Giving marketers the secret sauce

Good Gravy is promoting itself as a marketer’s ‘secret sauce’ – a nimble team of advertising experts with a recipe for success.

There’s a lot that’s wrong with the traditional agency model, explains Good Gravy founder, Lina Montero Soto (pictured), including high fees to pay for all the overheads and reliance on often overwhelmed interns and inexperienced juniors to do the lion’s share of the work.

So, when she and core team members of the newly branded, indie agency (themselves all alumni of traditional agencies) sat down for a long-overdue chin-wag, they created a plan to establish a business that could tackle creative problems from a marketers’ perspective.

That plan included fair fees and direct access to seasoned advertising professionals.

“We understand that marketers are under enormous pressure; with tightening budgets, growing KPIs, and the need to be so responsive. They need to be able to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. So we help them do that,” explains Lina.

“When you sit down at the table with Good Gravy you can say goodbye to dealing with egos and unnecessary overheads – you’re paying for experienced brains, not flashy bricks and mortar.

We like to think Good Gravy is never the star of the show, it makes everything else shine – including our clients.”

Since taking on their first client as Mágico back in 2017, Good Gravy has been continually perfecting their recipe to help businesses with their marketing conundrums.

They’ve established a proven model, bringing all the right creative ingredients together – brand planners, designers, writers, digital gurus, editors, art directors, PR specialists, strategists and fresh thinkers.

“A wee while ago we realised our name – Mágico – didn’t go far enough to paint a picture of who we’ve become as a full-service marketing provider, it’s about all the right ingredients working in perfect harmony. And that changes with every brief. Good Gravy puts the marketer’s needs first. Understanding their hurdles, bottlenecks, pressure points, audience and their results,” says Montero Soto.

Over the years we’ve developed a model that brings decades of experience with ‘big agency’ processes and combines it with an agile ‘freelance’ mindset to get to the core of marketing problems faster.”

Clients have been lapping up the gravy, giving a thumbs up to the agency’s nimble, flexible and pared down model. “It was so refreshing and rewarding to work with an agency who offered a digital experience that was a) within our budget; b) on brief; and c) with creative and media placement that blew the top off our campaign goals. Good Gravy talk our language and can turn marketing morsels into gourmet meals without the silver service price tag,” says Sue Brewster, Executive Director at Auckland Medical Research Foundation.

Richard Duckworth, Business Segment Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim Animal Health NZ, backs up this sentiment. “The Good Gravy team consistently, and effortlessly deliver top shelf strategic thinking and creative output even (especially) when the pressure is on, and let’s face it the pressure is always on.”