The New Wave ~ Arthur St
The New Wave is Campaign Brief’s Q&A series spotlighting the next generation of independent creative companies and exploring how the indie model is evolving. From structure and speed to culture and capability, we unpack where these businesses are finding their edge and what’s driving client decisions today. Next up is Arthur St.
1. Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?
Arthur St is an independent digital agency based in Geelong, working with ambitious organisations across Australia.
We help organisations make better digital decisions.
That can mean strategy, media, search, social, data, AI, customer experience or figuring out how all of those things should work together. We’ve been doing Google and Meta advertising since before most people called it an ecosystem and we’ve grown up alongside the platforms our clients now rely on.
But the thing that really defines Arthur St is pretty simple: people helping people.
We want our clients to be smarter because they work with us. We want our people to keep learning. And we want some of the capability we’ve built over the years to reach organisations that otherwise wouldn’t have access to it.
That philosophy has shaped everything from our Social Impact Program with Deakin University to our perpetual named fund with the Geelong Community Foundation.
We’re also on our way to becoming B Corp certified. Not because we suddenly decided to become a purpose-led business, but because we realised we’d been building one all along.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
Indies might be becoming the norm but we think the good ones will always be challengers.
It’s a mindset more than a business model.
You’re curious. You’re entrepreneurial. You don’t have ten layers between the problem and the person trying to solve it. And when something doesn’t exist, you have a crack at building it.
And what we love is that independent doesn’t have to mean doing everything yourself.
We regularly see brilliant specialist businesses come together around a client or a problem. Collaboration over competition. You bring the best people to the table rather than trying to manufacture every capability under one roof.
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
We care and we’re restless.
That sounds simple, but it changes how you build an agency.
We don’t have to feed departments or sell a particular solution. We can start with: what would actually make a difference here?
Over the last ten years that’s taken us into new marketing models, digital platforms, data, automation and AI and it means often working on things where there isn’t a neat playbook yet.
That willingness to work things out is becoming more valuable, not less.
Technology is moving so quickly that knowing how things have always been done only gets you so far. You need people who are comfortable asking better questions, testing things and occasionally stumbling their way into something new.
Being small means that we can do that quickly. Being experienced means we know which things are worth chasing.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
AI is giving small, regional agencies a pretty extraordinary opportunity.
It can remove a huge amount of the grunt work around research, analysis, reporting and optimisation, which means our people can spend more time thinking, questioning and advising.
We’re working towards a much more connected model where AI sits across our marketing platforms and data sources, helping our team see what’s happening and what we should be looking at next.
But the bit we’re most interested in isn’t using AI to produce more stuff.
It’s using AI to make better decisions.
And we don’t want that capability to sit only with our team. We run AI training for not-for-profits, small businesses and marketing teams because ultimately our job is to make the organisations we work with more capable, not more dependent on us.
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now – and why?
We were asked for our credentials by a major insurance brand recently, which probably says something about how much the market has changed.
Clients still want experience, rigour and strategic thinking. They just don’t necessarily want all the machinery that traditionally that comes with a big networked agency.
A lot of us in independent agencies have spent years in big agencies, media businesses or client-side roles. The experience hasn’t disappeared because the building got smaller.
What clients get is senior people closer to the work, faster decisions, genuine collaboration and people who care about the outcome.
And there’s a certain “we’ll work it out” energy you get from entrepreneurial businesses.
When everything is changing as quickly as it is now, that becomes pretty valuable.
6. What’s next – growth, staying lean, or something else?
Capability.
That’s probably the thread running through everything we’re building.
We want our team to keep getting better. We want our clients to become more capable. And increasingly, we’re asking how the capability inside an agency like ours can create value beyond our commercial work.
That’s what led to our Social Impact Program.
We kept meeting incredible not-for-profits doing important work without access to the digital capability that larger organisations take for granted. At the same time, graduates need meaningful experience if they’re going to build meaningful careers.
So we put the two together.
Deakin graduates spend a year inside Arthur St working with not-for-profits, surrounded by experienced digital specialists. The organisations get ongoing capability they otherwise may not have been able to access and graduates leave with a year of real work, real clients and real impact behind them.
We’ve applied the same long-term thinking to establishing a perpetual fund with the Geelong Community Foundation.
We’re not particularly interested in growth for growth’s sake. We want the work we do today to continue creating value for years to come.
We’re interested in building an agency where the more successful we become, the more useful we can be.
That feels like a pretty good definition of growth to us.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Today The Brave’s Q&A here
Read Tightknit Studio’s Q&A here
Read Bastion Australia’s Q&A here
Read We Are Different’s Q&A here
Read SICKDOGWOLFMAN’s Q&A here
Read Kill Boring Dead’s Q&A here
Read Oblong Creative’s Q&A here
Read The Many Australia’s Q&A here
Read Bureau of Everything’s Q&A here
Read Art of the Possible ANZ’s Q&A here
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