Like a good Australian, Con Frantzeskos is talking scrums. And no, not the Wallabies’ latest thrashing by the All Blacks at the Rugby World Cup final. Rather the founder and chief executive of Penso is trying to describe his Melbourne-based agency’s ‘agile-methodology’ approach after the Power Point failed to load.
“Instead of saying ‘let’s just go invest $2 million in this’, go out there and go crazy, then say it went to market and it was terrible; instead of spending all that money after launch, we invest it pre-launch and test five or six options in market immediately,” he says. “So let’s sprint in three days. Let’s have a campaign even if the product is not in market yet, versus a [traditional] campaign where you build a plane, it takes three or four months, then leaves the hanger and nobody even notices if it flies or not.
“There is not even a thought that this is shareholders’ money being sacrificed. You know there are mums and dads who are living off a pension fund with their money invested in these companies. And these companies are not growing because their advertising agencies are betraying them fundamentally.”
It was partly due to a frustration with agencies using ‘other people’s money’ to fund campaigns without achieving significant business growth that led Frantzeskos – alongside design expert Grant Farrelly and digital luminary David Rigbye – to found Penso in 2012. Formerly Ogilvy & Mather’s digital director for Asia Pacific and a self-confessed “tech-head”, Frantzeskos hoped to bring digital and creativity together with the aim of “doing things better” than their traditional competitors.
“What we see as our profound purpose is to see that every dollar is sacred, to see that every consumer is sacred and have the ability to say, ‘you know what, let’s respect the fact that not every consumer knows us and likes us – it does not matter’. What we need to say is, ‘it would be wonderful if via this communication you noticed us – if you chose to buy us that would be a great honour’. And we have that kind of approach in everything we do.
“So if we have built a website, we do not assume everybody is going to go to it. If we have built a video, we do no assume it is going to go viral. All these 99 myths that propagate ad agencies, we do not agree because they are not real. They are actually a myth. And on the other side of it, what is their approach to business? Is there even an approach? I would argue there is not.”
This approach has now arrived in Dubai, as Penso prepares to expand into the Middle East with the opening of an office in Dubai Design District. The move follows a period of organic and new business growth across the Gulf for the agency with the decision to create a foothold in Dubai spearheaded by Penso’s ongoing relationship with the Emirates Group. Almost half of the agency’s revenues are now derived from the Gulf.
A general manager for the new office was close to being finalised at the time of going to press and a planner and creative lead will follow. Rigbye, Penso’s Melbourne-based head of production, will relocate to the emirate and Frantzeskos will split his time between Australia and the United Arab Emirates.
At the heart of Penso’s strategy are statistician and scientist Andrew Ehrenberg’s “absolutely rock solid marketing laws of growth”. “They are things like reach over frequency, the idea that there is no such thing as brand loyalty, the idea that people do not care and they do not share,” Frantzeskos explains. “The fact that 90 to 95 per cent of the time people have enough problems having relations with their family and friends and keeping in touch, let alone liking a brand on Facebook.
“We start with the assumption that people are not interested in our brand and we do not care if they are or not – we simply have to make them aware. And that is 95 per cent of the battle. You do that by ensuring you have really strong brand assets and really distinctive advertising that is not sacrificing commercial reality for creative outcomes. “Our motto is that we support capitalist endeavour; so if you are here to really make money and grow, we will support you. You cannot support a business if you’re doing an ad that is unbranded and unclear. I am not saying an ad cannot
be beautiful but it has to have purpose.”
And that purpose cannot be to just win awards – described by Frantzeskos as “actually false” and “meaningless”. Instead, Penso’s purpose is not only to grow business but to put marketers back at the top table. “If you are the CEO of an organisation you want to grow, you go to the lawyer, financier. How often will the CEO go to the marketing manager and put big growth on their head? Unfortunately, my view is that marketing is being kind of emasculated because the tools that marketers have at their disposal have never been better. But they are not being used properly.”