Lee Stephens launches independent Meerkat Media

Lee Stephens, the former boss of Australia’s first listed digital agency e-mitch – a spinoff by the late Harold Mitchell’s Mitchell & Partners – and onetime boss of Carat ANZ, is back in the media agency game with a plan to do it differently. Meerkat is an unlisted public company to facilitate better equity management for execs and employees, moving to channel planning and buying based on the best “media moments” for a target audience or segment.

The agency’s co-founder and executive chairman Lee Stephens, and managing director Per Tinberg, are placing their bets on ‘media moments’ – media selected based on where and when target audiences are most receptive, rather than blunt reach targets.

Stephens also flagged advertisers needed to “own their tech and tools” in media to align with better privacy governance and minimise the flow of data in and out of companies – an agency policy that clients must own the tech they use to minimise potential breaches on data flows.

“We won’t rent clients these tools,” Tinberg said. “They’re going to own them because you don’t want the data integrity risk of passing data to and from something we’re renting to them. They’re going to own their systems, their own data – and they’re going to protect their own privacy in their own environments.”