Trusted by A-list celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Rebel Wilson, Matt Lucas and Raphael Rowe, Dav Lippasaar is breaking the mould of digital marketing agencies with his Melbourne-based company SAAR Media & Entertainment.
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA – 8:00 AM, Tuesday 07 June 2022
Digital marketing is one of the professions least trusted by Australians, according to a survey by Roy Morgan last year, placing second to last, above car salesmen.
According to Dav Lippasaar, founder of SAAR Media & Entertainment in Melbourne, the main reason for this distrust is that most agencies focus on themselves rather than their clients.
If a client comes to us and says they need a particular service and we see that they don’t need it, we’ll tell them and suggest a more cost-effective option. This means less profit for us initially, but the client can see we’re there for them in the long run.
We share what we’re doing so our clients get so successful that they no longer need us and can hire their own in-house marketing team. We get them to where they need to be to help them grow and create a mini-empire of their own.
This altruistic approach may seem counter-intuitive to having a profitable business, but the opposite is true. SAAR’s revenue increased almost 1200% in 2019-2020 from the previous year and a further 1500% in 2020-2021.
These figures are all the more impressive given that more than 90% of the agency’s small to medium-sized business clients came from word-of-mouth referrals.
So celebrities are looking for caring and nurturing qualities in people they work with. Because of this I was fortunate to be given a lot of trust by A-listers and high-profile executives.
Lippasaar brought this VIP treatment into SAAR from the day he founded the digital marketing agency in 2015. “Business owners deserve to feel they’re important and that you care about them”, he says.
SAAR was recently recognised as ‘Most Trusted Digital Marketing Agency – Victoria’ in the APAC Insider Awards.
This isn’t something you can fake – you have to live it, says Lippasaar. There’s no place in digital marketing for manufactured authenticity. You need to genuinely care about your customers, do the best for them, put them first and the business will follow.
Dav Lippasaar left a career in interior design to study media at the University of Adelaide.
After intern positions at Nine Network and Network Ten in Australia, he travelled to Los Angeles and worked as a production assistant, art assistant and producer on shows including The Bachelorette and Kocktails with Khloé starring Khloé Kardashian and at Sean Combs’ music cable network Revolt TV & Media.
Lippasaar founded digital marketing agency SAAR Media & Entertainment in 2015 to help small to medium business owners.