‘Our mission is to work ourselves out of a job’: Former Wired Co heads launch media consultancy
Two former Wired Co media heads have launched a new media consultancy with a “bold” model designed to help brands manage their own paid media and give agencies more flexibility with senior strategic support, Mumbrella can reveal.
Ashley Byers and James Deehan have launched Refinery Room as an “on-demand service”. Speaking exclusively to Mumbrella, they explain they felt a refreshed approach to media consultancy was necessary.
The pair met working at Wired Co, where Byers held roles including head of social and head of paid media, and Deehan was head of digital media and partnerships.
“We’ve got a lot of experience working with brands and agencies, and we just felt like — across everything from the commercial side, like retainers and lock-in contracts, all the way through to agencies servicing brands correctly — something needed to be done differently,” Deehan says.
“Doing the research for this, we realised brands want more autonomy but also agencies need more flexibility. So that’s what Refinery Room provides.”
Ashley Byers and James Deehan
From a brand perspective, Byers said the current client-agency relationship is almost too dependent, and some brands hit a “tipping point” where it’s more effective and efficient to them to manage their paid media in-house.
“We’re here to support that, it’s a natural trend that does happen,” she tells Mumbrella.
“It comes to a point where they’re potentially paying an agency $20,000 or $30,000 a month, but that work could be covered by a couple in-house people. So it often comes down to a cost play.”
She did stress, however, that Refinery Room is not “anti-agency” in its offering to brands. She claimed it is not “actively going out to try and steal agency business,” but instead help brands that are “naturally at that point” internalise their services.
For agencies, particularly those that may be under-resourced, Byers and Deehan will offer support “across the board”, whether that be on a new business pitch, existing clients, or so forth.
The pair described their model as “bold”, particularly because it has no lock-in contracts, no retainers, and “no plans to overstay a consultancy welcome”.
Its core model is that it “doesn’t expect to stay around forever”. In fact, they want to “work [them]selves out of a job”. But Refinery Room won’t simply come in, change things, then exit, leaving the brand or agency in the dark – as Deehan claims most consultancies do.
“There’s a lot of negative connotations with traditional consultancies,” Deehan explains. “They come in, make a lot of change, do a bit of an audit, then they just leave. Whereas for us, it’s about coming in there and really getting deep into these brands — it’s like becoming an extension of their teams.”
He says Refinery Room also taps into a “network of partners” across agencies and freelancers to bring their expertise where he and Byers might be lacking, allowing them to help clients with “everything”.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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