‘Nobody is really doing this’: Ex-Meta creative director launches ‘mobile-first’ creative brand agency
Jay Morgan
A new creative brand agency has officially launched, with a mission of redefining advertising for a mobile-first world.
Jay Morgan, creative partner and founder, told Mumbrella it was time for advertising to flip the switch and re-think their creative ideas.
Founded by Morgan, former creative director and strategist at Meta, POPULA has been designed to evolve brand advertising beyond the television screen, and switch the focus to the most dominant screen in our lives – the mobile phone.
Prior to his three year stint at the tech giant, Morgan spent the better part of two decades at various leading creative agencies and companies, including The Monkeys, Havas, VML, Austereo, and more.
“I started to see the gap in terms of what we were offering and what the clients needed, and also the massive shift to mobile by the audiences,” he told Mumbrella.
“And then I had this big light bulb moment, of ‘wow this is where the audience is now.'”
He argued that agency partners aren’t giving brands what they need to thrive in today’s world… enter POPULA.
“Nobody is really doing this,” he explained. “In my experience, agencies would always present a TV script first thing, even if the campaign wasn’t for TV.
“But even when we’re watching TV nowadays, we’re sitting using our phones at the same time. We have our phones with us all the time. On the train, we’re all on our phones; walking down the street, we’re all on our phones; it’s the way we communicate. But we’re still not thinking with a mobile-first approach to marketing?”
Jay Morgan
He stressed that the philosophy of mobile-first does not mean only social media.
“The mobile phone is the primary device that connects our world, connects us to other people, where we consume the majority of content, it’s essentially how we run our lives – it’s so much more than just social media,” he told Mumbrella.
“Traditional channels aren’t going anywhere, because they still have a place. It’s just about trying to flip the thinking – the audience is now very phone focused in the way they live and what they expect from brands, and content, and how they engage with that content, so it’s about flipping marketing culture to adapt to that.”
POPULA has already completed work for a variety of brands, including BHP, Canva, Meta, Quad Lock, Red Cross, BIG W, Woolworths Group and Mindset Health. It recently assisted in Commonwealth Bank’s ‘Yello’ campaign – collaborating with creative agency Brand+Story.
“Brand+Story had a really solid TV campaign idea, but wanted to create bespoke mobile-first pieces of content, so they brought us in…and we’ve heard since then that it’s been a really successful campaign for CommBank, one of their best in recent years,” Morgan said.
“We’re going to see more brands and clients like CommBank start benefitting more when thinking mobile-first, in terms of the storytelling and the speed of brand message, and things like that.”
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Creative agencies have been doing mobile-first creative assets poorly for decades too.
The market seems to be heading towards agency consolidation rather than diversification so will be interesting to see how many clients are keen to add another agency to the roster specifically for mobile-first creative.
As a marketer I can say that most of our work starts with TV-first thinking and it’s hard to break agencies out of that approach.
This feels like a interesting approach to developing creative that can live and perform better in the places our audiences are spending their time.
You have the lightbulb moment only recently? Seriously, places like Asia have been mobile-first for decades.
Congrats Jay! Looking forward to seeing you flourish mate
Love to see a new indie launch and wishing Jay every bit of luck in the highly competitive market, however there are several agencies that have been doing this for a long long time – WeAreSocial, Snackdrawer VaynerMedia, HelloSocial all come to mind immediately. I think the days of putting up a tv script first are long over (unless you’re an old old legacy agency where this is still fairly common). With the utmost respect, I can’t see how this offering is any different to the aforementioned agencies but I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out nonetheless.