INDUSTRY PROFILES

In a previous life I was a fashion designer and boutique owner, carrying out marketing communications for the store and even though I didn’t really know what I was doing I enjoyed doing it and unbeknownst to me doing a reasonably good job of it. I was offered a job at Spark PR & Activate off the back of this work. It was a crossroads moment for me and being a little bit more ‘fly by the seat of my pants’ in my early 20’s, I decided to jump at the new opportunity. It took me three years of on the job learning to wrap my head around what PR actually was, how it fitted into the bigger marketing communications remit and how that worked within the advertising industry as a whole. After seven years with Spark PR & Activate, I took a year out to work at DDB’s Mango - before being wooed back to my original agency home. Then, just this week on Wednesday, we rebranded from Spark PR & Activate to Drum, a huge step in recognising the full breadth of services that the agency now carries out. I’m very humbled to be the general manager and work alongside 22 of the smartest marketing communications practitioners in NZ.

Marketing communications with intelligence. A full service below the line agency that also provides creative content solutions. Thinking strategically about what the solutions are for our clients business challenges is a big focus here at Drum. Because of this the entire business is full of super smart people who are dynamic in their thinking and agile in the application of this to a broad range of marketing communications channels.

We’re very spoilt with our client base and are in an enviable position of working across multiple categories and a range of boutique to blue chip clients and brands. Our recent acquisition of KFC was a very big coup.

I’m proud of all of the work that our agency produces, but if I had to pick one to call out it’d be DB export Beer Bottle Sand. It exceeded expectations in every way possible and was a catalyst for us winning the MBM PR Agency Network of the year at the end of 2018.

What I love about the industry is the constant evolution, but this is also generally where the challenges come from. Agencies across the board have drastically been diversifying their services and this means that the lines start to blur around roles and responsibilities between client agency partners. Client side is also diversifying with the establishment of robust in-house marketing teams, which can sometimes mean the requirement for external support is reduced – which is a risk in itself, as I believe external agency partners help brands review their marketing plans objectively.

I love that no two days are the same. I also love how creative we get be and that at Drum we work in a truly integrated fashion internally (not just a consecutive sharing of the brief) with our mother agency PHD. This sees us all working together through the entirety of a campaign – from ideation to execution across the full remit of channels and touch points.

I’m somewhat technologically challenged….

Winning a Cannes Lion.

There have been plenty! But learning seldom happens without disaster moments, so I think they’re really important and the perceived enormity of them always pales with time.

The rebrand has been huge for us and we’re very much looking forward to taking Drum through and beyond 2019.

Psychology.

E: Katie.walton@drumagency.co.nz
I: DrumagencyNZ
W: Drumagency.co.nz