruce Clay merged with Resolution when it joined Omnicom which, despite being a global business operating in 58 markets, only had around 40 people in Australia. This gave the business access to even better clients but also resources and technology to improve its offering and the support to try new things.
“The benefits of working at Omnicom for me are about having lots of really amazing people and technology. It is one of the biggest media agencies in the world and that comes with a huge amount of data that I’m very interested in and the resources and technology to be able to manage and enhance the detail of that data,” she explained.
The team is currently working on a project called Pathways, designed to bring all customer data from across every stage of the digital user journey into one area to understand and find meaning that might be missed from within a walled garden.
While digital marketing might have been a Wild West in 2013, nowadays the market is more mature. Google has established a level of dominance in search almost unprecedented in business history, for example, and many businesses even have their own in-house SEO teams. However, while maturity has brought a level of predictability to the market, the pace of innovation has never been quicker.
“Every day is a school day,” said Gamble, “I’ve never gotten bored.
“Part of it is the incredible resources that the tech platforms have put into AI and machine learning and we’re working with those companies every day. I was chatting to one of the guys in our team and he explained we used to need 60 hours for a piece of keyword research work. Next week, we’re going to an event and we’ve got five mini pitches to present and prepare for. So, new keyword research for five companies in four days — I’d have needed a lot of resources to do it. But now, you’re using a few Python scripts, APIs and AI and we can pull this together in two days. It’s incredible”.
But that pace of change is a fundamental part of Resolution Digital’s strategy — “building the agency of the future”.
“It’s not going to be what we know, as it is with agencies today. The amount of technology that is available to us and the data available to us mean that if you’re not moving at pace to adapt to those environments, you’re going to be very quickly left behind. As a business, we have to leverage AI, leverage automation. It’s not going to be possible for us to stay competitive for our clients if we don’t” said Gamble.
For Gamble, being able to move at pace with clients relies on trust and, with a decade under its belt, Resolution Digital has the experience necessary to lead its clients into this brave new world.