Naturally Fast Food brand, LEON, has appointed Media and Performance agency, ROAST, to run their OOH activity to promote their award-winning breakfast to those on their morning commute. Following a competitive pitch, the agency will launch the DOOH & display proximity campaign this week and run activity until the beginning of July, focusing on key London restaurants. LEON won tastiest breakfast at the Just Eat awards earlier this year. They now seek to increase their share of the breakfast market in Central London. With a focus on commuters, LEON launch their ‘LEON Loves Mornings’ campaign and look to draw in new customers by increasing awareness of its hot breakfast meal deal for £4.99 offer.
Fox Agency has pointed to closer collaboration between the UK and US as a key driver for growth in B2B tech, following a strong first half to its financial year which saw a surge in demand for clients seeking support in both markets. This increasing trend for transatlantic collaboration was underlined last week by the Atlantic Declaration signed by UK PM, Rishi Sunak and US President, Joe Biden. The deal aims to enable and accelerate investment and cooperation between the two countries, with a particular focus on several areas of technology. B2B technology marketing specialist, Fox Agency, which has offices in the UK and Germany, is planning further expansion into the US market to better serve growing demand across technology businesses looking for representation on both sides of the Atlantic. Tech businesses which have engaged Fox Agency to support on activity across both the UK and US over the last six months include global technology consultancies BearingPoint and Arcwide, semiconductor innovator Dukosi, automotive parts and technology suppliers, TMD Friction and Delphi Technologies and SaaS (Software as a Service) financial management solution provider, OneStream Software. This contributed to a 15% increase in revenues and 120% increase in profits for the six months to April 2023. In total, the agency saw nine new client appointments over this period spanning multiple technology markets across the US and Europe.
Performance-driven PR and marketing consultancy Hard Numbers has launched an analyst relations practice to help scaling technology clients build their profile in the analyst community. The new practice will predominantly support in-house teams at scaling and high-growth companies to engage with the analyst audience across the UK and Europe. It aims to plug a gap in the market by helping earlier-stage firms – which are currently underserved by traditional agencies and AR departments – to get in front of key analysts in their sector. Leveraging its deep knowledge of the technology market, Hard Numbers will support clients to understand the analyst landscape and its role in influencing key decision-makers for their businesses. This will include delivering briefings with an extensive network of relevant sector analysts, as well as enabling clients to gain insights into key market trends, monitor their competitive landscapes and build credibility in their respective fields. The new offering is targeted at clients across the technology, financial services and commercial software and SaaS industries, where analyst opinion can heavily influence buyer behaviour and investor sentiment.
Actor, filmmaker and musician, Idris Elba, and Marc Boyan, founder of Miroma Group, one of the largest independent marketing groups in the world, have announced the launch of their new international business venture, SillyFace. A global marketing and content business, SillyFace aims to unearth new storytellers and reinvigorate creativity and fun in brand marketing through ideation, creation and distribution of both long and short form content. There is a growing sense of ‘purpose-fatigue’ amongst consumers, according to research by GfK¹, making it more difficult for brands to gain and hold the attention of their targeted audiences. With this backdrop, brands need to adopt new approaches to garner attention from consumers. Born in response to demand for a new approach by marketers and consumers, SillyFace will bring together a team of global, creative marketers and content creators – under the expert guidance of Elba and Boyan – all with different perspectives and backgrounds, to ensure they add the excitement back into brand building. The first new hires for SillyFace include Rahul Chopra as Chief Strategy Officer, Miroma Group, who recently joined from Instagram where he was Director, Reels and Camera, and was previously at Facebook app and Snap Inc in senior roles. SillyFace also welcomes Margot Hauer-King, as Chief Client and Revenue Officer, who joins from Beentheredonethat and was previously at WPP. Both will be based in New York. Possessing an extensive understanding of Gen-Z and millennial demographics that many brands are hoping to serve and connect with, SillyFace will specialise in creative ideation, content creation and distribution; helping clients deliver authentic campaigns with cultural value.
With summer holiday season finally back again, O2, is launching its brand-new through-the-line roaming campaign to remind the nation that O2 is the only major UK network not to charge customers extra for EU roaming. The roaming campaign ties into the new brand ethos, ‘See What You Can Do’, which focuses on turning industry ‘do nots’ into ‘can dos’ and aims to highlight that while other major networks may charge travellers extra to roam abroad, O2 customers can continue to ‘Roam on’ and travel without hidden roaming charges. ‘Roam on’ kicks off today with a brand-new 40” TVC which features O2’s loveable blue robot, Bubl, and will run across TV, cinema, BVOD and OLV. Set to Lizzo’s catchy anthem ‘Phone’ the film follows a series of holidaymakers and their holiday dramas after having to turn roaming off on their phones. The ad resolves with Bubl switching on an O2 customers’ data roaming, helping her find her way and enabling her to stride off towards an epic holiday. O2 worked with UK agency of record, VCCP London, Product and Service innovation company, Bernadette, and global content studio, Girl&Bear, to mastermind the new creative campaign. The visual play with the “Roam on” toggle will extend beyond AV and into other channels, with holiday makers set to see warning signs about the imminent loss of inclusive data for those not on O2 displayed in and around airports. People visiting The O2 will be reminded about the ability to stream their favourite songs abroad, with O2 customers being reassured via targeted ads online and non-customers being reminded to switch before they travel.
Wavemaker UK, Smart Media Technologies, Kinetic and Ocean Outdoor have collaborated to create the world’s largest AR-powered virtual slot machine for William Hill Vegas. This ingenious Out of Home (OOH) gaming competition is the first of its kind, not just for William Hill, but for the gambling sector and the ad industry. William Hill Vegas is fast becoming one of the UK’s most-loved entertainment brands. By bringing interactivity and addressability to 12 cities and 23 OOH screens across the UK, it is delivering an unforgettable experience for its customers. The campaign and concept created by Wavemaker in collaboration with William Hill, and with technological prowess from Smart Media Technologies in conjunction with Ocean Labs, will see digital and static billboards facilitating a two-way interaction with the audience. The power of AR has been harnessed to bring immersive gameplay to a user’s OOH experience, enabling them to play a virtual slot machine that’s in front of their eyes, triggered from an interactive billboard. This campaign pushes the boundaries of innovation as a user can grab a digital token from the billboard via a QR code. They then spin the slot machine on their mobile in AR via a WebApp Wallet – to enable users to enjoy AR on their mobile without the need to download anything. The digital billboards will animate in real time to denote the user has interacted and been entered into a prize pool – The top prize is being a £15k trip to Las Vegas. We’re also further incentivising users to download the William Hill app for a further entry into the prize pool to be drawn. The decision by Wavemaker to use Ocean Outdoor’s OOH screens as the media channel for this was simple – it’s public and it’s a great way to ensure the campaign is delivered in a safe way to a broad audience (18-44 adults). Added to this, the potential for innovative tech integrations/solutions is unmatched. This has given William Hill the opportunity to deliver entertaining advertising, responsibly, in a whole new way for its William Hill Vegas brand. This has truly raised the bar for the use of AR in the gambling, entertainment and advertising industry.
Additionally, Wavemaker has been managing a record +$4 billion new business pipeline since the start of the year. Now nearly at the halfway point, the pipeline is already converting well ahead of industry norms, and to date delivered over $780M in net new and retained business. Major wins include Adobe global, Reckitt India, KIA Motors China, Back Market and the Huawei China and Tiffany & Co US retentions. COMvergence has confirmed Wavemaker as the most successful network for Q1 2023. Driven by unapparelled demand Wavemaker has announced a significant expansion of its Global Growth team, with increased commitment and investment in new business across its Worldwide and Americas teams. Led by Hamish Davies, Global Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, the Global Growth team has recruited new leaders both globally and regionally in the Americas. Natalie Yorke has joined as Global Growth Partner based in London, from HH Global and brings significant insight from her experience at IPG and running her own business. For the Americas, Lynne Reilly has joined as Chief Growth Officer leading all growth initiatives across North America. Prior to Wavemaker, Reilly was at UM where she led teams to unprecedented expansion over the course of her nine-year career. Additionally, Natalia Lopez, who has transferred from GroupM Latin America, joins as new Head of Growth for Latin America. These recent additions to the team join Sebastian Boeltner, Global Growth Partner, EMEA, and Charlotte Wright, Chief Growth Officer, APAC.
Semetrical is a digital growth agency, whose co-founders have a history of bringing ground-breaking technical SEO solutions to market, including Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl). The agency is now excited to announce its latest release, Tomo, a new, free robots.txt monitoring tool. Tomo, which gets its name from the Japanese word for ‘friend’, is a free SEO tool that helps marketers avoid negative traffic impacts and crawling issues on their website from an incorrectly configured robots.txt file. It quickly shows users which of their website’s URLs are available to multiple crawlers, including Googlebot, helping users to improve their overall crawl efficiency. The Tomo app allows users to configure tests for multiple URLs and user agent tokens, which can be run against their live website robots.txt file to see if it produces expected results. Tomo can also be used for testing new robots.txt files in development before they go live. Tomo’s unique ability to alert users on live robots.txt changes quickly, allows for a rapid response to mitigate the impact of erroneous or unexpected changes.
Independent creative and brand transformation agency, JOAN Creative has announced the opening of a new international office, JOAN London, to accelerate the agency’s global expansion and bring its unique joyful rebellion to leading UK and EMEA brands. JOAN London is the first international expansion of the New York-based, award-winning agency JOAN Creative and its full-service maker studio, JOAN Studios – founded by Lisa Clunie and Jaime Robinson in 2016. JOAN London will be led by Executive Creative Director Kirsty Hathaway, former VP Creative at Refinery29 and Managing Director Tom Ghiden, formerly joint Head of Business Leadership at McCann London who will be joining the agency in mid-August. JOAN has become the formidable challenger to the big agency model. The agency is designed to push against the exclusionary nature of advertising agencies. They believe strongly that a diverse team better connects brands to culture. And it’s working. JOAN continues to bring the creativity and agility to build its reputation while growing an impressive AOR roster and making major investments to offer a global, integrated offering. Leveraging JOAN’s proprietary strategic brand mapping tool, The Growth Wheel, to build brand leaders and drive transformation, JOAN London will speak directly to audiences across the UK and EMEA. The JOAN team has a deep knowledge of audience-building, establishing strong brands and creating cultural moments, with a focus on fiercely modern media approaches, such as editorial, content, social and digital. JOAN London brings together a team of diverse backgrounds and expertise to deliver the JOAN mission of making legendary brands modern, and modern brands legendary.
