For 15 years, Tonic The Agency has quietly shaped the success of brands such as LG, Delonghi and Sonic Healthcare building long-term partnerships while flying under the radar. Ahead of the agency’s newly launched brand refresh, B&T sat down with John Epta, the agency’s co-founder, to pull back the curtain on his operation.
B&T: Why is now the right time for a brand refresh?
John Epta: We’re moving our office from Pyrmont to Surry Hills and have just done a fit-out in the new space, so everything feels fresh. We thought it was a good time to look at refreshing the brand!
The irony is we’ve been doing this for a long time, but we’ve never really marketed ourselves and put ourselves out there as an agency. All the work we get is organic. We thought this could be a good opportunity to showcase our distinctiveness as an agency, and we thought it’s about time to share that with the industry. Some people might know us, and some people don’t.
By putting ourselves out there, the expectation is for us to try and acquire new business. Not that we can’t rely on organic clients, but when you market yourself and do what we constantly preach, you want to yield the right results.
We’re an interesting business in terms of the cohort we want to market ourselves to, it’s not just for instance, working with CMOs, CEOs, and marketing managers. In our case it’s all that, plus chief technology officers for something like a complex software build. So we’re more than a traditional marketing and comms agency, and I think that’s important to put out there. We’re almost a hybrid between a marketing full-service agency and a software development house.
B&T: Has that hybrid model been the focus from the very beginning?
JE: Yeah, it has always been the case for us. We have deep conversations with someone who wants to build a cloud-based software systems all the way through to a marketer who wants to sell TVs. We’re almost like a jack of all trades, with capabilities across all these areas.
From day one, it’s worked to our advantage, and it’s meant we’ve always been busy. We’ve never needed to go out and market ourselves. Doing that now, though, I think it’s good for staff and the business as a whole.
B&T: You have worked on many iconic brands and built strong client relationships. Can you talk me through the secret to client longevity?
JE: I think it’s simple, to be honest. It’s having true integrity and providing exceptional value.
Integrity for me is picking up work you know you’re going to be able to deliver on. Don’t say yes to a project for the sake of banking it and then not being able to do it. We want to have open, transparent conversations with clients and be honest about what we can do and tell them that. That allows us to build deep relationships with clients.
Second one is value; you can’t survive in this market without exceptional value. Value comes in different ways. Price point is one thing and being flexible with that. At the moment, we’re getting a lot of agencies using offshore labour for work. So, how can you remain competitive with a local headcount? Ultimately, it comes down to value. It could be going above and beyond. You could quote something for a certain amount of head hours, but you end up doing more. It could be a competitive hourly rate. Clients want to buy on value and I think the market is getting pressed more and more and clients are looking at value.
B&T: How has the agency been able to blend creative thinking with technology like AI to drive commercial results?
JE: I think it comes down to the versatility of our service offering. I can jump on a government tender site, for example, and I can see a tender for a marcom body of work or for a complex software development, and we can apply for both.
For one of our clients, we invented a compliance product that helped them with their marketing compliance. So, we embedded technology that’s helping them improve efficiency across all the work they do.
Everyone talks about AI and to be honest, it’s been around for a long time. I studied it in the 90s, but it’s only now that it’s becoming embedded in people’s daily lives and in organisations. For us, going forward, we’re using technology to make us more efficient and streamline our agency and pass that onto our clients to give them more time for creative thinking. If you can become more efficient through it, then ultimately it’s going to provide more value for your client.
There’s lots of things that AI can potentially impact, not just us but also our clients. As we become more confident and capable with using it, we want to look at how it can improve our clients’ business. It means that you become even more hybrid, and I think that’s where the market is heading.
B&T: How should agencies be evolving with the shift in marcom and AI binding together and is there an incentive or pressure for agencies to build that capability?
JE: I think they do. At the moment, you’ve got the traditional model, with very siloed agencies and boutique agencies. I think the landscape is going to always need those agencies to an extent. If you’re solely a branding agency, that’s great when there’s a lot of branding work, but the market can dry up at times. It’s tough to exist as a siloed agency.
Personally, I think a lot of agencies and what they’re offering is beginning to morph. I do think AI is going to have an effect on that. For example, how is it going to affect search, SEO, media buyers, SEO agencies? These are traditional business models and all of a sudden, if AI affects the way search is going to be performed, it means these agencies are going to have to morph into something else or pick up additional services to exist.
A good full-service agency to me should be exposing itself to technology like AI. You’d be crazy not to! It’s very important for agencies, and especially full-service ones, to try and understand and leverage technology in their agencies and stay relevant. If you don’t, clients are going to be coming to you with things they’ve seen or heard and you’ll be behind the eight-ball.
B&T: Is there a need to source new talent to build that capability or can you build that within the agency?
JE: For us, we’re trying to nurture the talent we already have. We have a lot of great senior thinkers and a lot of designers who already dabble in digital. With a lot of AI products out there, you can quite easily build and develop code, so if you look back 10 years ago, a designer was purely a designer. But now, a lot more designers are cutting over to higher-level tech. AI is letting that happen even more easily.
With our programmers and our technical staff, we’ve asked them to start exploring AI under the bonnet. We frequently run sessions within the agency to look at use cases where AI can be applied.
So, I think if you can nurture it within your current talent pool, that’s the way to go. At some points, customers might engage third party experts and consultants. For instance, in Silicon Valley a role that’s popped up are query analysts. I think that’s ultimately where it’s going to go.
B&T: What are the next steps for the agency with the new brand refresh?
JE: The opportunity and time is right to expand our portfolio. We love all our clients, but it wouldn’t hurt to pick up more! The reality is, we can offer them a lot. We’re ultimately a solutions agency, and a lot of clients come up with a commercial objective or bring us a problem and we come up with a solution to help them with that.
We haven’t been aggressively marketing ourselves, now we’re going to start looking at executing marketing activities.
We’ve got that versatility for clients to come to us with problems and build solutions together. Historically, this wouldn’t have been the case, but now, you’ve kind of got to do everything.
B&T: What advice do you have for upcoming marketers?
JE: Spending time to understand your audience in a deep way; their buying behaviour, how they digest content, where they go online. Then it’s effectively marketing for results. The accolades and awards, all that comes after you’ve gotten results.
Historically, we’ve been engaged by brands that have been focused on accolades and awards. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but the reality is results have to come first.
When we talk about marcom, a marketer might look at a campaign and say that’s clever, but did it actually yield the results that was needed? We might award occasionally on awesome creative that looks great and resonated with us as marketers, but ultimately, what were those results?
It’s also about ensuring that work aligns with the target audience. If you’ve got a beer-drinking audience and you try to market them on a champagne budget, there’s a disconnect there.
Tonic The Agency’s brand refresh has gone live to market today.
