What you need to know 

• Hello Social this month unveiled a new full-service offering, leaving behind its social media specialism to roll out a suite of new disciplines, Hello Talent, Hello Media, Hello PR and Hello Create, and a host of new talent poached from the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi, CHEP Network, JOY, Rebel Sports, PlaygroundXYZ, LADbible Australia, and The Monkeys. 
• The agency is pitching the move to a full-servicing offering as a response to a gap in the market for an effective integrated agency service - MD Sam Kelly says the top down approach of other indies, and the 'clunky' integrations of holding companies have failed to capture the in-between work.
• For Kelly, Hello Social's advantage is in "taking the magic that was learned from social”, in terms of full-service campaign thinking, “and exploring that in other environments”.
• The evolution to full-service has been a long time coming, with the agency first beginning to build out its capabilities in production, influencer marketing and paid media several years ago, when clients began to experiment with their storytelling online.
• The blurring of the lines between digital and social effectively forced Hello Social to fast-track the expansion of these capabilities, doubling its headcount to 60 in the last two years.
• In the years since, social media has become something of a “Trojan horse” that the agency could use to get a foot in the door and win other work.
• Now the agency's plan is to pick up the "middle layer" of work often left behind by the bigger agencies, and integrate across touch points with versatility and agility. 

Top down vs. bottom up

Integrated independent agencies like Thinkerbell and Howatson+Company have been pushing full-service for years –  while the holdcos and consulting giants are almost all focusing on one flavour or another of end-to-end service delivery. But Kelly reckons nobody in market has managed to get it quite right.

“There are no agencies that do [integrated services] really well," he said. "I think there's some big holding groups that say they can do it across their different divisions, but again, it's clunky and it's expensive to realise that potential. It's not really under one roof or one strategy, they are lots of small businesses bolted together, selling a dream.”

He thinks integrated delivery is baked-in to social agencies – because they have to be inherently full-service, rolling in media, creative, digital, and social into a single output. 

Kelly also sees an edge in the agency’s background in performance media, compared to the “top-down” approach of other independents now taking integrated routes as the media landscape shifts. 

“If you look at it from a perspective of marketing objective, they've always been up in that brand world. So, they've started with TV, or with PR, and they’re trying to come down [to media and performance marketing].”

By contrast Kelly said Hello Social is “coming up”, with a strong background in media and measurement. It has built out production and an in-house design studio, with a new creative capability the “cherry on top”. That capability is due to be led by an executive creative director hailing from the Monkeys, with the official announcement expected in the coming weeks.

Fuller service

Founded by Max Doyle in 2011 – the same year as Instagram raised $7m in Series A funding and a year before it was bought by Facebook for $1bn – the agency was early into social in Australia at a time when brands were still enjoying the free reach. It would remain a pure-play social media agency up until around four years ago, when clients increasingly started to experiment with their storytelling online, investing in online stunts in a bid to ‘break the internet’.

That shift, Kelly says, required Hello Social to build out its capabilities in production, influencer marketing and paid media. “Before we knew it, we had strategy, creative production, media measurement, like full-service fundamentals there”.

The blurring of the lines between digital and social accelerated capability expansion, with the agency doubling its headcount to 60 in the last two years.

Of late it's hired ten new creative and client service specialists from the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi, CHEP Network, JOY, Rebel Sports, PlaygroundXYZ and LADbible Australia. Another three were scooped from We Are Social, with the as-yet-under-wraps ECD and soon to be ex-Monkeys creative incoming.

Trojan horse

Kelly said the business has long used its social chops as a "Trojan horse" to get into other client work, and onto rosters under cover of its former single specialism.

“Before we knew it, we were doing all sorts of stuff. I don't want to say picking up the scraps, but there were just things that their village couldn't do. They’d have a creative agency that could do a great TVC and a great out of home campaign, but for the top brands it will cost them a million bucks a campaign to use those agencies,” per Kelly. “Then you have your media buying agencies that they were looped into through these global deals who had three-month SLAs [service level agreements] to do anything.”

But it will also lean on its social heritage to drive growth for brands – and itself. Director of client services, Julien Dupuche, said demand for creator and influencer campaigns is spiking strongly.

Over the last three to four months in particular, he estimates that upwards of 70 per cent of incoming work has fallen into those categories. “I think brands are starting to realise that they need to plug into talent in order to stand out from that set of sameness.”

Versatility wins

With plans to pick up work around the “middle layer” of marketing services, Kelly reckons versatility in Hello Social’s new offering will be key in hitting growth targets.

Head of data and analytics, Daniel Hill, said the agency will be able to respond to briefs that sit within a single service offering, or that span across a spectrum of capabilities, though the latter is where he expects the most impact.

Having measurement in-house, and removing the barriers between media and creative so that campaigns can be optimised across disciplines, he thinks will gain client traction and drive campaign effectiveness.

“The separation of media and creative means that you're not holding that creative accountable,” said Hill.

“What really excites me as a media person is actually having that input into the creative, because working with these big media agencies, it can just come back as distribution reports … So being able to walk over to the desk of someone who's actually making the creative and saying – ‘this did or didn't work, how can we adjust it? How can we work together?’ – that is where the value happens.”

The goal is to make content – from TV ads to banners and buttons and everything in between – and make it work harder, coherently, end-to-end, and measure and optimise the results.

But Kelly says its consistency of quality and delivery across all of the component parts that brands need from agencies – and the gaps in between are those that require filling.

“What excites me – and where the demand is – is that campaigns now aren't just campaigns, they have to show up on and across all the different touch points. There’s a significant number of assets you need to make a campaign live and work in all the different places that it needs to in terms of giving consistent customer journeys. So, if you're sinking the million bucks into the TVC, where's the ATM banners? Where's your web stuff? Where’s your display? I think brands know they need to do it – but they're struggling because they’ve got internal silos."

Now Hello Social is officially moving out of its own original silo in a bid to open up a few more.