What you need to know:

• Henry Tajer has taken a 25-33 per cent stake in a newly formed venture, The Influence Group, estimated to be worth several million dollars.
• The deal transpired nearly 10 years after Tajer first opened pre-acquisition talks as Mediabrands CEO with the founders of Social Soup and Pollinate, who opted not to sell at the time. 
• The business expects to double in the next year, bending the definition of “people-based marketing” first coined by digital marketers chasing online advertising segments.
• The company is bundling the country’s biggest influencer agency Social Soup with market research and corporate strategy firm Pollinate, which deploys “systems thinking” across its corporate strategy briefs.
• Per Pollinate’s CEO Howard Parry-Husbands: “What Covid has really taught us is that the system isn’t working…it’s all broken.”
• The venture partners argue the influence industry needs more sophisticated management and commercial measurement although influence is not restrained by online platforms – it includes staff and external stakeholders offline.
• Tajer, who was also Amazon's first CEO in Australia also spent 10 months at the helm of Dentsu locally. He addresses the sudden exit from the holdco via Mi3's podcast – which is always worth a listen.

If the founders of influence agency Social Soup and research and strategy firm Pollinate are right, blustery change is swirling the market research industry, corporate strategy teams, agency strategy planning departments and the booming business of influence – offline and online. 

Social Soup’s Sharyn Smith and Pollinate’s Howard Parry-Husbands say leaders in agency network holdcos – and even consulting firms like Deloitte Digital and Accenture Interactive – have overlooked influence and strategy, bar a few exceptions. Nearly 10 years ago Henry Tajer was running Mediabrands in the region and opened pre-acquisition talks with Social Soup and Pollinate.  

Back then, Smith and Parry-Husbands opted against selling to Tajer and have since karate blocked other acquisitive overtures. They kept in touch with Tajer and after the past 12 months working with him in an advisory role, the wife-husband duo sold a minority but “significant” stake to the former global and Australian Mediabrands CEO, Amazon Media’s first Australian boss – and briefly, Dentsu CEO.

Bundled, restructured, rebadged

The now bundled and restructured business has been rebadged The Influence Group. 

None of the partners would comment on financial details of the deal but it’s likely Tajer has taken 25-33 per cent of the business and joined as CEO of the new parent company.  

Both Social Soup and Pollinate will be managed by their founders but the “well capitalised” Influence Group will likely explore acquisitions and possibly mergers. Some form of exit in three to five years wasn’t ruled out by the three partners. 

So what actually is this new, unconventional venture about? The ambition is to pair a more sophisticated and commercially measured influence industry with an exotic blend of market research and "systems thinking" that they argue will deliver better commercial, economic and societal results.    

For now, The Influence Group is combining Social Soup’s 15 years in what used to be called word-of-mouth marketing; now it’s influence, usually executed digitally – with a market research and corporate strategy firm in Pollinate. One of the casualties is agency network strategy planning, which Parry-Husbands says will be challenged. 

5,000 focus groups 

The trio also intend to bend the definition of “people-based marketing”, first coined by digital and data marketers chasing online identities to target with ads or undertaking their own internal segmented customer communications. 

The argument from the Influence Group execs is that a new post-Covid world beset with complexity and bedevilled by siloed thinking, tends to focus on the short-term and fails to solve for bigger challenges that are connected beyond the immediately obvious. 

To prosecute this commercial IP, two business partners became three after Tajer bought in. 

“Henry’s one of the few really senior media and marketing leaders who actually reached out to us over the years and has taken an interest in what we're doing. Where we are today didn't happen yesterday,” says Pollinate’s Parry-Husbands on Mi3’s podcast, published today. 

Parry-Husbands has 5,000 focus groups and hundreds of corporate and consumer strategy briefs under his belt and has already witnessed the change that’s hit his traditional turf in corporate strategy and market research; the latter, he says, is usurping an often narrow and disconnected strategy and planning function inside creative and media agency networks. 

Locked out of long-term

“There's been a step change in society in so many ways that's now going to play out, and it's going to play out in media and marketing as well,” says Parry-Husbands. “What Covid has really taught us is that the system isn't working. There's been a step change in society in so many ways. We did a whole lot of [consumer] research when Covid hit, literally every month talking to people, and pretty much people came to the sense that it's all broken. It's not working, the system is broken. It's out of balance.”

Parry-Husbands says complexity naturally creates silos in business – and politics – and the solutions tend to skew micro in nature. “The more complicated it gets, the harder it is to manage,” he says. “So you break into silos. From our perspective at Pollinate, we see more and more briefs that focus on the short term, the micro, the immediate, the urgent. And that creates short term solutions, but long term problems," he says.

"Systems thinking simply says we still have a short term need, but we also need to look at the big picture. We need to integrate everything, cut across the silos and integrate the thinking. So where influence comes in is that influence is power. Influence is the common currency across that whole system. It's actually all joined up. And if we only solve this one little bit here, it actually won't solve the whole thing. In fact, it could create a bigger problem down the line.” 

Parry-Husbands says that’s the core dilemma for the once hallowed ad agency strategy and planning departments – they’ve become bit-part players inside a big system that needs interconnected solutions. “It's just not joined up enough,” he says. “And that's the opportunity.”

Marketing, media power structures 

Social Soup’s Smith is in solidarity with her partner on their new investor and CEO – it was Smith that approached Tajer a year ago for advisory work on what they might do next with their businesses.

“He [Henry] is very well versed in the current structures of power in media and marketing and really understanding that world, which I think we'll have to navigate for the ambitions that we have as a business,” she says. “It’s really important Henry is bringing that to the table. He’s an incredibly experienced local and international CEO, he has an incredible growth mindset and knows how to put the right structures and systems in place. So far, I've been very impressed.”

For Tajer’s part, his old stomping ground inside the global holding companies that own the world’s biggest agency networks, they’ve moved too slowly.   

“We're in a segment within the marketing and media industry that no one's really paying any attention to,” Tajer says.

Pure media, people marketing

“We’re now in a bit of a flashpoint moment, no different to about 15 years ago when we were having the same sort of conversations around paid search. I quickly realised that this is a really big area of importance for marketing that the industry at large sort of had a bit of a blind spot [around]. It’s undercooked.”

Tajer concedes his investment in The Influence Group is a shift away from what many might have expected.  

“It's significant in that this is the most pure media I've ever come across,” he says. “Pure because it's people. Both businesses are centred in their understanding and ability to derive insights from people. In the Pollinate business, they have been talking to people, listening to people and devising answers for their clients for a long time. The bank of knowledge and expertise in that business was alarmingly impressive.” 

Tajer says on the influence side at Social Soup, the influencer channel is “also people, whether they are macro influencers with huge followings of 100,000 and more, or what we refer to as a nano influencer, which is under 1000. It's people: We've heard different players in the industry talk about people-based marketing but I haven't seen a lot of evidence until now of businesses that are really channelling a pure people play. Influencer marketing is people marketing.”

Additive influence

Tajer thinks Pollinate can take a big picture view of a company's “infrastructure or ecosystem” and its growth drivers, identify where influence fits and leverage it.

“We'll surface those opportunities and show those companies how they can dial that up and work… to make it additive," he says. 

"Our intent is to put influence at the centre of marketing, not for it to be the centre of attention. It’s an important cue for brands and companies to understand the influence they already have or the influence that they could generate and integrate that into their marketing thinking so that they get a better outcome for their business.

"From my past and what we see still happening, the role of influence in marketing is usually after the traditional definition of marketing is dealt with. When we are working with some of those companies and helping them take a macro view through a systems thinking approach, we'll identify lots of drivers in their business.”

What next?

Smith says business is “looking for a better way” and was happening at executive leadership levels. “The Influence Group gives us a vehicle to have those high level strategic conversations that we probably haven't been able to have before. At the end of the day, everything should centre around people. Media and marketing should begin with people. And understanding that sort of ecosystem of influence begins with people.

"So it’s really understanding how you plan that out. We're certainly not saying, you shouldn't do TV or you shouldn't do digital or search. They're all really important parts of the mix. But you should start with people, understand how we can influence the market through the channel of people and then really looking at how that plays out across other channels and other contexts.”

It's certainly ambitious but Tajer is convinced the business will at least double in the next 12 months – the group currently sits at around 50 people. 

“Double is realistic and a reasonable expectation,” says Tajer. “And depending on the sort of understanding and support we get from the broader business community, then double may be calling it short. We're not the only people who realise that influence is important, but we're definitely the market leader. I guess further down the track, if there are opportunities to acquire businesses and they fit within what we believe helps drive the growth agenda, we'll definitely look at it. The business is well capitalised. It's a very healthy business, and I think that will only improve.”

Tajer says whether the business sells or stays as an independent is a “bit early to say, but if we keep growing and we do good work and we show the broader market that influence is critical, we may not need to sell – or we may not want to do that. The business enables us to leverage our independence and just as importantly, really take advantage of how simple our structure is.”

Now to the hard part.