kwpx&partners urges brands to do less advertising
In September 2023, WA creative boutique, &Partners merged with South Australian strategic powerhouse, kwpx. Since then, kwpx&partners has been refining its business strategy in line with the belief that better advertising beats more advertising.
‘Do less advertising’ was a proposition that founders Dav Tabeshfar and Bryan Dennis had been working towards at &Partners, but didn’t have the dedicated strategic, media or digital support to fully realise. The recent merger has set that situation right.
“The era of content has led to an explosion of ill considered, cheap and forgettable creation” Said Tabeshfar. “We as an industry are making billions of dollars’ worth of shite that no one wants to watch, look at or hear. We sell ‘impressions’; a word that assumes the work we put out actually penetrates the consciousness of our audience. We’re counting eyeballs, ignoring the fact that our work is sliding off them, straight into a trillion acres of marketing landfill. So, we’re putting our faith in quality over quantity. We’re helping clients to do less advertising by investing in better strategic and media insights, concepts and craft. We’re lucky that our business model – supported by access to kwpx’s deep digital, strategic and media expertise – means we don’t have scary overheads that need feeding, so we don’t need to add to the landfill just to keep the lights on. It helps that we can work with likeminded media folk (both kwpx and local partners) who share the understanding that eyeballs don’t make decisions, hearts do.”
Dru Mincher, who has relocated to Perth to drive kwpx&partners in the role of Business Director, has been responsible for aligning the business strategy with the needs of the WA market, and ensuring the agency can deliver on their new proposition with the support of kwpx’s Adelaide and Darwin teams.
“Western Australian brands are often up against national or international counterparts with significantly larger marketing budgets, so outspending is not an option. WA brands need agencies who embrace the opportunities that come with smaller budgets; to do work that pushes every impression deeper. Because while WA brands can’t always compete with marketing budgets, they can certainly win on depth-of-impact. Our national strategic model ‘Deeper Connections’ is designed to ensure that’s exactly what happens. It’s a model that uncovers the insights necessary for deep and meaningful audience engagement, and importantly in a cost-sensitive market, it’s a fluid model that fits around a client’s existing tools and existing understanding, so there’s no waste,” says Mincher.
Check out the new kwpx&partners identity and website at https://www.kwpxandpartners.au
8 Comments
So the new agency is aligned with the WA market, but using the resources of the wider agency in Adelaide and Darwin to deliver solutions?
Not quite @The Local. We’ll continue to prioritise WA partners – especially when it comes to production, concepts, design and local media expertise but, we’ll also be tapping the brains at kwpx to help guide our decisions in areas where we don’t have in-house leadership (media, strategy, and some aspects of digital). We have treasured partners in many disciplines right here in WA and we’ll continue to team up with them. In fact, we’ll be bringing more work to our WA partners this quarter than we have for years.
Yep – a philosophy that I have advocated for many years.
Spend more on idea development and its execution for greater impact, in order to reduce the more expensive cost of media exposure.
In my mind, the enemies of bland work are (1) indifference (2 product parity and (3) a long standing pursuit of extrinsic (and embedded or inherent) cultural values.
Interesting observation from the Guardian today (29 Jan) about ‘values’ that, in a slightly different way, reinforces the central notion behind the KWPX piece:
“For well over a century, the nations of the West in particular, have worshipped extrinsic values: the … dream of acquiring wealth, spending it conspicuously and escaping the constraints of other people’s needs and demands. It is accompanied… in popular culture, by toxic myths about failure and success: wealth is the goal, regardless of how it is acquired. The ubiquity of advertising, the commercialisation of society and the rise of consumerism, alongside the media’s obsession with fame and fashion, reinforce this story …. the marketing of insecurity, especially about physical appearance, and the manufacture of unfulfilled wants, dig holes in our psyches that we … try to fill with money, fame or power.
For decades, the dominant cultural themes in the US – and in many other nations – have functioned as an almost perfect incubator of (sic: these) extrinsic values.
Hullo ;Advertising.” The above is largely tour fault.
More power to PWPX whose approach it appears, is to be built around ‘connection’ in order to break through this inherent chain of causation. I hope they succeed.
Nice sentiment but I am not sure that the actual science behind modern marketing reflects this as reality. With programmatic media an advertiser can have hundreds of highly relevant messages in front of very specific sub target audience groups at very specific times. Of course you still need a big idea and a hero creative platform, but if you aren’t taking a more customised approach to your market and marketing using multiple ad versions then really you are back in 1980. Some of the world’s largest and most successful brands and businesses (say Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon) would all have strategies that involve producing more than a single hero spot.
It’s all about the big budget 60 second tv commercial baby.
Feels like something most smaller agencies have been doing for decades. Maybe reality has hit ‘big agency thinking’. And just like big agency thinking it seems like a great way for them to do less for small clients and charge more. KWP used to be good.
It’s sad that some respondents lack the courage to identify themselves in making their comments. I’m not sure if “It’s not the 1980s is it?” is responding to my comment, or the original CB piece. It’s not clear.
But I am gratified that he or she acknowledges that ‘you still need a big idea and a hero creative platform.’
Yes, indeed.
I usually ID myself as Tim on my posts, so just wanted to say hi and clarify that the Tim above isn’t Tim, well it isn’t me, Tim. Though I’d hope the tone of Tim’s post might betray that he’s not me, Tim.
Dav (I’m pretty sure there’s only one of you), don’t listen to the other Tim, not because it’s not me; but because bitterness isn’t a good look. Helping people care about brands and causes and products or anything really, beyond hollow impressions and reach, is what people like you do so, so well and have done for as long as I’ve known you. Great ideas with human insights are what 90% of big and small agency peeps I’ve ever known are trying to bring to small and big clients alike. Small minded comments feel like the only size related problem here.