Listen to how a digital agency from a sleepy provincial town developed tech that is set to put marketers in complete control of their most important digital asset, (not their NFT’s) their website! Since the dawn of the internet Ad Agencies and Marketing teams have loved to hate website development. Every morning agencies and marketing folk get up and don armor, select a weapon and corral an army of the bewildered to do battle. They are fighting technology fragmentation, rising infrastructure costs, ballooning overheads, and diminished creative freedoms. These daily skirmishes have forever labeled web development as a price of entry, loss leader. Blutui has set out to change this and I will explain why and how we plan to change the game for advertising agencies of all sizes. The team at Blutui have reimagined the web development process to make multi-site, multi-brand, multi-collaborator and even multi-agency web development something marketers can fall in love with over and over again.

1. MASTER
CLASS
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND ~ AUGUST 24 - 25, 2022
DIGIMARCONNEWZEALAND.CO.NZ | #DigiMarConNZ
Graeme Blake
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
BLUTUI
Do Digital Right
Masterclass

2. From chaos to digital productivity in Adland

4. Story of a cow-town agency with digital chops.
● New project new platform
● New developer new platform
● The Tron ain’t Silicon Valley good devs are thin on the ground.
● Your new Dev has a favourite coding language
● Old platform new problem
● Same story different scale
● This bed’s not quite right - Finding the Goldilocks Zone
Back story of Brandish, PAN and Blutui - the lived experience.

6. TechFrag 1.0
● Every individual has a favourite platform, over time agencies accumulate websites that span many platforms
● No single platform offers all the features an agency needs
● Every platform has pros and cons
● Platform choice has been driven by the developer labour market.
● Successful agencies have more websites and as a result more platform fragmentation.
Imagine for a moment an agency finance dept using MYOB, Xero, Sage and Quickbooks to deliver financial reporting. Chaos.
The hangover of unsuitable tool selections - DIY versus No-Code versus Open Source versus Enterprise.
What do you think clients expect they are being billed for.
If you’re client side - how impressed are you with an agency invoice for a project built in a DIY solution?

8. Cannes in the can
Research confirmed we were not alone in what we already knew. The same issues exist in agencies everywhere.
● Agencies are struggling with digital platform fragmentation
● Large groups like WPP, Publicis and Interpublic are trying to consolidate their digital services across all of their companies.
● In the 2000’s Holding Companies and Agency Networks acquired countless smaller digital agencies and inherited a plethora of different
systems and platforms that were acutely specialist. This has caused a significant tech hangover, production inefficiencies and ballooning
overhead.
● Default technologies (Drupal, WIX, Squarespace, Wordpress et al) are great. They’re universally accepted but so are their limitations and
they are not optimised for client or agency
● No one has yet solved the problem for Adland:
- Coinbase has cracked cryptocurrency portfolio management
- Shopify has cracked e-commerce
- Github has cracked …………….. well, you get the idea
But no one has cracked the agency digital platform yet.
Blutui conducted exhaustive research via Linkedin, Digital marketing forums, User Groups and in-market feet on the ground research. Result - our
experience is not unique, there is an itch that requires scratching.

10. Filing for divorce or bankruptcy - we follow the money
The internal and external vendor relationships and workflows that have lead to Agencies risking solvency or divorcing themselves from
the process entirely.
Good Old Days
Client Brief ---> Account Team ---> Creative Team ---> Output
Now. The situation is considerably more complex:
● Internal development teams
● External Vendors
● Consultants
● Multiple agency, multiple disciplines]
● Agency Group offshore resources and production houses.
● Sub-contractors
Agencies can’t move to a monolithic model in this connected world and they can’t operate productively at scale without contiguous
workflows.
Agencies need the tools that allow them to effortlessly bring the army of Advertising companies together to produce great work.

12. The tyranny of the default
How inertia has played its part in normalising sector-wide inefficiencies.
● Defaults are easy, safe, and seemingly require little effort - You don’t know what you don’t know right?
● The effort caused by default settings in agency is spread out over long time periods so not visible (Frog in the water).
● But it’s there! Under the surface defaults are throwing sand in the gears of progress
● Incremental changes over time build businesses, but the changes are forced on you and you’re at the mercy of another
business (CMS provider).
● How can we have both? Have stability, a good foundation and the freedom to change and incrementally improve?
● Agencies need to move away from the idea that websites need all that scaffolding and user friendly drag and drop. Your
development team don’t (or shouldn’t) need to use an in browser editor.
Inefficiencies serve so few so well - it’s time to unpack the herd mentality.

14. DIY is not enough
You definitely know your paying for professional when you hire an agency. So you expect professional tools.
● Messaging around DIY mass market CMS platforms is all about accessibility ease of use and simplicity
● The website building workflow can be hugely simplified but at a cost. The cost is creative freedom.
● Agencies are all about creativity and free thinking, to do this you need technology that has the scope to deliver on your big idea.
● The commoditisaton of websites is a good thing for society making technology accessible to pretty much everyone. In the same
way as air travel during the 70s became affordable and now millions of people have access to far off destinations.
● Business Class, First Class exist but if you want to arrive on your own terms . . . Private jets exist for a reason.
How does a credible agency expect to be handed an incredible payday using off the shelf DIY tech that the clients kid uses on school
projects.

16. Adlands Billion Dollar Baby
What’s the size of the problem - how is it holding businesses back, driving marketers to despair and what’s with developers retiring at 30?
Current estimates indicate that the North American ad industry loses over a billion dollars per annum as a result of website production
inefficiencies and unrealised revenue. Below are just some of the sources of lost revenue:
● Outsourcing digital to vendors and the inevitable project management inefficiencies and associated lack of connection and
control.
● Unrealised project work through lack of digital presence, agency not even considered by active clients who engage elsewhere as
a result.
● Platform fragmentation and maintenance of legacy sites.
● Acquisition of expensive full-stack teams to deliver on client requests.
● Inefficient digital workflows
To put this number in context $1B annually equates to each agency losing out on just one basic site per month through any of the factors
above.

18. No limits.
The need for an agency sector gold standard that brings dev, PM, KAM and client into the same ecosystem.
We dream of a utopia where you can have:
● A stable default platform as a foundation for your digital work
● Complete creative freedom and boundless opportunity to customize
● Your own digital personality, your agencies je ne sais quoi
● Happy developers and happy account teams.
● An ecosystem of people who understand advertising and understand agencies who are also amazing creatives and developers
● Speed, fast development that delivers high quality projects
● Profitability and Margin
We come from a starting point of understanding the problem and being able to direct all efforts to fixing it. From the ground up, from
2016 to now. No baggage. No limits.