Hello,
Welcome to hi, tech. 123!
Weāve got a special edition today, all about Togetherr. Itās a new company from Fiverr and no, my ārā is not stuck. And no, I havenāt gone all pirate.
As youāll know, I have my gripes with the ad agency world. On occasion, I have referenced said gripes for comic effect.
But on a slightly more serious note, we can likely all agree that the old-fashioned āretainer-basedā business model isnāt fit for purpose in advertising these days.
Everybody loses:
š The clients: Increased pressure on budgets; stuck with an āAgency of Recordā that canāt adapt. Something has to give, and often that thing is quality.
š The agencies: Under pressure to grow at a time when client budgets are decreasing and overheads are increasing. Something has to give, etc.
š The talent: Well, they end up doing lots of unsatisfying work due to the above.
So I spoke to Amir Guy, the founder of Togetherr and former CEO of Grey in Tel Aviv, and Roi Gold, who will lead the Togetherr product.
Guy noted that they are not disrupting the advertising ecosystem, namely because it has already been disrupted. The modern world has seen to that.
Instead, Togetherr is working with the new world of data, technology, and talent to build a platform that works for all parties. By cutting out the middlemen, the budget goes further towards creating great work.
As you can imagine, I was intrigued.
The Togetherr solution
Youāll be familiar with Fiverrās work. But if not: Itās a freelance services marketplace where you can hire someone to complete a task. Fiverr is effective and cheap for individual jobs, but itās not quite where a high-end advertiser would go to run a full campaign.
Togetherr has a more elevated value proposition. On our call, it was described to me as āfantasy football meets advertisingā. Instead of running laborious pitch processes and arranging cumbersome in-person meetings, clients use Togetherr to get work done at digital speed.
Clients can specify their challenge, their deadline, their budget, and much more, then Togetherrās āCreative Genomeā AI matches these requirements to the most suitable talent.
If that sounds nice-but-vague, Iāve got a little more on the Creative Genome later.
But for now, letās say the AI pairs people with each other to fit the brief and budget. The āfantasyā bit for the client is that they can pick their own team, from an approved set of experienced professionals.
There are over 1000 creatives and 30 micro-independent agencies on-board already.
I asked Guy which side of the platform (Clients or Talent) he wanted to focus on first, and his response was unequivocal. The talent has to come first.
In fact, he stressed that the ad world needs to ālove what we do and how we do itā.
That could sound like an obvious observation, but it is significant for a couple of reasons.
Togetherr looks, at first glance, to be a huge threat to the industryās status quo. Yet Guy envisages a world where agencies work with the platform, not against it. After all, agencies could handle more diverse briefs if they could plug talent gaps on a project basis at short notice. And they already do employ a lot of freelancers, so this would give them access to Togetherrās talent and technology.
Second, other platforms that have tried to tackle this challenge have focused on the client side before the talent. āGet the money and then figure out how to do the jobā, would be another way of putting it.
For its part, Togetherr involved hundreds of industry professionals in the design process, and Guy says they were in contact with creatives every day during the build.
By focusing on the talent, Togetherr can then attract great clients. And the budgets on Togetherr start at an average of about $50,000, so that trust is essential.
Naturally, this does entail other potential challenges.
For example, is it possible to keep a large roster of great professionals engaged without a steady stream of work?
Will advertising agencies really embrace a model that highlights some of their own weaknesses?
How can Togetherr convince clients to part with sizeable budgets on an online platform?
Gold mentioned that the team knows where āthe technology should stop and the human interactions should begin.ā This is crucial for client education, as well as talent management.
So how does the talent-focused approach manifest itself on Togetherr?
For a start, creatives set their own rates and Togetherr does not take a cut of these fees. The platformās fees are paid by the clients.
The vetting process is manual at the moment and Guy wants to keep the standard high. Creatives will want to see well-known, respected colleagues on the platform to ensure them that itās worth their own time .
Each individual has a profile where they can show off their work and awards. They can also identify other creatives they would like to work with in future.
The look of the profiles is more āThe Dotsā than Hubspot:
When a brief comes in, the Creative Genome finds links between different people in the network. Gold explained that this uses a combination of explicit and inferred information.
For example, creatives can specify their preferred partnerships, but the technology will also identify overlaps in the working histories of different people. So, it would pick up that they worked at the same agency, or that they have worked mainly in the automotive industry, and so on.
Guy maintains that the central idea here is for creatives to get down to producing exceptional work.
He is confident that when you cut out all the extraneous challenges of agency life, great professionals can fulfil any brief in weeks, not months. The working cycles on Togetherr are based on sprints with clear deadlines and client checkpoints, too.
The client view
Itās well-worn trope that agencies will pitch with one team, then implement with a different, cheaper one. But on Togetherr, you can see that youāre getting what you pay for.
On our call, Gold did show me a little more behind-the-scenes than this screenshot suggests, but it gives a simplified idea of what the client can see when picking their team:
Togetherr gives the client a few team options to begin with, then they can pick and edit the best option for their brief.
The briefing process is much more intensive than on typical freelance marketplaces. Personally, I think standardising the creative brief in this way would do the whole industry a huge favour.
Once the client selects their team, there is an onboarding call and the team gets down to work. They then check off milestones as they go, with time built in for any required amendments.
You can see here that the timeframes are comparatively short - the project is completed in a matter of weeks:
I asked if there were plans to expand beyond this type of work into performance marketing in future.
Digital advertising is, as you know, terrible. Too many clients split out creative/brand from performance, but this āfantasy footballā approach could bring better creative work into performance channels as part of one team.
Guy says itās a possibility. If all goes well with this platform, Iād recommend that as a next target.
In conclusion: Togetherr
Iāve kept it to one side until this point but as some of you will know, I worked at a company that sort-of does something like this for digital marketing. Thatās what really caught my attention here, because I love the idea and I do want to create a proper alternative to the existing model.
I was impressed by what I saw and Iām excited by what comes next here. It is a thoughtful, informed approach to a tangled set of problems.Ā
Togetherr is asking the right questions. Now weāll see if the industry is ready for the answers.
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