The Responsible Marketing Agency: From admin to advocacy

We caught up with Hannah Mirza, founder of The Responsible Marketing Agency to understand how Apron helps her and the team navigate through what is a very unusual and culturally nuanced time for their clients.

What is on the agenda for The Responsible Marketing Agency today?

The Responsible Marketing Agency is, in Hannah’s words, a marketing transformation consultancy focused on making brands more responsible in their presence and practices. Setting up two years ago has meant there’s been a constant heightened context to their clients, Hannah says: "There’s been a complex layer added to our work and the thinking we do around it, with the perceived politicising of brands and their outputs… topics of inclusion, sustainability and political alignment now govern the zeitgeist of our work in a way I didn’t anticipate."

When it comes to keeping the team abreast and agile enough to navigate their clients’ nuances, Hannah says it’s all about providing the most up-to-date research and insight on the swathe of topics that have become acutely contextual to their work. "We sometimes have to debunk a brand’s thinking on a matter and in turn, understand a topic…it’s about having a team that has deep subject matter expertise."

That joined-up knowledge within the team is one part of a new venture that The Responsible Marketing Agency is building out, a curriculum-based training programme, aiming to answer the question of 'what is a responsible marketer.' Hannah explains: "We’re building out more modules at the moment around areas that we see gaps of knowledge in across our client interactions… this presents a great commercial opportunity for us, there’s a lot of demand here for people to understand sustainability as it relates to marketing, understand AI responsible use in marketing practices and understand progressive marketing practices."

How does Apron help?

"It gives me time back to invest in the growth of the business," Hannah says as she reflects on how she spends the time she saves by having Apron as a tool for her and her accountants. She goes on to explain how it’s been helping out operationally in what is a relatively new, nimble and growing agency business, founded in 2022, already with a notably sized team of 20 and global clients that require a high level of robustness to service: "Apron has been instrumental in streamlining invoice payments and systemising that kind of information into a repository that is trackable… that general streamlining even includes things like payroll which for the team of 20 we have is so much time saved."

And what does Hannah spend that time on? "I’m always grappling with how best and where to spend time. It’s always split between administrative and strategic and operational tasks throughout the day so anything that means I can focus on more strategic things is a blessing." Hannah says as she lists the ways other than admin she could be spending that time; namely with clients for now and areas she considers to be ‘growth based’ — one of which includes the above-mentioned training programme.