A global marketing agency, run out of Melbourne.
Australia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand — held by one team in one office, on one set of numbers. Not a network of licensed offices, and not a list of places we would be willing to fly to.
One head office in Melbourne · Arabic written natively, not translated · Currency and reporting convention fixed before launch
Five countries, and what
each one actually is.
More than 250 active client engagements sit across these five markets. Here is what each one means in practice, rather than a row of flags.
- Head office
Australia
The home market and most of the book. West Tower, Level 4/608 St Kilda Rd in Melbourne, with live work running in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. Everything on this page was built here first and then had to survive being taken somewhere else.
- Services and retail
United Kingdom
A Liverpool law firm and a national made-to-measure retailer, both written up with their own figures further down this page. English that looks identical to ours and behaves differently in almost every search that matters.
- Arabic-language work
Saudi Arabia
Property campaign work in Riyadh with the creative written in Arabic rather than translated into it, and a two-sided commercial kitchen marketplace built for the Saudi market by our technology division.
- Gulf hours
United Arab Emirates
Run by the same Melbourne team on the same terms. Time zones are agreed in the first conversation rather than assumed, which is the part that decides whether a fix lands the same day or the next one.
- Near, not identical
New Zealand
Close enough to Australian search behaviour to feel familiar, and different enough to catch people out. Currency, spelling, public holidays and delivery expectations all move, and none of them announce themselves.
Seven things a border charges you for.
None of them are exotic. They are the ordinary costs of moving a working system into a market that did not grow it, and every one of them is cheaper to answer before launch than after.
The English is not the same English
Solicitor and lawyer. Blinds and shades. Rubbish and trash. Autumn and fall. A page that reads perfectly in Melbourne reads slightly foreign in Liverpool, and slightly foreign is enough to lose the enquiry to someone who sounds local.
Demand does not translate on a spreadsheet
The phrase people use to describe a problem is a local artefact. Copying a term list from one country into another produces a plan that looks complete and is mostly aimed at nothing.
What you may promise is set by the market you advertise into
Claims, comparisons, pricing language and what counts as a guarantee are governed where the customer is, not where the agency is. Finding that out at approval stage means rewriting the offer, not the ad.
The currency in the report is not the currency in the account
A platform billing in one currency, a business banking in another, and a board reading a third. Without a stated convention up front, every performance conversation quietly becomes an argument about exchange rates.
Time zones decide how quickly anything gets fixed
A problem found at 9am in Riyadh sits until 4pm in Melbourne unless somebody has agreed in advance who is allowed to act on it. That is a working agreement, not a technology problem.
Hosting and data residency get decided last
Where the data sits, who holds the keys and what happens to it if the relationship ends are contract questions. They are cheap to answer at the brief and expensive to answer once a platform is built.
Five markets becomes five agencies and five versions of the truth
Each one knows its market and none of them knows the account. Nothing learned in one place reaches another, the reporting never reconciles, and the head office spends its week translating between suppliers.
Active engagements
250+
Client accounts under management
Across Australia, the UK, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and New Zealand
Markets
5
Countries with live engagements
One Melbourne team holding all of them, not five licensed offices
Media under management
A$120M+
Paid media we are accountable for
From A$3,000 a month to multiple eight figures a month
Figures describe SoudCoh's own book of work and are dated at the time of writing. They are context for how the five markets are staffed, not a forecast for any one of them.
Eight things happen before a new market spends anything.
In this order, every time. It is the part of a cross-border engagement that usually stays vague, and it is the part that decides whether the second market is easier than the first.
We read the market before we read the account
How the thing is described locally, who already ranks and advertises for it, what the offer has to look like to be credible, and what the law of that market allows you to say. That reading is written down and shown to you before anything is set up.
One team, one set of numbers
Every market runs through the same Melbourne team rather than a network of local suppliers. There is one performance picture, reconciled once, instead of five reports that each describe a different quarter.
Language is a person, not a plugin
Arabic work is written in Arabic by someone who speaks it. Machine translation is fine for understanding a competitor and useless for writing an offer, because the thing that has to land is tone, and tone is the first casualty.
Currency and reporting convention are fixed before launch
Which currency the platform bills in, which one the report states, and which one the board sees. Agreed in writing at the start so nobody has to relitigate a result because the rate moved.
Measurement is built before the spend, not after it
Enquiries, calls and bookings are wired up and fired by hand until each one has been seen to land. A market you cannot measure is a market you are guessing in, and guessing gets expensive fastest the further from home you go.
Local pages, not translated ones
The landing page carries the local spelling, the local units, the local contact route and the local proof. Translating an Australian page into a British one leaves every reference intact and every reader slightly suspicious.
Reporting lands on a fixed cadence in your working hours
Every third day the numbers are pulled and read properly, and the written view goes to you as matched Word and PDF — same numbers, same date. The review call is booked in your morning, not ours.
Hosting, residency and exit are answered in the brief
For platform work: where it is hosted, who controls the keys, and the notice period and export format if you leave. On the Victorian council finance platform that is sovereign sole-tenant hosting, source-code escrow from sprint one and a thirty-day data exit.
The measurement step is the one people want to skip when a market is small. It is also the only reason the next market is quicker, because a result you cannot see is a result you have to argue about. How a phone call becomes a conversion covers what gets wired up.
Four things that do not change when the market does.
Everything above is what we adapt. This is what we do not, and the reason a buyer eleven time zones away is not getting a lighter version of the engagement.
The countersign
Nothing reaches a live account with one name on it, in any market. A proposed change waits in a queue and a second specialist has to argue it through with the person who wrote it before it moves.
The refusal list
The six things none of us are allowed to do apply to every account we hold, including the ones eleven time zones away where nobody would have noticed.
The data boundary
What we learn carries between accounts. What belongs to you does not. Crossing a border does not loosen that, and it is the reason a UK engagement can start with what the Australian ones already paid for.
The report turns up
On the agreed date, whether the period was good or bad, in both file formats, with the same numbers in each. Distance is not a reason to go quiet and a bad month is not a reason to reschedule.
A cross-border job is rarely one discipline.
The Saudi marketplace was a technology build with a marketing engagement around it. The UK work was search and paid media with the measurement rebuilt underneath. Both ran from the same five divisions.
That is the practical argument for holding every market in one place: the person who found the problem in the account can walk to the person who has to change the platform. The technology division builds the sovereign-hosted side of it, and the paid media side runs against the same reporting.
The offshore work, with its numbers.
Two United Kingdom engagements published with their own figures, and two in the Gulf published without any — because no figure for those two exists that we are able to show you.
- Legal services · Liverpool, United Kingdom58.48%lower cost per enquiryFrom one measured period to the next · 277.25 enquiries in its strongest monthSLS Solicitors
- Made-to-measure blinds · United Kingdom62.63%lower cost per orderCost per order of $8.82 · a 17.47% conversion rate across a 31-day periodImpress Blinds
Also in the region
- Riyadh property, in ArabicArabic-language campaign work for a Riyadh property business, with enquiry follow-up handled in the channel buyers were already using.
- A Saudi two-sided marketplaceMsaha — a commercial kitchen rental marketplace built for the Saudi market, with dashboards, listings and messaging for both sides of it.
Before you brief a second market
Here is what everybody asks first.
Working across borders, answered.
Offices, time zones, language, currency, where the data lives, and whether we would take your competitor.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Book a free strategy callA market is the question. These are usually the next six.
Most cross-border conversations start here and end up in two or three of these, because the border is rarely the only constraint in the room.
- International SEOThe organic half of a multi-market plan — language targeting, regional signals and what stops one country cannibalising another.
- Enterprise and governmentWhen the constraint is six approvals and four divisions rather than a border. Governance written into the brief.
- The standard we work toWhat we refuse, what we will not claim, and how you get your data back. The same document in every market.
- SoudCoh CompoundThe six stages every change passes through before it reaches a live account, wherever that account is.
- Custom platforms and web appsHosting, data residency, escrow and exit — the questions a cross-border build has to answer before sprint one.
- All five divisionsMarketing, Technology, Public Sector, Research and Creative — the people the work is actually split across.
Name the market
Tell us which country you are trying to reach and what you already know about it. We will come back with what has to be rebuilt for that market, what carries over, and the working hours it would run on.
One office, in Melbourne. Time zones agreed in the first conversation, not assumed.