Why Anton · Founder and strategic advisor
Better decisions start with better questions.
My job isn't to tell you what you want to hear. It's to help you work out what's actually going on.
- 2009
- Founded in Sydney
- 300+
- Strategic projects
- APAC
- Local to global brands
Twenty years of being in the room for the decision.
Billions
Customer interactions personally assessed across Australia and APAC.
Up to 22:1
Return on one campaign, on incremental marginal return.
Some clients call me The ROI Guy. I'll take it, as long as it comes with the caveat below.
Returns like that are marginal, not typical, and they only make sense against a long-term view of what marketing actually pays back. The definitive work on that is the IPA effectiveness research by Les Binet and Peter Field, which is where I'd send anyone arguing about brand versus performance budget splits.
Background
My career has spanned advertising, direct response and digital agencies, and marketing management consultancies. That mix matters: I've sat on the side that sells the work, the side that buys it, and the side that has to justify it commercially.
I founded Front Foot Marketing in Sydney in 2009. Since then I've delivered over 300 strategic marketing projects and personally assessed billions of customer interactions, working with organisations from local start-ups to global brands across Australia and the APAC region.
The pattern I keep seeing is not a shortage of marketing activity. It's a shortage of clarity about which decisions matter and what the evidence actually says.
Customer value work specifically runs on a proprietary framework, the Front Foot Customer Value Model, built around margin rather than revenue.
Anton is also a frequent podcaster for TrinityP3’s Managing Marketing series. Listen to Anton interview Jon Wild about how to create a growth engine for a business, Dan Ferguson on the secrets behind scaling e-commerce, and The Laptop Initiative on giving laptops to people in desperate need, a charity Anton later repositioned, in Selected Work.
He also curates TrinityP3’s monthly M3 Report on marketing, measurement and martech, and guest-curates and contributes to their weekly FIVE newsletter. Subscribe to the TrinityP3 newsletters.
Browse more episodes of Managing Marketing.
Connect on LinkedIn.
What I've come to believe
- Businesses are complicated. Marketing rarely operates in isolation from the rest of them.
- Data doesn't automatically create insight. Someone has to ask it a good question.
- Executives have competing priorities. Advice that ignores that isn't practical advice.
- The real problem isn't always the presenting problem.
- Decisions often have to be made before the information is perfect.
The underlying feeling I want you to have in a first conversation is simple: I've seen this before, let's work through it together.
In their words
Anton has a clear and methodical approach to discussing strategic layers, which are vital for both strategic and commercial success. His ability to dissect the different segments in sales and marketing funnels, with simplicity and clarity, is a rare skill.
What clients have said
Anton and Ian led a very considered approach to our customer loyalty review. Their data-led insights helped to prioritise areas of focus and clearly articulated the value this would create for the business.
Anton guided us through a thought provoking, and at times challenging, process that resulted in a very clear strategy and marketing plan for the next steps of our project.