William Tyree: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands and their agencies. I’m William Tyree here with my co-host IntelligenceBank CEO, Tessa court. Today we’ll look at how marketing teams are using AI to power the entire content development supply chain from ideation to automated approvals and add optimization.

Joining me today is Bridget Cleary of the Big Red Communications Group. Welcome Bridget.

Bridget Cleary: Wow. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

William Tyree: Could we start just by learning a little bit more about Big Red? Just would love to hear how you got into it where you’re based and anything else you want to share.

Bridget Cleary: Yeah, absolutely. So Big Red has traditionally, but it’s one of Australia’s biggest independent agencies and has been for 20 years. It’s notoriously private, so we don’t talk to the press, PR ourselves, enter industry awards. So even being on this podcast is a bit of a new thing for us. And it’s very, it’s worked with very big enterprise brands to do great, powerful advertising owned by a legend of advertising called Ted Horton, who’s in his early seventies. And I joined Ted about 10 years ago and ran Big Red for five years and helped along with Marty Hungerford in making it a much more through the whole customer journey kind of a business, not just big ad ideas. And then I went away for five years.

I worked in consulting. And just about two years ago, Ted took me out for dinner and said, look, I, his face at, in his early seventies, wasn’t about the future. Would I come back and take the essence of the business, which was better, faster, and smarter at scale for clients, commercial success and spin off a new entity which we’ve called, Big Red X or BRX that’s really about taking that DNA, but making sure that we take the best of the old, but take what’s available in emerging technology to deliver on better, faster, [00:02:00] smarter at scale.

William Tyree: Can you give us a couple examples of BRX? Like how, say customer comes to you with certain needs, what are their problems and challenges and how do you approach that?

Bridget Cleary: Yeah, I think we typically work with big enterprise based clients. So in retail, telco, resources, technology. So some of our clients are Optus, AGL, Realtor. com in the U. S. and they need a commercial outcome through marketing. And so we tend to help in two ways. We can build really powerful brand platforms with ownable assets that endure and can be used for a very long time and build lots of value.

equity. And then the second part of it is we can industrialize the execution of those brand platforms in better, faster and smarter ways by using technology and then drive constant improvement. So really industrializing execution through the funnel. And then because you’ve got time back, you can then spend time testing, learning and optimizing to drive that improvement.

So that’s really the core of what we do. And What a lot of our clients say, one in particular said, what other agencies do, she might show her peers. What we do tends to be put in the board pack because we drive really great commercial results. So that might be performance improvements that are incremental, that compound to a big sales increase.

So nearly 20 percent increase year on year for some clients, or it could be a powerful brand platform that takes them from number two to number one in the market. or helps them reinvest some of their media money back into profit because of the efficacy of the work. So we’re very much not looking into the ad industry.

We’re very much looking into our own world about driving commercial outcomes.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree and Bridget Cleary…