Tumbleturn Media boss Jen Davidson has pulled together a cross-discipline alliance in a bid to solve some of the key challenges marketers and agencies face – and reduce the number of needless, often rudderless, pitches.

The Marketing Advisory Suite, per Davidson and business partner Dan Johns, is in no way intended to replace agencies. 

“It’s about making agencies’ lives easier by improving marketer capability so that they become more effective clients” said Johns. “It’s not about implementation [i.e. providing overlapping services]. We’re strongly focused on the areas that will have major benefits for agencies – clearer briefs, improved working relations.”

CMO pressure cooker

While Tumbleturn is viewed by some in market as a pitch consultancy, Davidson said the firm’s remit is broader and increasingly focused on improving operating models as marketer remits expand rapidly despite static headcounts and resource.

Even when a pitch is required, defining structures and outcomes before selecting agencies is now “potentially 40-50 per cent” of the entire pitch process, she told Mi3 earlier this year. “Where we have been brought in to do a pitch, at least one in four doesn’t actually ever get to that point, because what [many marketers] actually need to do is optimise how they work,” said Davidson. A new agency won’t solve underlying issues.

“The recurring issue we are seeing is that CMOs are no longer coming through the traditional ranks with traditional marketing skillsets. They are coming into marketing from different areas, because they now have to bring so much diverse capability to the job. But you can’t be an expert in everything,” per Davidson.

“The whole definition of the role has changed,” added Johns, citing the shift to chief growth and chief customer officers. “There’s more responsibility, more pressure to deliver business results, and more often than not, no more resource. So that is the catalyst: How to navigate that shifting dynamic.”

“So the advisory in no way replaces agencies,” Davidson reiterated. “It just helps their clients get better across crucial areas.”

Hence bringing together the consulting collective. “Every one of these areas has come from a brand marketer’s request. ‘Do you know someone who can do this?’” per Davidson. She said the Advisory, which Tumbleturn will project manage with services delivered independently by each consultant, is therefore simply formalising existing informal relationships.

While formally launching today, Davidson said the first two projects via the Advisory are now underway.

Agency village management

The alliance’s capability spans marketing strategy, branding, agency village management, sponsorship, DE&I and CX.

Johns said there is demand across each vertical, but sees ”massive need” for agency village management, “because there has previously been no obvious independent solution”.

Rob Pyne, who spent 15 years in media agencies before launching training and leadership development firm Realizer in 2013, will deliver that aspect. For the last decade he's been working with both marketers and agencies on improving client-partner relationships. “We were working on the same problem, but coming at it separately. So we’ve figured out a way to solve it at the same time,” said Pyne.

Pyne and Davidson first worked together at Universal McCann two decades ago. “I spend 30-40 per cent of time with marketers. Jen is more like 100 per cent. But she’s seeing the same problems. So the need is how to help marketers be the best client to their agency partners – produce the best briefs, allow the village partners to collaborate better and set the environment for that,” said Pyne. “I’d not seen enough marketers really take the lead on that.”

Expanding marketer remits and static resource, or “skinny teams”, per Pyne, means marketers are “not always able to play the role of ‘chief of chiefs’,” which he said is essential if they are to keep the agency tribes from warring. “They are tribes, they almost speak different languages – and you have to unite them,” said Pyne. Otherwise, friction between agencies is inevitable. “And if you don’t keep an eye on it, that disaffection spreads.”

Plus, marketers have gone from working with two main agency partners to five or six. Pyne usually gets called in when it’s not working. The aim is “to help marketers build a better model – abundance instead of scarcity, open instead of defensive, collectively doing great work instead of trying to catch up all the time,” he said.

“For marketers, there is an opportunity to take a lead on this which will save them a lot of time and pain down the track. We don’t want agencies to feel they are battling uphill to get marketers on board to drive better collaboration. Leadership is a big word. The marketers need to be the chief of chiefs.”

Brand builder

Richard Sauerman, aka The Brand Guy, will deliver brand services via the Advisory. Sauerman thinks brands are suffering from short-termism linked to shrinking CMO and CEO tenures, and tactical executions rather than  building brand equity by properly defining and articulating what they do and why they do it. In short, he said, “know who you are”.

He rebranded insurer QBE globally. “Insurance is an interesting category. It’s all about piece of mind, reassurance, ‘we’ve got your back’ – all the insurance brands sit in that space and its quite passive,” said Sauerman.

“There is risk associated with anything you want to do in life – drive a car, start a business. An insurance company has appetite for that risk and makes it possible. So we rebranded QBE around making things possible, and that is a whole different take,” he added.

“A lot of people who work in insurance are not proud about it. ‘Have you always dreamt of working in insurance? Fuck no'. But reframe it as working for a firm that insures all of the emergency vehicles in London, oil rigs, nuclear power plants, Formula 1 racing drivers, all of a sudden insurance is quite cool. And that came out of a global leadership conversation.”

Sauerman calls it the “midnight red wine conversation”, but it usually takes place at 9am, without wine.

“It’s a chat: hopes and dreams; if you didn’t exist, would anybody care? What is your contribution to employees, why should they be excited to work here? The same for your business partners; what worries and what excites you? That is The Brand Guy conversation, and when you talk to corporates in that way, you get very different conversations and human answers. And then you build the brand on those answers. That cascades down to people, culture, internal comms and brand on the outside, which is marketing – the whole thing flows out,” said Sauerman.

Sauerman has been having those conversations for 20 years. “I left advertising to do this. Because when you work in advertising, all you do is make fucking ads. Now I don’t mind ads but that is not what brand is all about. It’s about what you do, doing it, keeping your promises and telling the world. Walk the talk.”

He sees huge scope.

“From a marketing perspective there is far too much tactical stuff and not enough genuinely building a brand.”

Sponsorship optimiser

Andrew Clarke provides sponsorship expertise to the Advisory via Super-Sub, a consultancy he launched in 2021 after leaving IPG-owned sports marketing unit Octagon. He thinks sponsorship – and the way brands are using those partnerships – remains “incredibly primitive”.

“There is incredible investment of time and money from brands in partnerships – but very little investment of knowledge and capability of how they are using them,” per Clarke. “The way people are connecting [to events, sports, etc.] has changed exponentially, but businesses are still thinking about where does the log go and how many tickets do I get,” he suggests.

He sees a mismatch between the rest of their marketing investments. “If you presented a CMO with a media plan for a national campaign they want to see the detail that justify the output. Yet they will sign off a sponsorship of the same value with none of that scrutiny – because they are bought on spec, not strategy,” per Clarke.

“When you ask brands ‘how did you get to this number?’ The response is ‘that’s what we spent last time’ or ‘it’s what we have left’. Very rarely is it is ‘we’ve done the analysis and worked out if we spend this much we can drive these outcomes. So the rigour we apply to other parts of marketing is greater than that applied to sponsorship.”

Clarke, who has written a global strategy for Santander, Ferrari and F1, sees significant opportunity for brands to improve that process. But he said the basics are simple: “Does this sponsorship present an opportunity to address a brand or business problem that we can’t meet currently. And if we were to do it, how do we approach it in such as way as we understand what we need from this contract and these relationships… so that we have a raft of tools and know how to use them to address the challenge we face?”

Globally, that is a $58bn opportunity, per Clarke, with Australia “more diverse and with more major sporting teams per capita” than anywhere else.

“As a country we have so much access to the things people love doing, but not enough commercial firepower and understanding to put the right amount of funding into right places,” said Clarke. “It’s a complicated market to get right. So we aim to provide expertise where required. Some of that is working with rights holders, in other cases working with an agency whose client has a big sponsorship, or it may be a brand with a sponsorship opportunity that comes to us before approaching an agency,” he adds.

DE&I: Pitch table stakes

Former UM and Carat exec Kerry Boys is delivering DE&I expertise to the Advisory via her consultancy Leaders for Good.

Boys said diversity, equity and inclusion is now table stakes for many pitches – with agencies increasingly asked to state their DE&I policies and credentials on RFPs.

“Certainly every government RFP and a lot of the big brands will have that question – and they are driving that through their supply chains, using the RFPs to drive change” said Boys. Which is much the same as the likes of Telstra and Microsoft are doing with ESG. “It’s the same ballpark, sometimes DE&I falls under ESG,” said Boys, which means many companies have mandated reporting requirements.

Firms can’t be expected to instantly diversify their workforce, even should it prove possible. But they need a plan, said Boys.

“It’s about progress, momentum. You can’t do it overnight, but lots of organisations have zero plans, no targets, no awareness of the state of diversity. They don’t know where to start. But we know it reduces risk – there are a lot of employment cases going through the courts – while improving decision-making, because different perspectives inform strategy. Plus, DE&I helps attract talent. But the reality is that Australia is significantly behind places like the US and the UK,” said Boys. “That’s the challenge and the opportunity.”

CX: Optimisation required

Simone Blakers of Liquid CX is providing customer experience services to the collective. She said the two biggest market challenges are cross-functional collaboration and demonstrating ROI.

“In many businesses the internal team structures, working practices, incentives and politics are often getting in the way of putting the customer first,” she said of the former.

“Demonstrating a return on investment can often pull a CX strategy down into tactical activities” that deliver a short-term commercial boost, but don’t actually improve the customer experience, said Blakers of the latter.

Brands need to think longer-term commercially and always tie CX back to the actual customer, she underlined. Do that, and it becomes “a brand differentiator” rather than a tactical pain point fix.

Ultimately she thinks customer experience design “will become as important as product development”, and the smart firms are already heading in that direction. Within five years, Blakers thinks AI-driven personalisation “will completely reshape marketing roles and team structures”.