Sinch Engage partners with Nova’s Fear & Greed for rebrand campaign via Assembled Media

Independent media agency Assembled Media has been appointed by global customer communications company Sinch to lead media strategy and buying in Australia, with its first campaign marking the rebrand of MessageMedia to Sinch Engage.

MessageMedia has been Australia’s market leader in business messaging for more than two decades. Acquired by Sinch in 2021, it now moves under the global brand as Sinch Engage, bringing the local platform into Sinch’s worldwide network of 200,000 customers and more than one trillion customer interactions a year, while keeping the same team and the same products.

The campaign platform, ‘Global Reach. Local Legends.’, puts the Australian team at the centre of the story. The creative features the people who have built and supported the business locally, framing the rebrand as an upgrade rather than a takeover.

Luke Fitzpatrick, Head of Digital and Innovation at Assembled Media, said: “A rebrand of a category leader is one of the hardest jobs in media. You have to hold on to everything customers already trust while telling them something has changed.”

He continued: “‘Global Reach. Local Legends.’ does that in four words. Global scale behind them, the same local people in front of them. Our job was to build a plan that lands that message with Australian businesses in the places they already pay attention.”

The integrated campaign spans large format out of home, radio and podcast, digital and programmatic, paid social, search and trade press.

Gwen Lafage, VP Brand at Sinch, said: “Most rebrands ask customers to give something up. This one doesn’t. The team Australian businesses have worked with for two decades is the same team, and they now have a global network behind them. ‘Global Reach. Local Legends.’ isn’t a line we invented in a room. It’s a description of what this business actually is.”

At the centre of the plan is a partnership with Nova Entertainment’s daily business podcast Fear & Greed, built by Assembled Media as a bespoke content series rather than a standard sponsorship. Fear & Greed is producing a run of custom episodes featuring Sinch Engage subject matter experts, with each interview researched and shaped around the questions Australian business owners are actually asking about messaging.

The first episode features Paul Diamond, Sinch Engage’s SMB expert, on where messaging and automation genuinely save time for small business, and where human interaction still matters. The series is supported by host reads across Nova’s business programming.

Fitzpatrick said the Fear & Greed partnership was deliberately built as content rather than advertising: “A fifteen second read tells someone a name has changed. A full episode with a genuine expert tells them why it matters to their business. Fear & Greed’s audience is exactly who Sinch Engage serves, and the hosts are trusted so long form conversation does the work for us.”

Lafage added: “The easy thing to do with a rebrand is shout the new name louder. That helps nobody. We would rather put our own experts in front of business owners and answer the questions they actually have about messaging, from consent rules to scam impersonation. If people come away understanding their own business better, the name takes care of itself.”

The appointment continues a period of growth for Assembled Media, which has added a series of national accounts over the past twelve months on the strength of senior hands-on service and media planning built around behaviour change.

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