Earlier this summer, KINESSO UK&I, the IPG Mediabrands technology-driven performance marketing agency within Interpublic Group, launched its new EMEA Experience Centre of Excellence in Leeds.
New Digital Age recently spoke with Chloe Hawking, KINESSO’s CEO for the UK and Ireland and President EMEA, to find out more about the agency’s ambitions for the future…
What takes up your time on a day-to-day basis?
In the UK and Ireland, we have nearly 700 people across three locations. My role is to make sure that all those teams come together to create a tech driven performance agency, delivering real intelligence that moves our clients forward. In practice, that means partnering with clients, having strategic business conversations about the challenges they’re facing and potential solutions, and building trust within those relationships.
I also work with the marketplace, our tech and media partners, to make sure we’re abreast of what’s coming down the line from their side and to help them understand our needs as a business and the needs of our clients.
It’s a multi-faceted role and there’s always something different going on at any given time. Earlier this week, for example, we launched our 2025 cohort of our Represent program, which focuses on getting a more diverse selection of people into leadership positions.
What sort of issues are your clients discussing at the moment?
In some ways, 2024 has seen a continuation of the caution we saw throughout 2023. There are still some clients focused on doing more with less, leveraging automation and AI to get more value from their budgets. However, there are signs of optimism and other clients are increasing spending and exploring new ways to unlock growth with data and technology.
There’s also a lot of change happening in the marketing industry right now. Lots of businesses are making changes to their organisational structure and the way they operate, so we’re helping guide our clients through those changes at the moment.
Has the concept of ‘customer experience’ evolved in recent years?
Yes, I think it has actually. Five or six years ago, it was essentially about SEO and ranking well in results pages. Today, it’s really about optimising the entire digital experience. The concept has broadened out a lot.
Yes, technical SEO is still important, but we’re also talking about your digital content strategy on your website, in social environments and commerce environments. It also includes things like UX design, conversion rate optimization, customer landing pages, all the way through to marketing automation and CRM. At its heart, it’s about removing friction from the customer journey, end-to-end.
What are your big priorities for the rest of the year?
In terms of the business priorities beyond our experience proposition, one thing that we’re focusing on is ‘change readiness’. Obviously, AI looks like it has the potential to disrupt things a lot, but change has always been a constant part of the marketing world.
As a business, we’re on our own transformation journey. The main thing for me is making sure we take our teams on that journey, and that they grow from the experience. Change readiness, rather than simply ‘change management’ is about helping people thrive and come out ahead in a time of change.
Another key other focus for us is continuing to build partnerships and trust with our clients. Increasingly, we’re putting more skin in the game with our clients and entering into more joint business partnerships rather than traditional agency/client relationships.
A third area of focus is delivering on the ambition of being a truly tech-enabled performance agency. KINESSO has one of the largest technology teams of any agency group, employing more than 600 tech specialists globally. We have the capability to build our own bespoke solutions where needed but aren’t in the business of competing with third party solutions. Our focus is on helping our team and our clients work in a more seamless way.
