James Cooper joined Ursa with extensive project marketing experience across leading property brands in Australia and New Zealand including Investa, Macquarie RE Equities Fund and Investec.
He also ran his own property magazine called Property Today, a free fortnightly subscription magazine aimed at medium to large organisations in the Sydney market.
His remit at Ursa was to start a property division and add another string to Ursa Communications’ successful “bow”, which until that time had been predominantly achieved with pharmaceutical clients and computer industry giants.
Commercial Property and Property Developers were generally only offered advertising solutions by traditional ad agencies who would operate their accounts in the same way they would run every other piece of business; staff heavy and with cumbersome traffic management processes.
Developers and commercial agents who worked within fast turnaround times for weekly ad placements were dissatisfied by the level of service on offer, considering it to be plagued with inefficiency and high operating costs that meant they paid premium rates for sub-standard services.
In 2006, Ursa was approached by CB Richard Ellis to pitch for the project marketing accounts of 9 franchise businesses across their network, covering New South Wales and Victoria. James immediately saw huge advantages in partnering with the leading property campaign technology, CampaignTRACK, to both compliment and marry together the capabilities of Ursa’s creative communications agency with Workstreams property marketing know how.
CB Richard Ellis, the world’s leading real estate brand, chose Ursa Communications to handle advertising in NSW and Victoria for their commercial property group.
CB Richard Ellis franchise owners were dissatisfied with the service they had been receiving from their existing ad agency and third-party suppliers, therefore Ursa Metropolis were asked to provide a full review of their advertising, print, signage, magazine and project marketing needs and find best-of-breed solutions.
Workstream Solutions became the winning draw card. Workstream licensed Ursa Metropolis both an operational job tracking system, JobTRACK Studio, and a client facing web solution, CampaignTRACK. For the first time, CBRE staff were able to submit bookings and undertake their own design of standardised campaign elements such as brochures, mail cards and ad placements in publications such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Financial Review.
One key advantage of the system, which solved problems previously encountered by other advertising agencies, was the ability for clients to create mock-ups of campaign elements (artwork designs) as part of the sales pitch to development agencies. This meant that this non-fee generating work could be pushed back to CBRE staff to manage without the involvement from Ursa staff who instead concentrated on live project marketing campaigns.
The partnership between Ursa Metropolis and Workstream Solutions went beyond technology, with three Workstream Project Management working onsite for a six week period to help bed down the new department and CBRE account.
Workstream’s main areas of assistance included:
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“CampaignTrack has streamlined the way we interact with our clients on high volume template based accounts. The efficiencies and time saved by managing these campaigns via the system has led to a huge improvement in the consistency of our clients brand and the service we are able to offer, especially those clients with multiple offices/franchises.”
Mei-ling McCabe
Account Director, Ursa