A full-service marketing agency for South Melbourne, all in-house.

Honest answer: no. Our studio is on Rokeby Street in Collingwood, fifteen minutes north of the South Melbourne Market. Strategy, brand, design, photo, video, social, paid media, and PR all sit in the same room there. We work with South Melbourne design-led brands, premium hospitality, property businesses, and lifestyle clients because the work is interesting, the conversations are face to face, and the door is open if you want to drop in.

A meaningful share of our retainer work sits in South Melbourne's wheelhouse: design-led product brands needing premium creative, the hospitality scene around the Market and Clarendon Street, the property businesses around Albert Road, and the creative-services firms that have outgrown a single-channel agency. The reason these brands need full-service rather than one channel at a time is that the audience is design-literate, and the brand has to read consistent across every surface from packaging to a Reels cut.

A full-service marketing agency owns four things: strategy (who, what, where, when, how much), creative production (brand, content, video, photo, copy, design), channel execution (paid media, organic social, EDM, SEO), and reporting (what worked, what to test next, where to reallocate). Smaller agencies cover one or two channels. Full-service agencies handle the whole system end to end, usually with senior account leadership and a creative team under one roof.

Marketing agency retainers in Melbourne in 2026 range from about $1,500 a month for a freelance content manager up to $50,000+ a month for a senior full-service agency. Most growth-stage businesses spend between $7,500 and $20,000 a month on agency fees, plus separate media spend that typically runs one to three times the agency fee depending on the channel mix. Our content retainers start at $5,000 a month and full-service retainers start at $9,000 a month.

Minimum twelve months to see real compounding signal. Paid media shows results in two to four weeks. Organic social takes three to six months. SEO takes six to twelve months. Brand work pays back over years. Agency relationships under twelve months rarely show what the agency is capable of.

Hire an agency if your monthly marketing spend is under $30,000 and you need senior strategy alongside execution. Build in-house if your monthly spend is over $50,000 and you can hire a senior head plus a small team. The middle ground ($30,000 to $50,000) is usually a hybrid: an in-house marketing lead working with an agency on creative production and paid media.

A creative agency makes the work: brand, film, photo, website, campaign. A marketing agency runs the strategy and the channels: who, what, where, when, how much. Most agencies do both to some degree, but the centre of gravity is different. Lucky Boy runs both as one studio, which is the integration point that makes the creative perform and the marketing compound.

No, never. Most reputable Melbourne agencies use flat monthly fees instead of percentage of spend, because percentage models create a perverse incentive to push media higher than the strategy supports. If an agency quotes 10 to 20 per cent of media as the fee, ask what they would charge as a flat alternative. The flat number is almost always cleaner over a twelve-month engagement.

Yes. We allow month-end pauses with 30 days notice, no auto-renewal, no lock-in. The exception is large bracket-four retainers that include dedicated team allocation, which carry a six month minimum.