Why PMG’s Nike win doesn’t seem all that unusual for the indie media agency

By Michael Bürgi

Just because you hit the big time, doesn’t mean you forget the little guy — or where you came from. So it is with independent media agency PMG, which has followed up its gigantic August win of Nike’s North American media AOR business — in which it beat out several holding company media agencies — with two smaller wins, Digiday has learned.

According to the agency’s founder and CEO George Popstefanov, Texas-based PMG has landed media and creative AOR duties for Nothing Bundt Cakes (PMG’s first win that includes its creative tools) and entered into a new sports marketing and media AOR partnership with health tool Therabody.

“We are excited to partner together with PMG across insights, strategy, creative, media and measurement to lead in a category that continues to build relevance and improve the lives of everybody,” said John Solomon, Therabody’s CMO in a statement. “Already we are seeing the power of their strategy and approach to driving meaningful connections for our brand.”

This caps a 2022 in which PMG’s revenue is expected to grow close to 30 percent over 2021, said Popstefanov, who didn’t provide actual revenue. That comes after 77 percent growth in 2021 over the first year of the pandemic. He said the agency has enjoyed around 35-40 percent of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since its 2010 inception.

Like many independent agency founders, Popstefanov is a holding company refugee of sorts — a CEO who left the holdco world after the company he worked with, Range Online Media, was bought up by iProspect, a Dentsu shop in 2008.

Popstefanov started PMG in 2010 and from the outset envisioned a media agency that embraced tech and engineering before it was cool. In fact, his first two employees were engineers, he said, who are still with the nearly 600-staff company a dozen years later.

“Being part of that holding company for a little bit made me realize there’s different ways to do this,” he said somewhat politely. “For me it was really about building a technology-enabled services company, focused around people and doing something different.”

But it wasn’t just to be technologically savvy that Popstefanov went down the engineering path. The aim was to match results better to investments. Agencies now call that performance media.

“PMG’s performance media heritage and philosophy that performance extends across all marketing activity is among the things that set them apart,” said Jay Pattisall, vp and principal agency analyst at Forrester, who covers PMG. “This mindset, their investments in technology to afford them a holistic view of the customer journey and their investments in creative capabilities/creative optimization, are key to PMG’s success.”

Specifically, PMG has been able to apply its proprietary marketing technology called Alli to all of its clients, which include Ralph Lauren, Apple, Gap and Kohler, which it won at the end of December 2021 (and which Popstefanov likes to point out was won against a defending holding company, Omnicom’s PHD).

Part of PMG’s secret sauce is that its team of technologists sit with clients who …read more

Source:: Digiday