The Total Payment Solution for MAGNET Global Agencies

FastPay, an AvidXchange company, streamlines your invoice-to-pay process reducing friction and unlocking revenue for buyers and sellers across the media buying landscape. We invest in solutions that add value to MAGNET Global agencies, including:

Increased Revenue

→ Largest media supplier database resulting in highest revenue share

Invoice Management

→ Invoice reconciliation tools that help agencies keep track of invoices and resolve issues when they arise

Innovation

→ Proprietary software and extensive supplier payment data that allows us to continuously innovate and meet the needs of media agencies

Service & Transparency

→ Payment follow-up, regular account analysis with recommendations, and personalized attention from our client success team

In 2022, FastPay helped MAGNET agencies:

→ Signi cantly improve workflow at scale by automating 14,000+ transactions to 2,000+ suppliers

→ Earn over $540,000 in revenue share

→ Provide a 25% average lift on revenue-share versus incumbent payment solutions

Ask our team for a complimentary analysis of your media spend over the last 12 months to illustrate how our expertise translates into higher revenue for you. For more information, email Theresa Contario at tcontario@avidxchange.com.

Happy Spring, Fellow MAGNET Members!

2023 has started out challenging, to say the least. We, like many of you I’m sure, are experiencing the “death by a thousand cuts” of a brutal budget season. We have not lost any clients, but the cumulative effect of the budget cuts sure feels like it. To that end, I just gave a speech at SXSW on Strategies for a Brutal Budget Season. Here’s a link to the speech in case you have some time to review it.

Fortunately, we increased our rates twice last year to accommodate the increase in payroll that was realized during the first and second quarters last year. That pricing increase is just now catching up with our clients’ 2023 SOWs, so we feel somewhat fortunate that the budget reductions aren’t hitting us as dramatically as they would have without those increases.

The WFH/hybrid/distributed workforce environment is not changing any time soon. We continue to do what we can to bring people together when we feel it is most necessary. Most of the employee response has been, “I’ll come in when there is a reason to; otherwise why should I commute to do Teams calls? I can do that from home.” It’s hard to argue with that logic. So, we remain flexible like everyone else and do what we can to foster our culture.

I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone in Park City. In the meantime, please enjoy this work that we recently launched for our Ditto™ client (joint venture between JOANN stores and SINGER® sewing machines).

My best,

Nancy Hill, Chief Executive Officer

Ditto™ is a new, unknown brand with a new, unknown product that is the first disruptive sewing technology in 160 years. Ditto combines digital projection with powerful software to make sewing patterns paperless, customizable, and adaptable to specific body measurements – all in real time. But how do we let sewists know Ditto exists? We drop in on New York Fashion Week with two big activations.

First, we hosted an all-day event in SoHo to reach key players in the sewing and fashion world who would help build early buzz for Ditto, and amplify the event experience beyond those four walls.

Ditto’s magic comes to life when sewists can get a hands -on look at the technology, so we designed three different sessions where guests could try Ditto for themselves, tailoring each one to a key audience for the new brand: fashion design schools, media, and New York-area sewists and makers. Attendees tested out the Ditto ecosystem, met with Ditto designers, and heard from early users of the product: the brand’s seven influencer partners (and counting) secured by Marcus Thomas.

Meanwhile, for two nights, Ditto took over key street corners with guerilla projections – digital billboards that demonstrated Ditto’s empowering, inclusive and forwardlooking technology with messaging in direct opposition to the limited standards of beauty and elitism that are typical of Fashion Week fare. Together, the event and projections helped Ditto reach hundreds of thousands of consumers within the brand’s audience, specifically earning attention and praise across social media, with the brand’s social following growing organically by more than 1,000% in the first 24 hours.

Hello and Happy Spring,

We’ve had a busy start to the year. For the clients we serve, it is annual planning and industry event season.

As co-founders of the Cattle Feeders Hall of Fame, we produced the annual awards ceremony and dinner at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association convention. The event is supported and promoted throughout the animal pharma industry. This year’s event was the largest to date with nearly 600 guests.

We produce activations at the National Farm Machinery Show and Mid-South Farm & Gin Show for clients including GSI, Kinze Manufacturing and Bayer seed brands DEKALB and Deltapine.

Commodity Classic, the largest indoor agricultural trade show, took place March 9-11. We produced and activated several incredible farmer experiences for National Corn Growers Association, United Soybean Board and Bayer seed brands DEKALB®, Asgrow®, Deltapine® and WestBred®.

For the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, our experiential team helped bring the brand to life at their annual convention and trade show. We’ve added a few new clients.

We’ve expanded our business with Bayer Crop Science on the launch of their ForGround platform. ForGround leverages The Bayer Carbon program to assist farmers in transitioning to sustainable agricultural practices.

We will also begin work with Pivot Bio, a progressive fast-growing microbial nitrogen for food production.

Pivot Bio engaged OBP for brand-building and channel initiatives with their various stakeholders.

We’ve added some awards.

Our integrated campaign “Field of Dreams” work for DEKALB seed brand won two regional American Advertising Awards (ADDYs). Work across four other clients also won 13 regional awards from the National Agri-Marketing Association.

On the tourism side, we continued to achieve incredible milestones for the Missouri Division of Tourism for the “That’s My M-O” campaign , winning five HSMAI Adrian Awards for excellence in travel marketing.

To date, the campaign has earned more than 30 industry awards — a groundbreaking achievement.

It doesn’t stop there. Once we knew our beloved Kansas City Chiefs were headed to the big game, we made sure Mo was part of it. We developed a Super Bowl ad buy and we debuted our new creative during the broadcast. Please take a look at it in our work highlights.

We’re marking an agency milestone.

OBP celebrates 35 years in the noble pursuit of possibility this spring. On April 1, we’re celebrating by hosting a client and employee open house and attending a St. Louis Cardinals game.

I am so proud of our achievements and grateful for all the clients who entrusted us with their brands and helped us reach this milestone. We are stronger and o ur w o rk i s b e t t er be c a u s e o f t h e co mm i tme n t s o f our t e a m a n d t h e a gen cy p a rtners hi p s w e ’ v e f o r ge d a l ong t h e j our n e y

Su z a n w i ll be j o inin g y o u a ll i n P ar k Ci t y I a m u na ble t o a t t e nd i n per s o n but k n o w i t w ill be a r em a r k a ble M AG NE T Summ i t

C heer s ,

Rhonda Ries

C AN ’ T S T O P, W ON ’ T S T O P.

Th i s y e a r, OB P c el e b r a t es 35 y ears of s e r v i n g s o m e o f t h e in du st r y ’ s be st cl i en t s .

C ELEB R ATI NG T HE I NDU ST R Y ’ S BES T

Th e n e w Cat t l e F e e de r s H al l of F am e w e bs i t e f eat u r es an in t e r a c t i v e t i meli n e ce l eb r a t in g t h e o r g a n i z a t i o n ’ s r ic h hi s t o r y.

F o ll o w ing i t s deb ut on a d v e r t i s in g ’ s b i g g e st s tag e , t h e n e w “ T ha t ’ s M y M -O” c am p a i g n r olls ou t t his s p r in g

Operating Profit: Down Business Volume: Up

Dear MAGNET friends,

Business Trend: Up

As I write this note, we are in the midst of major changes at the agency. We made it through 2022, replacing the revenue from the loss of our biggest account in Q1, and we’re finally focused on looking forward. Two separate initiatives at Response Media will transform us by the end of 2023.

First, we’re going through a full repositioning journey. We’ve been dragging our feet for years on properly articulating our value to specifically targeted verticals, and it’s finally time to focus. We’re “going for it” in our key targeted verticals, Consumer Packaged Goods and Multi-Location Retail. By mid-year, we’ll be rolling out new positioning, value props, and services focused on the needs of those specific businesses. We’ll finally be investing in our own marketing, biz dev and restaffing these areas. Our goal is to make us fully irresistible to brands in those industries by packaging the right combination of our proven data-led services that drive outsized results for marketers in CPG and Multi-Location.

We’re not just changing how we position and package, but adding new services, such as retail media and promotional media, which will appropriately flank and support our core capability – helping brands grow by maximizing the value of connected first-party data through a bespoke relationship platform. It has been an interesting journey thus far, and there is nothing sacred – we might even end up renaming the agency or spinning-off vertical focuses into separate businesses.

Second, we’re putting a renewed focus on what truly makes us great – our people. We’ve brought on a few new faces that will help in our transformation. We announced major changes to the staff development approach and employee wellness, which we hope will both improve our employees’ experiences at Response Media and secure their place here for longer and more fulfilling tenures. Among these new benefits – we’ve decided to pick up 100% of their individual healthcare cost, introduced a couple of mental health days into our annual calendar, and announced a $1,000 professional development stipend each team member can use to enhance their development. We’re putting a renewed focus on career pathing for each department and individual (which isn’t an easy task for a 35-person firm).

Last, we’re sticking with a hybrid work environment – everyone comes into the office on Tuesdays + one additional day each week of their choosing, then work from home the other 3 days of the week. We have seen that this offers the best of both worlds, providing the right balance of collaboration and convenience. Of course, this will continue to evolve but seems to feel right at this time.

I’m eager to see you and learn from you in Park City. Can’t wait to collaborate and discuss what’s working (and not) for you.

Warmly, Josh