Henry Daglish believes his latest venture, Bicycle, ‘heralds the third wave of media agencies and represents an entirely new way of working with clients.’
Daglish has had a long and varied career across almost three decades, working for agencies such as Zenith Optimedia Australia, Carat and Arena Media UK. In 2016 he founded Bountiful Cow, which he ran for over four years. Then, in 2021, he co-founded Bicycle London.
He tells MediaCat how the agency balances performance versus brand work, the advantages of keeping skills in-house, and how he rallies against boring industry behaviour.
What made you confident there was a gap for another media agency?
I previously launched Bountiful Cow in the UK with the backing of The7stars group, and within a few years you could see that there was space for another brand. Before we knew it, we were operating towards the top of the long tail, in terms of all the independent agencies.
When it came to Bicycle I realised, in the world of independent agencies and largely networks as well, you have this dichotomy in terms of how you’re working with businesses, between performance and brand. Agencies that align themselves one way or another. The likes of the big independents — The7stars, Goodstuff, etc. — have built their businesses with solid models around better service, good strategic planning, conventional media planning and buying, but less so in performance.
Then at the other extreme, you have Brainlabs, RocketMill [now PMG], and Jellyfish and the performance-first agencies, who have built their capabilities in that space, but failed to move into brand. We felt there was a space in the middle, to operate under this ‘power of and’ concept, where you could bridge performance and brand.
You know… there hasn’t been a new full stack media planning and buying agency launched since The7stars. There have been lots of different agencies that have launched around planning or buying, but not this size [and] with this level of intent. For me, the real thing is around muscle memory and legacy. When these organisations get a few years old they still have the muscle memory from their founders and what they were. It’s hard for them to migrate into that proper ‘power of and’ proposition. We’ve had to work hard to do that.
What lessons from previous agencies did you take with you when you started Bicycle?
I’m lucky enough to have experienced scaling independent businesses that sell into larger networks. You learn a lot about what happens when you go through growth. But also a lot about what matters most when you launch. Most boringly, it’s about having proper finance processes at the beginning.
The first hire we did was a proper financial director. We had to build a commercially astute organisation. You can build everything else on that. Too many businesses think about finance as an afterthought. When you’re trading media, there’s a volume of money that you’re looking after on your client’s behalf. I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t have that set up in the beginning. That was the biggest learning.
The other bit is — and everyone will say this — it’s all about the team, and you have to have a core founding team that have each other’s backs, are invested in the future, not too ego-driven, and understand where we’re trying to go. If you have any egos or anyone who thinks it’s all about them, you’re instantly in trouble.
You mentioned breaking from legacy thinking, which brings us on to the ‘power of and’. Why did you choose that as your proposition and how does it work in practical terms, when approaching briefs and so on?
It originally started out as a concept between performance and brand. So many businesses are hung up on short-term metrics. With the growth of digital media, you have a real challenge with performance. Clients struggle to scale their businesses and grow into what we call sustainable growth. The ‘power of and’ is helping clients take that journey, and going, ‘Look, if you’re obsessed with last click and click-through rates and all the metrics that exist within digital media, we’ll help your media work on an incremental basis, and then build the brand side’.
It works both ways because you get other brands coming in who are brand obsessed and very upper funnel, but aren’t thinking about how they’re connecting the dots to drive a meaningful sales journey.
So it started around those two areas, which we’re now delivering at different ends of the spectrum. Last year we picked up Krispy Kreme and Greater Anglia, which are pure performance businesses. We’re helping them go the other way. Then similarly, we’re working with brands like Papa Johns and helping them align their performance channels.
Is it difficult getting clients to understand and embrace ‘the power of and’?
What you actually get a lot of is where you have two heads of marketing: one person sitting on top of the data and short-term performance metrics, and another focused on the whole media piece. That’s the challenge. Quite often the interaction is with the brand person who is saying: I need to justify what I’m doing and why it’s good, and I’ve got a colleague I need to get on board because they are sitting on all the data.
It’s that type of pressure we work in best because we will be agnostic across those two things. And because we’re a small organisation, I’m not interested in trying to take the digital performance channels that those clients might be doing in-house. What I am interested in, is driving business change and making those two business areas work together.
You describe Bicycle’s media planning and buying setup as ‘the newest version of the oldest model’. What does that mean?
When I talk about the newest version of the oldest model, I actually hark back to the old days when you might be sitting in JWT or Ogilvy, where you had the creative and media teams properly working together in one organisation, and you had a suit, for want of a better phrase, who knew their stuff, and could plug all those different worlds together.
We’re on this journey to get a group of people that can actually help our clients navigate what is a massively complex media space, alongside the requirements of creating a whole new brand and creative strategy, through to making sure we’ve got the right design on pizza boxes and that type of stuff. So it’s old-school thinking in my head, in that I want to create the newest version of the oldest model, which is proper integration that sits on a team of suits, who sit in the middle of the organisation, making that happen. Then you have the specialist skill sets underneath.
Are you looking at alternative remuneration models for your agency?
There’s a lot of stuff in the press and people talk about outcome-based models. You can’t do that until you’ve got everything lined up: all the way from the integrated work I’ve been talking about, to actually understanding and working closely with the client’s tech stack, and the actual performance that comes out the bottom end of the pipe, so to speak.
Our view is: if you could get to a situation where you have an outcome-based relationship with a client, so you take fees to cover costs, but have a situation where you’re driving business change that’s properly measured…that’s where we (and anyone else) want to get to. That’s rare. I don’t think we’re that close to it, and I’m not sure many other people are.
The only thing I would say is, we’ve made it clear we don’t work with many clients on a pure commission basis. We need them to buy into our resource and headcount commitment, and see the value in that. Not just see us as a percentage on a media schedule.
What’s the advantage of having everything (creative, production, influencer) in-house?
The advantage is on the client side as much as anything else. Rebecca Carroll, marketing director at Papa Johns, talked about how this model has made her life so much easier because she can have one conversation with one integrated brief, and everything comes back to her. It’s all fully aligned and there’s a solution. The challenge is making sure that your specialist skills within that integrated team are up to the task, and as good as they can be.
There’s a stat. I can’t quite remember it, but it’s about media expenditure being driven by the quality of the creative, and the ability of creative to work with media. The other thing is, our performance isn’t measured around billings. As a team of people we’ll measure ourselves on income and profit. If we can get clients to spend less over a period of time in paid media, it’s because we’ve got them strategically aligned, and worked out what’s working for them and what is not.
Why do you think it was necessary to have the influencer side of the business?
That’s a tactical partnership with a business called Hypetap, who are one of the leading influencer platforms in Australia, and have relocated here to work with us. It’s a constant question mark as to where influencers sit, between the world of PR and paid media. We felt we needed to provide those services as part of a paid media solution. It’s such a massive market, especially in specific sectors, we felt we needed to have expertise on board, should we need to put it into a client solution.
Which divisions of the business have been the easiest to build and grow and which parts are the hardest?
If we go back to the beginning of this conversation about the original founders, we didn’t quite get that right. We had one founder that wasn’t right, on the digital side. Getting specialists in digital to work with the more conventional media solutions, media brands or media people, is actually quite tough to do. It’s slightly like mixing oil and water.
A lot of the time with those people, they want to work on big train sets. They want to be running all the PPC for Audi or Google, or whatever else it might be. When you’re a new business and you’re working with other fast-growth businesses that are spending [comparatively small amounts] on those types of budgets, it’s hard for it to be motivating to someone who specialises in those types of channels.
We’ve had to work hard to make those people feel engaged and be on that journey, and grow with us as the business grows. So that they will get to play with those train sets.
The other area is creative. If you’re a media buyer or planner, managing clients through a creative process requires real skill because it’s so subjective. If I do a media plan to a client, I could sit behind so much data to say why it’s right. If I’m presenting a creative solution and concept, there are so many different angles of conversation, trying to keep the client on a trajectory that works for the agency and the client — that’s tough. We started doing these types of services two years ago and I learned a hell of a lot very quickly because these are totally different skills.
What’s your take on AI? How have you been integrating it into the business?
At the simplest level, all of our team have got ChatGPT and premium access to AI. We see it as an interesting way of simplifying a lot of menial tasks that they need to do. We have a team that is constantly sharing learning with each other, in terms of how they’ve used it in different ways on a day-to-day basis. Then you’ve got the business operational level, incorporating it into your planning systems, data insights, and commercial operations. That’s an investment journey that we’re on right now.
But again it’s one of those areas you can consider is the most terrifying thing coming our way. I was in a board meeting two weeks ago where we were presenting the new shape and vision of the business, and how it would evolve in this world. I sat there for a minute and went: ‘I’m not sure I want to run an agency like this, because it will become so automated and tech-driven’.
But then, this is just another industrial revolution where the difference will be the people.
You have to have guardrails and boundaries as to where AI stops. If people can’t add value, then let AI do it. But where people can add value, have people do it.
It’s interesting, I said to the team we have an opportunity here to potentially double the size of the business without doubling our headcount because of all this stuff coming into the marketplace. Whereas some of the bigger organisations have to embrace this technology and go through a brutal case of removing headcount, because they’ve got a big legacy system they’re working on.
Another area I wanted to discuss was high retention rates at your agency. How do you stop people from leaving?
I’m biased, but I think it’s got to be pretty exciting to be part of a scale-up business for the right person. You have a situation where you’re working closely with the business owners and learning a lot about how to run a business, at whatever age you are.
You’re part of the massive ups and downs that happen as you grow. For the right people, that environment becomes very sticky, because they will say: I’m not getting off this bus now, it’s going places.
The other reason why I set this up was to be able to build a culture and have fun, and fight against some of the boring behaviours coming into our industry. It used to be the most exciting and dynamic industry to work in, and now it’s just full of ‘you can’t do this and you can’t do that’, and ‘policies here and policies there.’
I will fight against that because we want to be able to have fun, in terms of enjoying time working with each other. At the heart of that sits a programme we do called the Whakapapa, which is a Māori tradition. When you’re in New Zealand, if you’re joining a new tribe you do your Whakapapa, which is your roots, your tree, your sky — basically talking about where you’ve come from, where you want to go, your moments of vulnerability etc.
Every new starter that comes and joins us, within a few months will share their Whakapapa with the agency. It’s nothing to do with work. It’s often to do with their parents, and struggles and opportunities they’ve had in their lives, etc. That’s created a big sense of belonging in the agency, because everyone understands each other for who they are, not for what they do.
So those two things, I think, are helping with retention.
What skills do you look for in new employees? Do you look for different things than you did before?
Every time we’re looking, we’ll look for someone who is humble, hungry and smart. If they can operate across those three areas, then they’re right for us.
What do you think of the health of the media industry in general, right now?
From where I sit, there is opportunity. These bigger legacy-driven organisations are going to struggle to adapt to the new world. All the arguments everyone has about days of work in the office, about AI, and client-agency trust — all that creates a perfect storm for us to operate and grow our business.
One thing I will say, is I think it’s sad when you look at some of those bigger organisations and I’m seeing colleagues and peers being spat out because they are a bigger cost on the balance sheet — as opposed to the realisation of the importance of experience.
There’s a balance I don’t think we’re getting right, where those people are being compromised in return for costs, and this perception that they don’t get the modern world.
But experience is an incredibly powerful thing, and it’s what clients want probably more than anything else. They don’t need tech and things anyone can provide. They need someone who knows how to do stuff, and has made mistakes and learned from them before. That’s way more valuable than someone who can operate a keyboard.
Featured image: Bicycle’s work for ginger shot brand MOJU