NZ digital and ecommerce industry heavyweights form new digital agency ‘Hype & Dexter’

Some of New Zealand’s digital and Ecommerce heavyweights have come together to create a new digital agency, Hype & Dexter, based in Auckland.

Billed as ‘The Digital Transformation Agency’, Hype & Dexter has been founded by the former MD of GrabOne and Data Insight Ryan Watkins (left) and former GrabOne CIO and digital delivery manager at NZME, Romi Dexter (right). The pair also worked together at Yellow and Finda. Together they have nearly 30 years’ experience in digital.

Through his experience at GrabOne and NZME, and at Data Insight working with large Australasian Corporates, Watkins noticed a gap in the market when it came to businesses below enterprise and corporate level in accessing and affording the tools and expertise required to implement sales and marketing automation.

Hype & Dexter was created to service this niche, focusing specifically on delivering digital transformation and customer generation, and providing a consultative approach that enables clients to benefit from the team’s digital expertise.

Says Watkins: “I saw millions of dollars and many months being spent implementing enterprise level marketing automation tools. These are only ever as good as the people who drive them but the “We’ll learn how to use it as we go” approach was, and still is, extremely common. Of course, that results in only a small percentage of the platform’s true capability being used. But while the risk factor for these big business is relatively limited, what about businesses who don’t turn over $100 million or more per year, who was delivering for them?

“It was mainly small or even one-man consultancies who, in my experienced, lacked the resource and real world experience to deliver the level of service and results these businesses need to grow. While the really effective consultants who can deliver had such demand for their services they can choose to work only with the highest bidder, leaving these businesses priced out, or out of options.”

Watkins and Dexter will be joined as directors by Alex Mackrill, former marketing communications manager for ecommerce at NZME and Nick O’Neill, who is a former sales director of 90 Seconds and currently head of revenue at Customer Radar.

Says Watkins: “Romi and I started working on Hype & Dexter just last October, and we have already taken on over a dozen clients, mainly in the B2B space, as well as becoming the fastest growing certified HubSpot Partner in the APAC region. Now we’ve officially launched and have put a team together who will build on that, as well as leveraging our considerable real world experience in building digital and ecommerce businesses for several years.”