I first met Alon Abraham when he and his awesome team from Tag Digital when they came to CreativeCubes.Co to educate our community on the digital landscape

4 years ago, Alon and his co-founder Gary Tenenbaum started their digital agency. Now they are pivoting and re-inventing their brand from Tag Digital to ‘Tag Direct’.

Why? Here is Alon to explain…

All business, big or small, go through moments of pivots. I know I did, hundred of times I had to learn and adjust my ship and pivot. Part of the growth is understanding and leveraging these learning and opportunities.

Always be learning. Check your ego. Do your thing.

Transcript

Alon: I think over 4,000 agencies in Melbourne, or potentially Australia, and how do you become different and that’s why I wanted to chat with you

When you say digital, it’s like, “Oh, what language do you code? What app do you build?” There’s so many agencies out there, so it’s all about finding a difference. So we’re changing, we’re doing a lot of work internally. Just like you, we’re in the service space industry and we always focus on clients before we focus on ourselves.

Tobi: Totally, yeah.

Alon: So right now you’ve been in business for over four years, probably for three or so. Now it’s time to focus on our brand and how we’re different. So what we’re doing is changing actually our name from TAG Digital to TAG Direct. We’re going to be Australia’s first direct agency. What is that?

Exactly.That’s exactly the response we want. The whole idea is that we focus on social, but we work everything on digital. It’s all about when we manage our clients’ social media-

Tobi:  By the way, have you bought the domains?

Alon:  Yes.

Tobi:  Okay.

Alon: All good.

Tobi:  There’s like 40,000 people like…

Alon: With this going live I better, yeah. I do, I’ve got the Instagram handle, got the rest. We’ll be launching in a few days.

Tobi: You migrated that all that across from existing?

Alon: Yeah, essentially. So a whole new websites coming underway, but the whole idea of TAG direct is, when we manage our clients’ social media, we speak to your customers directly. We know what their habits are, what they like to see, when they like to see it and on what platform. The whole idea why you outsource is you save costs in terms of overheads or soup, all that stuff. The fresh perspectives. What’s the other one? And basically just the scale. Instead of hiring that one person, you’ve got a whole team of specialists.

Tobi: Exactly

Alon: Yeah, I know that’s a good question. I honestly, as launching this new branding we’ve done, we’ve never done any work internally and ask those questions. Who do we want to work with? Why do we exist? And finally we got to the bottom of it. So to be able to launch it, speak to people confidently about what we do, how we do, is exciting.

The older you are, the more grey hair you have or the less hair you have, the more of an expert you are. That’s why I find it really exciting to be able to, you know, be around young people because in our industry, the digital and social, it’s completely flipped. So we don’t have to hire these 40 plus with years of experience. We hire those like young guns, digital natives, fresh out of uni or just creative and honour.

Tobi: And current, which is really, really important. You know, there’s a lot of businesses that are leveraging the current trends, but they’re not about the current trends. They’re just there because they feel like they have to be there, but they don’t live it and breathe it. I think some of those businesses are being heavily disrupted at the moment.

Where you look at the guys at YouTube, they built that in a garage and disrupted a whole industry. Right? I actually cut my cable a few months back because a)I don’t watch TV and b) my kids downloading YouTubeKids or Sims on Netflix, right? Everything’s on demand consumption.

I found it really interesting, maybe a few months before I left Los Angeles, I remember a pro football player tweeted the most bizarre thing. He said, “I woke up this morning and my kid asked me, “Daddy, when you turn on the TV today, can I watch the TV show that they tell you you have to watch?”” And he’s like, “I didn’t understand for a minute.” Then it dawned on me that, you know, at seven o’clock hypothetical example, Home and Away is on channel 7. Where if you’re not in front of the TV at seven o’clock the show starts, right? Whether you like it or not. But my kids don’t wait for that. They’re like “Dad, this one’s boring me. Can you search for-” and I can download in an instant. And so this guy was basically articulating that his son thought it was odd that the television channel, or the television network, told you what time you had to be sitting in front of it versus you being able to search and watch.

Alon: What’s that saying like, a dressmaker-shoemaker never? You know that saying?

Tobi: I don’t know anything about shoemakers, except that I like to buy this stuff.

Alon: It’s all about a dressmaker like-