Fergus Watts chose advertising because the people in the office wore T-shirts, played music and appeared happy. He was 22, recently dismissed from professional Australian football, and, by his own account, did not have an email address. This was not the usual apprenticeship for building a marketing company. It was, however, excellent preparation for noticing that an industry full of experts was strangely bad at putting its experts in the same room.
The broken football career was the first failure, and the useful one. Watts had suffered an ankle injury, endured multiple surgeries and been delisted by St Kilda. His next job at an ad agency revealed a second surprise: he was less fascinated by making the ads than by the machinery surrounding them - ownership, acquisitions and the way a group could add capabilities.
In 2009, amid the global financial crisis, Fergus and his younger brother Jack started Bastion in Melbourne. Jack later described part of the strategy with pleasing economy: stay alive. Fergus was building the agency group; Jack was selling sponsorship for the Rip Curl Pro from the same office. Sponsorship pitches kept requiring creative, public relations and event activation. The brothers joined their operations because the work was already demanding it.
“I was the first guy through the wall on something new. Jack would then need to pick up the pieces on the ground and actually make it run properly.”Fergus Watts, describing the brothers' division of labour
The founding trickBuy the thing the brief keeps asking for
Bastion's early expansion was not a grand theory pasted onto a pitch deck. It was a shopping list made by clients. A sponsorship brief needed PR, so PR became a capability. Consumer decisions needed evidence, so research joined. A digital idea needed a product team, so the network added designers and engineers. The firm acquired PR agency Undertow Media in 2010. According to an account of its US expansion, Fergus sold his house at 24 to help finance that first acquisition.
The pattern became the business. Latitude Insights added research in 2016. Southern California firms brought public relations and digital work; db5 added consumer insights in 2019. Shine expanded the New Zealand operation in 2021. AnalogFolk Australia brought digital creative depth in 2024, then Wellington's Catch Design added 25 people working across customer experience, CRM, web, apps and product development. Daymark brought senior corporate affairs and crisis counsel in 2025.
This is what Bastion actually sells: advertising and brand strategy; PR, social and corporate reputation; market research and analytics; digital products and transformation; sponsorship and live experience; media and content production. Clients can buy one discipline. The more consequential pitch is that they can buy several without managing a small parliament of agencies.
The hard number is mostly missingWhat growth cost, and who kept the keys
Private agency deals are fond of mystery. Bastion has not disclosed the price of most acquisitions, including its August 2026 merger with Nashville-based BUNTIN. One useful number did surface in 2019: the group planned to invest roughly 20 per cent of projected annual revenue, about US$11 million, in US acquisitions and organic growth.
The more revealing term was not the price. Leaders of acquired firms could retain meaningful equity and keep running their businesses, while Bastion handled functions such as finance and human resources. The idea was to avoid turning an entrepreneur into an employee immediately after buying the entrepreneurship. When Bastion acquired db5, its original owners kept a significant stake and few immediate operational changes followed beyond upgrades to customer-management and accounting systems.
This places Bastion in an awkward and potentially valuable middle. A boutique usually owns a craft but needs partners. A global holding company owns almost every craft but can make cooperation feel like diplomacy. Bastion's wager is that a privately controlled network can offer the breadth of the second with more of the attention of the first. Its alternatives are WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic and Dentsu on one side, and independent specialist shops on the other.
The proof is in the handoffA thermal shirt, a rave and a pub for a ute
Integrated capability is easy to claim and hard to photograph. Bastion's recent work makes it more visible. For UNIQLO, an experiential team distributed 2,400 HEATTECH samples to cold commuters in Melbourne and Adelaide while a social team created anticipation and the activation pushed app sign-ups. The cleverness was not hidden in a slogan. It was the weather, a useful product and a reason to continue into the store.
For Farmers Union's high-protein yogurt, Bastion turned the breakfast proposition into a morning rave. More than 1,900 people attended; the campaign reported 56 media hits and 2.6 million people reached across earned, paid and social channels. For Kia, it rebuilt the fictional Hotel Tasman near the Australian Open, displayed three utes, installed a virtual-reality drive and brought in Rafael Nadal. Creative, staging, safety, talent and on-site operations had to behave as one production rather than a relay race.
The customers are correspondingly varied: Microsoft, Xbox, Kellogg's, Unilever, L'Oreal, Air New Zealand, Kia, ALDI, TAB, Crown Resorts and government agencies have all been publicly named. The problems range from discovering why customers behave as they do to surviving a crisis, launching an app, filling an event or making a product noticeable when every competitor is buying the same media.
The interesting product is not any one department. It is the distance between them.
The current experimentNashville meets Melbourne
In August 2026, Bastion USA merged with BUNTIN. The American operation became BastionBUNTIN, with Nashville joining Los Angeles and New York as US hubs while Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Auckland and Wellington remained part of the wider network. The combined business said it had more than 400 people. Cheuk Chiang leads the Bastion Group; Jeff Browe became chief executive of BastionBUNTIN.
The merger changes the scale of the promise. An Australian client can now reach deeper into American creative and media capability; a US client can use Bastion's research, communications and experience teams across the Pacific. In September, bp appointed Bastion to lead social strategy, content, creators, community management and listening across Australia and New Zealand. In July, Bastion Insights launched Vantage, which uses AI to scan online conversations and senior researchers to decide what matters. Both moves push the same thesis: connect more signals, then apply judgement.
Two brothers begin during the global financial crisis.
PR, digital and consumer research create the early stack.
New Zealand, digital product design and corporate affairs deepen the offer.
The BUNTIN merger makes integration a cross-Pacific operating question.
The part worth stealingStart with the gap, not the deal
The copyable part of Bastion is not “buy agencies.” That is how you acquire payroll, clashing software and three definitions of strategy. The better sequence is visible in its history: listen for a recurring client need; add a genuinely different capability; keep the operator invested; centralise the dull machinery; measure whether the joined-up work performs better than separate vendors would.
Add a discipline because briefs repeatedly need it, not because a deal is available.
Let specialist leaders retain responsibility and economic reason to care.
Move finance, HR and systems out of the way of client and craft leadership.
If research cannot change creative, or creative cannot shape media, integration is a brochure.
The conditions matter. This model is a poor fit when clients only want one narrow commodity, when acquired leaders leave, when shared services become a tollbooth, or when account politics reward departments for guarding revenue. It also struggles if the network cannot explain who makes the final decision. Breadth helps only when the work crosses boundaries; otherwise it is overhead with a handsome capabilities page.
Jack once opposed opening a Sydney office. Fergus moved there and opened it anyway. The result changed his mind. That anecdote contains Bastion's most useful habit: make the argument concrete, close enough to clients that evidence arrives quickly. The firm began because one brother spotted missing pieces and the other knew how to make them function. Seventeen years later, the list is longer. The job is still the join.