Changing the Marketing Game: Technology and the Gig Economy

Daryn Smith is the Cofounder and Director of Mpull, a full-service inbound marketing-technology agency serving South African companies and, to a greater extent, partnering with and supporting agencies from around the world. Mpull has 50 employees as of this interview and is a Diamond HubSpot Partner.

Working together at Verizon, Mpull founders, Daryn Smith and Graeme Wilson saw a huge waste of marketing dollars. Six years ago, they started Mpull with the dream of having a Software as a Service business, providing a software for managing marketing and tracking return on investment. The company pivoted into an agency when they discovered that this type of product was already offered by a number of MarTech providers. Software as a service still remains a long-term goal.

In this interview, Daryn talks about technology's impact on marketing . . . many brands are replacing work that agencies used to do for them with marketing technology software . . . and getting faster, better results with more scalability. The result? Fewer brands are interested in signing long-term retainers.

Daryn presented ""Why Agencies Need to Pay Attention to the Gig Economy" at HubSpot's Inbound 2018 conference. In a gig economy, you only pay for what you need, when you need it, and where you need it. Daryn sees a big trend in this direction. So who needs it?

Much of what marketing agencies have done in the past can be done today with software . . . better, faster, and with greater scalability. With software "lifting" much of the load, many brands are starting to build "in-house agencies" The result? Fewer brands want to sign long-term retainers with marketing agencies.

But, just as one marketing agency rarely excels in all aspects of marketing, software cannot do everything.

When Mpull started getting "a lot of small project requests," the administrative overhead made an hour project massively complicated and expensive. Daryn realized the growing gig economy needed an easy way for agencies to engage with brands on a gig basis, with integrated payment processing and administrative functions, brand-to-service provider matching, and the ability to start work immediately

Because Mpull works with a lot of agencies, Daryn was also aware that highly-skilled agency staff still pull salaries, even when they are "on the bench." How could Mpull give its agency partners around the world an additional way to make revenue when their employees weren't busy?

Daryn describes Mpull's "On The Bench" platform, which manages gig administrivia overhead, enables agencies to engage in the gig economy, and provides agencies with "burst capacity" when needed. He talks about the policies needed to protect your client base, managing rates to prevent commoditizing services and a consequent "race to the bottom," and how to maintain a base of recurring revenue.

Daryn can be reached by email on the company website: Mpull.com, at @darynsmith on Twitter, and on Linked at (https://www.linkedin.com/in/darynsmith/). The "On The Bench" website is: onthebench.io.