Building brands through a modern lens

Pictured above: Wendy Thompson.

Wendy Thompson is a highly successful entrepreneur and business owner with ambitious goals and an enviable track record for building brands across the globe.

It has been more than eight years since NZBusiness took a deep dive into the world of Wendy Thompson. In 2016, when her Auckland-based social media business Socialites graced the magazine’s cover, it was already a leader in the social media marketing space.

Back then the likes of Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram ruled social media and were influencing a new breed of young marketers. However, social media was still generally viewed by advertisers and agencies as an interesting “on the side” add-on to traditional marketing channels.

“Nine years ago marketing managers might allocate the last two percent of an advertising budget to social [media],” recalls Wendy. “Today, and this has always been my vision, many companies are going social first. They use social platforms to hone their marketing and then bring it ‘through the line’. They might test out three or four different messages on social media, and whichever message works best is then used on traditional media such as billboards, TV or radio.”

Today, Wendy says 90 percent of people look to social channels first for cultural information and to follow trends. Fuelled by the Covid pandemic, social media has quickly become the platform of choice and social commerce is now an important priority for most marketers.

From awkward teenager to mature adult

In the early days social media was like an awkward teenager just working things out, explains Wendy. Now it’s a mature adult. “It knows its power in the market, it knows what it’s doing and how it fits into the world. And with the arrival of AI it has also triggered the next social industrial revolution.”

Wendy sits on several boards and has seen AI’s impact from both a business owner’s perspective and at a governance level.

“AI is very powerful and will revolutionise every single industry, but it’s only just getting started. Even if it didn’t evolve from what it is today, it would still take us three years to work out the full capability of what AI can do.”

Wendy believes we don’t know the true value of AI technology but can use it to make existing technology better and more efficient.

Like social media, her business has also grown and matured over the past nine years. Melanie Spencer joined as a business partner in 2019, and together they expanded from pure social media, adding more specialised modern advertising skills to their client offering and rebranded as Thompson Spencer in 2023.

A taste for acquisition

Wendy says her skillsets and Melanie’s are very complementary. They were co-CEOs during the pandemic, but today Melanie has assumed that role while Wendy looks to grow the business in other ways.

During Covid they made their first acquisition with influencer agency The Social Club. This proved successful and gave Wendy and Melanie a taste for acquisition. They discovered they had a talent for buying complimentary specialist companies and successfully merging cultures by retaining the best features of each organisation.

In 2022 they purchased Flying Tiger, which opened the door to a very specialised branch of advertising, away from normal Western platforms, and specifically targeting Chinese consumers living in Western countries.

The Flying Tiger acquisition also made sense because China is five to 10 years ahead when it comes to digital advertising and commerce, says Wendy.

Digital advertising has increasingly become sophisticated, involving full-scale productions, so the next target was a suitable video production and accredited media agency. Magnesium was subsequently purchased, and now they have “an amazing team of producers, directors, production and media experts” contributing to the overall team.

At the same time, they also acquired talent agency People of Influence.

The latter was a strategic move, Wendy explains. “We needed to understand what it’s like to be a talent in the world we’re going into right now.”

Wendy and Melanie’s vision was for a purpose-built, new-age advertising agency that could handle all modern advertising skills and specialisations under one roof.

“Modern advertising requires very specialist skills across a range of channels, and to get the best results these specialists need to be talking to each other every day,” explains Wendy. “We have done this by strategically bringing together the best of the best under the Thompson Spencer brand.”

Industry seems to be liking this vision with Thompson Spencer clients now including Bupa, Wattyl (AU/NZ), Asahi, Honda, Mitre 10, and Auckland Transport.

Thompson Spencer’s latest move is a merger with performance specialist agency Reason. “We can now confidentially provide a world-leading full-funnel end-to-end advertising service for our clients”, says Wendy.  “We were always brilliant at creating strong demand and brand love for our clients, Reason is the best in the world at converting that demand into sales at the till.

“We are not a generalist agency that does everything averagely, we are a collection of modern advertising specialists, that work together to create the very best results – from TikTok to TV, cars to toilet paper!”

Helping brands find their way

Comeback brand stories are a particular specialty of Melanie and Wendy’s agency. Brands that used to be well-liked but have perhaps lost their way.

They also enjoy assisting brands that have ‘OK’ traditional advertising but want to step it up a level to something more “brave and modern and cool”, as Wendy describes it.

Vitaco’s Musashi brand is one such example, which involved a clever activation promo campaign linking Barcelona and Auckland during the 2024 America’s Cup in Spain.

“We achieved major coverage, brand love and lots of new customers for our client from that campaign,” she recalls.

Wendy also talks about the importance of authenticity when it comes to advertising nowadays.

“With your advertising messaging you must be authentic, or you’ll get quickly caught out. We have the advantage because we started out as a social media agency ahead of everyone else.

So we have that commitment to authenticity inbuilt into our DNA.”

Why strong online communities are vital

On the topic of what’s up ahead for marketers to think about, Wendy says that until now, for marketers, it has been all about how your brand places on Google. “But we think it will now be how you’re placed on the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and other AI-based search models.”

Looking ahead, she can envisage a huge change in how we all use the Internet to find stuff. “We’ll all have virtual personal assistants to search for things, so brands need to optimise for that.”

Thanks to AI and generative learning, the way people and products are found on the Internet is changing rapidly and success will come from just how strong your digital and social presence is. Therefore, having a really strong online community is more important than ever in 2025, explains Wendy.

“Marketers are now thinking, it’s no longer a case of ‘how do we show up on the first page of Google, but how do we get first mention on ChatGPT?”

She believes the biggest mistake a lot of people are still making is not taking community management seriously and simply treating social media like a broadcasting channel. “People still want to have a conversation with you and you need to encourage them.”

As well as assisting marketers to achieve more social horsepower, AI can also help with automating repetitive work, so you have time to do more meaningful tasks, she says.

Thompson Spencer has a focus on efficiency and, even before AI’s arrival, boasted a full-time development team tasked with automating and removing the agency’s admin. This frees everybody up to be, in Wendy’s words, “just creative and amazing”.

However, Wendy reassures her team that while robots may be taking over some jobs, there’s no cause for alarm because it’s only the boring bits.

“The goal is for us to be the most efficient agency out there, get the best out of our people and give our clients our best work.”

Exciting times for entrepreneurs

The world is Wendy and Melanie’s focus in 2025. They believe that if Thompson Spencer can thrive in New Zealand during a recession, then they can do the same in other world markets.

They currently have campaigns for their clients running in 74 countries. They’ve also established an office in Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington and London and are about to open one in the Middle East.

For Wendy life is not about to slow down either. “I absolutely love what I do,” she says. “And I’m so grateful for the experiences I’ve had over the past 15 years as an entrepreneur, and serving on the boards of some very cool companies.”

Her advice for other entrepreneurs is to always surround yourself with supporters who understand what you’re going through. “It’s not an easy path being an entrepreneur.”

She says she’s grateful for the personal and business support she receives through the Entrepreneurs Organisation, as well as a group of fellow “wonder women” she meets with regularly.

So, what would be the ultimate goal for this high-achieving entrepreneur to realise in the next nine years?

Wendy says she would love to be involved in a billion dollar company, ideally as a founder or at least an early board member and investor. She also believes AI will be a great enabler of successful Kiwi companies.

“The Kiwi ‘number 8’ mentality is perfectly in line with how to get the best out of this AI revolution. And if our government really leans into support start-ups like it says it will, we could spin out a heap of billion dollar companies from New Zealand.”

Now there’s an audacious plan, and with Wendy’s track record it may well be achievable.

Wendy’s tip: What makes a start-up attractive to investors?

• Does it have a solution to a big problem?
• Is that problem a hard one to solve?
• Does the founder have the X-factor? The ability to keep going when the going gets tough?