Please provide staff turnover rate (for last 2 financial years) of account managers and client facing teams

We are a team of 17 full time staff, 11 of which fall into the account management team. Over the past 2 years, excluding one of the Senior leaders who is currently on maternity leave, we have had 2 junior roles turn over.

What practices and initiatives do you have in place to retain talent and minimise disruption from staff turnover (e.g. training, succession planning, employee engagement) 

We are very much a performance-based culture and support as such.  We invest approximately 4.5% of our revenue on training and development - be that courses, seminars, conferences or education grants.  On top of this we also offer some great cultural 'perks' such as early finishes before a public holiday long weekend, birthday day off, Xmas in July, Thanksgiving lunch, Christmas party celebration day.  For our 'mums' in the team, we pay ongoing superannuation contributions for the entire 12 months of maternity leave, on top of 12 weeks primary carers leave. It’s a small cost to us but makes the world of difference to our people. Our parental leave policy also includes: 5 day's pay for 4 days work when returning to work. 

How do you collaborate with clients and other roster agencies during campaign development and execution? Please provide an example where collaboration delivered a stronger outcome

The word 'Union' in our name is very purposeful.  We don’t profess to be experts at everything but have been lucky enough to make wonderful partnerships through our tenure and will bring these parties to our 'Union' where needed.  Due to this philosophy, we are very open and collaborative when it comes to a client's agency village.  A great example would be with a big data project for Diageo - we brought Howatson & Co in to be our data expert and to build and set up the platform - the results and accountability for all retail work ongoing are phenomenal (underpinning everything that they do and the decisions they make by data).

Which tools, platforms, or processes do you use for briefing, project tracking, and workflow management with clients? How do these improve efficiency

Due to our transparency principle we facilitate everything through SharePoint and all of our clients have full access to these project folders.  Be that for file storage and file sharing, WIP's, running budgets, full production documents, creative responses, finished art files etc.  

We also operate off Teams, Monday.com, Slack and Figma.

How do you capture learnings from campaigns and feed them back into future activity? Please provide an example of how you improved efficiency, quality, or innovation through review and refinement.

As our philosophy is about creating great & measurable work, we are true to our word.  Every campaign from a shopper led promotion to an experiential activation is measured, tracked, and reported.  Every new brief then represents or reviews any previous campaign findings and M&E as we are constantly looking to improve / optimise / grow.  A perfect example of this is through our Diageo Data Dashboard which we built - it tracks the success of each of our shopper campaigns down to brand, specific promotional activity, banner or down to store level. This dashboard also measures store execution and compliance over campaign live window. 

Provide an overview of how your company would resource the Asahi account

If successful and obviously depending on the agreed scope of work, we would build a dedicated account service team and then allocate dedicated time for strategy, creative, design & finished art (pending the ask and deliverables of the SOW). Where possible and to ensure greatest efficiencies, we would want to dedicate our design team members to certain brands etc. - this ensures brand ownership and IP remains and is consistent - we want out design team to be brand custodians for the Asahi brands and to hold knowledge and IP. In terms of production, in most cases we would service on an ad hoc basis unless a full-time resource is required.

Share your approach to the briefing and response process

Every client has a different approach to briefing. We find the most collaborative way is to get us involved as soon as possible - in a lot of cases the best results come from writing the brief together. Every project that passes through our agency benefits from a holistic approach to creative and planning. That is, considering the most relevant brand, consumer and customer context rather than viewing any one component in isolation.  We start every brief by interrogating the client’s commercial objectives and brand strategy - not just the activation task. Our approach, called “From Intent to Impact”, translates upstream brand intent into downstream activation impact.

Our model is built on matching agendas - between brand, retailer, and shopper - to ensure every activation drives shared value. We interpret brand strategy through commercial and customer lenses, identifying the behaviours, occasions and conversion moments that move the dial.  This thinking shaped our “Owning the Moment” framework. We translate the brand ambition into a retail and shopper strategy that educates shopper, elevates the category, and creates joint value with retail partners.

Strategic principle: 1. Start with business intent. 2. Match agendas (brand x retailer x shopper). 3. Translate into activation impact that sells and scales.

We can work closely with the Asahi day to day contacts crafting appropriate briefing templates for the different brief types required & when receiving new briefs will always chat through initial kick off in person, work through any Q&A on the brief and then share a simplified one pager (Return Brief) back for alignment on direction prior to strategy and creative kicking off.