Greg Tebbutt and Erich Funke Introduce Creative Agency Fixer

Above: Erich Funke and Greg Tebbutt

Fixer has officially launched. Fixer is a new creative agency built to eliminate many of the industry’s inefficiencies, including: the separation of strategy and creative into siloed teams, timelines, and outputs.

Founded on the belief that strategic knowledge and creativity are most powerful when developed together—not handed off— Fixer introduces a reimagined organisational model that unites strategic and creative thinking from day one. The result is faster work that is more cohesive across channels, more efficient to produce, and more effective in driving real business outcomes.

“For decades, agencies have added layers between the CMO and the creative person solving the problem. A fundamental layer is treating strategy and creative as sequential disciplines,” said Greg Tebbutt, co-founder of Fixer. “But in a landscape where brands need to move faster and be more relevant, that model no longer serves clients, or audiences. Fixer was built to reflect how modern brands actually operate and how consumers actually engage, and as the name suggests, fix marketing problems, fast.”

Greg, an award-winning CMO recognised for break-through marketing for iconic global brands like Adidas, AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Volkswagen, believes the last true structural revolution in agency models was in 1949 when Bill Bernbach paired copywriters and art directors to spark ‘the big idea.’ That model served the industry for decades, but as agencies scaled, layers of complexity quietly built up around it. Today, those walls create friction at a time when marketers need speed, clarity, and cohesion.

“The traditional model simply isn’t in step with what modern brand leadership requires,” added Greg. “Having experienced firsthand the tension between speed, flexibility, and impact as a CMO myself, I felt it was time to build a different kind of agency - one designed to dismantle the walls that slow great marketing down.”

A Model Built for a Fragmented—but Connected—Marketing Landscape

Fixer’s integrated structure is designed to dismantle the walls that slow marketing down, walls between business and creativity, client and agency, strategy and execution. Senior strategy and creative leaders work in teams, side-by-side as a single commercial force, accelerating both pace and impact.

At the core of the model is a client lead partnership unlike any other: a chief marketing officer and chief creative officer operating as one team - combining business rigour and creative excellence to deeply understand the problem and deliver a cohesive, high-impact brand solution.

Greg has partnered with renowned breakthrough chief creative officer Erich Funke, a highly sought-after creative leader whose work spans globally recognised brands and top-tier creative agencies - including an 11-year run with Saatchi - to launch Fixer.

“Today’s brands don’t live in a single medium — they show up everywhere, often all at once,” shared Erich. “The Fixer CMO-CCO partnership short-circuits the layers between, giving brands clarity, creativity and action, quickly. This model was built to provide clarity under pressure and help CMOs see clearly, decide quickly, and act decisively when it matters most.”

Underpinning Fixer’s organisational model is Joe Public, South Africa’s most awarded independent agency, unlocking a 400-person creative engine that enables world-class execution with speed, scale, and time-zone advantage.

Why This Shift Is Overdue

As the marketing and communications landscape continues to evolve - driven by new platforms, AI-enabled creation, real-time media cycles, heightened expectations for authenticity, and rapidly increasing speed of culture - the cost of disjointed thinking has never been higher. Brands need partners who can move quickly, think holistically, and translate strategy into execution without losing clarity along the way.

Fixer was built for this moment: to help organisations bring speed, clarity, and commercial alignment to an external agency model.