How brands can super-charge their advertising budgets and grow?

By Sarah Keith, Group Managing Director, Active International Australia and Involved Media

For almost three decades, Active International has been creating real value for Australian businesses. Our corporate trade model is a powerful and smart way for businesses to achieve more with their existing products, assets or services, offering flexibility and several options to increase profitability and boost the bottom line.

Put simply, Active is a “super-charger” for a company’s bottom line, a solutions-based business with an eye for creating extra value through arbitration. We work by converting pressure points across clients’ businesses – like excess, depreciated or obsolete stock – into cash in the form of trade credit. The trade credit can be leveraged to generate additional value across media, retail, travel and more, thanks to the long-term partnerships we have established over the years.

The Active model allows brands to part-fund their advertising with their own assets, products or services and thereby expand their media spend. But advertising, of course, is only effective if it is reaching the right consumer at the right time with the right message. Finding those consumers, understanding what they are doing and thinking, and talking with them at the time they are most receptive to what you are saying is where Active’s Involved Media business steps in.

How do Active and Involved work together to help brands grow? Let me explain.

Our strong partnerships and position in the advertising market allow us to buy a large amount of advertising space across all media channels (including digital and programmatic advertising) upfront at a discount rate, a margin that creates extra value for the client. We buy a client’s underperforming assets at a higher than liquidation price and sell the assets through our global remarketing network (we have 18 offices around the world).

Enter Involved Media, the media strategy and buying agency Active International Australia acquired in 2019. Active collaborates with Involved Media and uses its skills to plan, negotiate and secure the best advertising space across all media channels. Involved also recommends the Active services to clients, to help solve any asset issues they might have and give them a way to buy more advertising space.

Being an independent business, we are able to work with every media owner and every media agency in Australia. We have clients who have a media agency and clients who do not. For brands who do not have a media agency but are in need for a bespoke media agency service we have it covered.

Media planning is central to what Involved does. Over the past year or so, we have focused on the concept of “involved planning” to help brands navigate an ever-changing world. Here is how our Head of Strategy and Planning, Daniel Hojnik, explains it.

“The process of media planning today must be a constantly evolving strategic communications model: strategy at its heart, with a dynamic feed of insight to inform agility in media trading. At no point do we stop asking why something is working or why it is not. This ensures rich insight is consistently unearthed and implemented into an evolving communications approach,” Daniel says.

“To do this, the right measurement methodologies must be in place, ensuring information provides a clear evolution for strategy. However, there is no one-size-fits-all marketing effectiveness solution. Therefore, agencies and their brands need to set clear KPIs for their activity, balancing a short and long-term view of efficiency and effectiveness. Only with a dynamic approach to communications strategy, underpinned with a robust measurement framework to understand marketing effectiveness, can brands truly navigate the constantly changing business conditions that are the norm these days.”

Involved’s approach to planning, coupled with Active’s ability to super-charge advertising budgets, is proving to be a potent combination for our clients and is driving strong sales growth, a clear increase in value and improved advertising ROI.

At Active we welcome brands across any category who want to achieve more and learn how they can engage with us to utilise the full suite of solutions we offer to help them succeed.  It all starts with a conversation.

www.activeinternational.com.au   |  www.involvedmedia.com.au

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