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At Adapt, Covid-19 has provided us with plenty of positive insights. One key change we are focusing on is how we view our engagement with our offices and physical spaces. 

As we come out of lockdown, we are fully embracing what we have learned these past 12 months across our 2,000+ global Welocalize workforce and we refuse to revert to how it was before. 

We know we can do a whole lot more, and by that, we mean we will be more forward-thinking, more innovative, more flexible and more people-focused. 

We will stick to our word and provide a better environment for our team. We want to focus on providing people with a sustainable work/life balance, as well as a more enjoyable future work environment.  

We have one underlying principle: to encourage people to take ownership of their own time and how they choose to engage with our physical spaces when our teams are safe to return. In short, we want to ensure people are given the trust and therefore flexibility to work in a way they feel most productive. 

Why have we decided to change the way we work?  

Our working habits have changed. This pandemic has accelerated some principles for work that may have arrived in the future, but we are very lucky to be able to embrace these in 2021 – far earlier than we would have been able to over the next decade without Covid-19. 

We have very clear, tangible data across our global workforce that shows we simply do not need to gather everyone that works for a business in the same four walls every day to deliver for our clients, be productive and work well together. And our results prove quite the opposite – some of these trends have improved in the last year. 

Over the last 12+ months, our teams in the UK and globally at Welocalize have proven that we can deliver amazing results and work for clients regardless of location.

We have plans to grow our footprint internationally and already have major international hubs in Barcelona, Beijing, London, NYC and Portland.

On top of that, we have shared spaces all over the world for our teams to gather, meet clients and build face-to-face connections.

Embracing a more dynamic way of working, less focused on specific locations and more focused on how we best serve our teams and clients will make us a far stronger business in the future and better able to serve our clients. 

We have learned to embrace this far better than we could before the pandemic. And it is now time to take those findings into the future and shape our culture. 

What is our position on offices now? 

First and foremost, we want to facilitate our teams spending time together should they choose to, and we will do this by providing inspiring collaborative spaces around the world at Welocalize for people to gather on their own terms, with colleagues and clients. 

Where we have clusters of employees and clients, we will invest in collaborative spaces for people to use to their own benefit and to fuel their own productivity. 

As a result, we are opening a new collaborative space in Bristol city centre. 

This new space, ready to use when it is safe to do so, will give us a great opportunity to stay true to our new direction… to better support our team and clients where we have a strong presence. 

We could not be more excited to have a Bristol base to socialize and build stronger rapports and support the networking and growth of our team relationships. 

Want to join us?! 

Do you like our new approach to working? Do you want to work for a business that trusts you and gives you this kind of flexibility and has an international outlook? 

We have many current roles open across our business! Click here for Adapt and Welocalize careers. 

Quantock have recently welcomed Werner Zeelie to our line-up. Werner will head up our ongoing client activity, as well as our business development strategies.

Werner is an enthusiastic marketeer with over seventeen years of experience across multiple marketing channels in both the corporate and consumer sectors. He has successfully helped establish and grow leading global brands for clients such CBRE, Unilever, Reckitt, Coca-Cola, Levi’s and IHG.

Originally from South Africa, Werner arrived in the United Kingdom in 2006 to further his international career in marketing, only to find himself now settling in the beautiful Somerset countryside.

Werner comments, “Attracted to Quantock’s creative flair, long-standing heritage, and ever-expanding client base, joining the team was a no-brainer”.

Outside of work, Werner loves to spend time with his children and friends and go for the odd run to keep fit.

Welcome to the team, Werner!
Find out more here: https://bit.ly/33vZvox

It was a complete surprise when AMBITIOUS was been named Best PR Agency of the Year by The Drum Recommends. This is the fourth year in a row that we’ve won, and we’re so proud that our clients have recognised our hard work and efforts. 

The award we won is in the agencies under 40 staff category, and there was definitely had tough competition from other UK agencies. The Drum organises the awards to celebrate agencies and is one of a kind in the industry in how it chooses the winners. There are no entries to submit, creative to show or papers to write. Winning can only be achieved through the high regard of clients, supported by their ratings and feedback.

The Drum is a global media platform and the largest marketing website in Europe. Their Recommends database contains over 64,000 ratings left by brands, businesses, and organisations. Here you can find client feedback covering PR strategy, content planning, media relations, and social media. It has the essential ratings for performance levels – from effectiveness to value for money.

Companies searching for suppliers can understand what it is like to work with you and how you perform. The Drum Recommends is a valuable database.

Lis Anderson, Director, AMBITIOUS, said:  “We’re incredibly proud of the team. It’s a real reflection on the effort and work that everyone has put in over the past 12 months. 

This time last year was very different for everyone, personally and professionally. At times pretty tough. I know we asked a lot of everyone: they delivered. So for all the reasons this win feels pretty special.

We’re looking forward to an exciting year ahead, working with our valued clients, growing the business and expanding the team.”

For more information about our award-winning services, please get in touch.

As of March 2021, P+S are now an official Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Consulting Partner. Hurray! Exciting news for us – but why should anyone else care?

Don’t worry. This isn’t your typical self-congratulatory post.

What this means is we can help clients to grow and scale their businesses on AWS. So you could get a cost saving, industry-leading and super secure application.

To achieve our AWS Select Tier status, we had to demonstrate a whole lot of team knowledge and prove the strength of our experience too. So, over the past 4 months, we’ve delivered High Availability architecture for clients like Osborne Clarke and the UK Hydrographic Office.

So, we’ve written this blog to tell you just why you should take note about what AWS has to offer, and answer a few of the questions you might have.

Why is AWS your chosen cloud service provider?

Because they’re the industry’s leading cloud provider.

AWS offers a huge list of services and a robust global infrastructure that we knew could serve our clients around the world. If it’s good enough for 90% of the world’s Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies, it’s good enough for us.

And now our partnership status is testament to our experience and knowledge when it comes to designing and implementing cloud architecture.

As an application implementation, development and infrastructure partner, we can achieve a very close link between your applications’ functionality and its environment, ensuring you always get the very best performance.

What can you do for me?

We can save you time and money.

It’s likely you already know on-premise infrastructure can be hugely expensive. Or you might be using cloud computing, but finding it’s still costing you a fortune. With the right cloud architecture in place, not only can you gain a huge price advantage, you could also save countless hours of time, too.

Commissioning just one new server can take several days and thousands of pounds of hardware investment. But in the cloud, the same process takes just a few seconds. Plus, you can spin servers up and remove them again easily, and without having to worry about hardware.

Our use cases are normally centred around creating web architecture, where this flexibility is useful for creating cost effective solutions. A traditional web architecture might consist of several web servers behind a load balancer, where traffic is distributed across the instances according to some rules.

Figure 1: Application Load Balancer routing traffic to 3 web servers.

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The problem with this traditional set up is that during lulls in user activity, e.g., overnight or over the weekend, you end up with more servers than you need – you’re just haemorrhaging money.

Conversely, during traffic spikes, you might not have enough capacity to meet demand, putting your application’s performance at risk.

Auto-scaling prevents this by automatically adding more servers to the group if demand requires it. When the demand drops, these servers are removed.

Figure 2: The difference between configurations as Autoscaling increases the number of servers to meet demand.
Why is High Availability architecture so important?

Because in the words of Werner Vogels, “Everything fails, all the time”.

All technological solutions – no matter how perfect we might like them to be – will have points of failure and downtime. In fact, even cloud solutions within AWS are subject to the same risks.

By creating an infrastructure that anticipates this failure, we can overcome the risks and mitigate the impact before a failure ever happens.

For example, the AWS network consists of several geographical regions based around the world. These regions are further divided into Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is made up of separate physical data centres that are connected within a region.

You can then split your services across Availability Zones, so should one develop a problem, you’ll hardly notice – your application will still be up and running.

At P+S we follow the AWS principals for High Availability across all of our clients’ architecture to ensure there are no single points of failure, and recovery is automatic wherever possible.

Figure 3: Load Balancing across multiple servers in different Availability Zones.
Is AWS’ Cloud Service secure?

Yes. In fact, at AWS, they have a saying: Security is Priority Zero.

This is for good reason, given the critical nature of data security and harsh penalties for businesses who breach regulations.

There are multiple features in AWS’ tools and services ensuring every design meets stringent compliance requirements, with our own architecture including many of these features as standard.

For example, we deploy AWS CloudFront as a CDN as standard in front of all our sites, together with AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield to protect your site against web vulnerabilities and attack vectors, including the OWASP Top 10 – globally recognised by developers as the top 10 risks to application security – and Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS), which you may have seen recently taking a number of the Belgium government’s websites offline. It also ensures you’re compliant with Data Protection standards such as ISO 27001.

AWS also provides the ability to create entire virtual networks and subnets within the cloud, with complete control over data and user access and flow. This gives you the ability to lock down access to subnets, instances, and services to only authorised sources. For example, you can block physical access to web application servers, ensuring access can only be gained from the load balancer or approved IPs.

So I don’t need servers?

No. One of our favourite methodologies in cloud infrastructure is ‘server-less architecture’.

Server-less architecture means the servers or machine resources used to run a particular task are handled by the cloud provider. So you don’t have to worry about provisioning a server or maintaining it. This saves a lot of time and money; we can simply spin up a database or run code.

This methodology is extremely useful when working on prototypes, for example, allowing us to quicker develop and verify our ideas. It’s also useful for running Continuous Integration workloads to speed up deployments (useful for Autoscaling groups) and helping you manage repetitive tasks or queues.

For example, we successfully offloaded some database queue processing from the application into AWS Lambda. This meant we could configure a smaller database instance than would otherwise have been necessary.

Our summary

At P+S, we believe every business should be able to offer an excellent digital service to their customers. That means creating flexible digital architecture that grows as you – and your customers – need it to. It’s faster, more adaptable, and because it’s flexible, you won’t waste money on servers you don’t need.

Your application shouldn’t go offline unexpectedly. And we don’t believe you should have to pay more for a secure website, so we’ll ensure both your data and your customers’ info is protected at all times.

And our newly earned AWS Select Consulting Partner badge proves that commitment.

Want to find out more? Talk to [email protected] for a no-obligation chat.

Whether you’ve thrived or suffered in the last year, the uncertainties and market changes have put a new emphasis on the concept of value, requiring agency owners, team members and investors to all think differently.

Creating, protecting and realising value demands more rigour, better planning and greater attention to detail. And if you’re not adapting to these new standards, your personal, team and business prosperity could well be at risk.

But please don’t think these challenges only apply if you have an imminent desire to sell your business. Whatever your eventual destination might turn out to be, you’ll want to nurture and safeguard your value in the meantime, keeping your options open for the longer term.

So, to be sure that you’re on the right value track, ask yourself if you have:

We explain these new standards and how to achieve them in our Future Positive Value guide. Find out more about what it will take to optimise value in the next era, with no half measures and nothing much left to chance.

Bower Films today re-launches as Octopus Films: https://octopus-films.co.uk. Founded eight years ago as a full-service video production company by Giles Edwards and Ellie Edwards, the re-brand reflects the company’s ethos and problem-solving abilities.

With clients such as BBC’s Countryfile Live, the British Council and Dyson, Octopus Films helps businesses connect emotionally with their audience through explainer videos, event documentation, TV adverts, testimonial videos and corporate films. Experienced in working across a range of industries, its clients span financial, IT, medical, charity and education sectors, both locally and nationally.

Octopus Films also prides itself on delivering real value to much smaller organisations whose goals are to communicate their offering effectively. These include the BCRM in Bristol, Nelson Hall and Medical Detection Dogs. Leading every project, creative producer Ellie Edwards has 14 years’ of broadcast and corporate experience, while [technical director] Giles has worked across both the corporate and TV industries for more than 30 years.

“We set out to refresh our name and logo to accurately reflect our company’s values – creativity, adaptability, agility and also, great problem-solving skills. The octopus was the perfect emblem – they are nimble, flexible creatures and famed for their smart approach,” comments Ellie Edwards.

“We love producing vibrant, engaging and unique video content for businesses that are keen to show their best side. We can always promise a personal service and our senior team leads the entire production process.”

Giles Edwards adds: “We believe in real stories well told. We draw on our years of documentary experience to get beneath the surface every time. By combining crafted, truthful films with refined editorial values, we tell stories that accurately reflect our clients’ lives and businesses.”

As its new name suggests, Octopus Films is highly adaptable and flexes the size of its team depending on the scale and budget of the task in hand. For larger projects it assembles a team of trusted, former BBC production staff and crew.

Pictured: Octopus Films on location in Bath filming with presenter Jamie Lowe.

It’s that time of year again! The South West Design and Digital Student (SWDDS) Awards are upon us once more, and the clock is ticking for students to enter the competition, with only 10 days left until submissions close on Friday May 14th.

The competition, hosted by us here at Proctor and Stevenson (P+S), offers final-year students studying in the South West of England and South Wales a chance to win amazing prizes for their creative work.

Up for grabs this year, is £4,000 in cash, opportunities for networking, industry exposure, a portfolio review, and a paid work placement with P+S. Not bad eh?

Ten finalists. Three winners. One ‘Ultimate Creative Champion’.

The awards are a chance for students to prove that they’re the best in the South West, and the next up-and-coming stars of the creative industry.

The brief, you ask? There isn’t one.

Students can enter any project – including previous university projects – as long as it falls into one of the below categories and it’s their own work. We’re looking for projects that demonstrate commercial value, meet a market, cultural, and/or social demand, and that showcase how they will be rolled out as a campaign across multiple channels.

Our three categories for this year are:

Our panel of expert judges will carefully select 10 finalists, who will be invited for 25-minute virtual interviews, where they’ll have the opportunity to present their entries, explain their thinking behind the projects and why they’re deserving of the prize, and also receive a portfolio review of their wider body of work. Last year’s projects were exceptional; you can check out the 2020 finalists’ projects here.

Out of our 10 finalists, 3 lucky winners will be selected, announced at our digital awards ceremony on June 10th.

All 3 winners will be awarded £1,000, with one crowned as our 2021 Ultimate Creative Champion, and granted an extra £3,000! Any of our 10 finalists could also be selected for a paid 3-month work placement with us here at P+S.

Meet the judges

We pick the crème de la crème of the industry to judge our awards. Ready to meet this year’s line up?

Let’s show the world what the South West and South Wales are made of

Powered by P+S, and sponsored by Bristol-based printers Taylor Brothers, the awards were launched by our very own MD Roger Proctor, as part of his ongoing campaign to tackle how institutions approach design education.

Over the years, Rog had noticed something about design graduates leaving university: often they had exceptional talent, but no commercial experience. A big problem, when creating a commercially-viable concept that clients and customers will buy into is half the job!

Frustrated by the lack of culture and creativity funding anywhere west of London, he also wanted to do something to celebrate local talent. The South West and South Wales are bursting with creative flair, with their vibrant cities, bustling creative networks, and brimming art venues.

Plus, the awards are specifically designed to be as accessible as possible. We know a lot of students have limited free time –especially those who need to work alongside their degree – so they can choose to enter an already existing project from their course.

Find out more

To make sure you don’t miss any of our updates, like our Facebook page and register your interest here. Our FAQs page is also a handy resource – and if you haven’t already, check out last year’s winners for some hints and tips.

Drop us a line at [email protected]if you have any questions, or to find out more.

And why it’s important to help raise your profile

As a small, proactive PR agency, we work on a mix of short term projects and longer term PR activity.  Working on a range of clients and communications helps to keep us fresh and we enjoy being able to help fledging companies as well as large, more established businesses.

A short burst of activity can give a company or individual a boost and create the kind of impact they’re after. While longer-term pushes can build and sustain momentum as well as awareness amongst your target audience.

We want to position you and your business as thought leaders – trusted sources for commentary and information that journalists come back to time and again. The best way to do that is through a sustained approach.

Clients often ask what they can do to support that and the answer is quite a bit. We start with how they’re currently engaging with publications and journalists – including on social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter.

This is a good way to raise awareness, helping to amplify coverage and getting to know the content being covered.

Quick Tips:

These are good steps to take to help support PR efforts and get you even closer to the publications and writers that will be the most powerful for you.

To find out more about engaging with publications check out our post on the importance of working with local and trade press.

We celebrate new people, new clients and updated structure

This April, at Loom Digital we have celebrated the end of a fruitful Q1, after new hires, new clients and completion of our structural and behavioural evolution. Called “Project Stitch”, we began revisiting our foundations earlier this year and we made the decision to do away with job titles and embrace a flat structure, to better service clients and empower our team.

The business has upweighted our biddable media (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) and biddable social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) offerings, as demand in the market grows. This is reflected in two of the new hires, as Jacob Zurawski, an experienced PPC and biddable media specialist, joins from Shift Active Media and Matt Cooper, also a PPC and biddable media specialist, joins from Atelier Studios. Meanwhile, with three years’ digital experience under her belt, Ellen Stone is our newest digital marketing specialist, previously working at C3.

We have also welcomed a wide range of new clients, including Event Store; Havebike; Play Away; Sew Over It and Smithson Gallery. Now in our 12th year, we continue to make business’s online investments work harder.

Based in Temple Studios in the heart of Bristol, with the team currently working from home due to Covid, Loom is co-owned by the original founder, Nicola Ellison, and Karen Pearce.

Pearce comments, “Our new business structure (as rolled out under ‘Project Stitch) allows our team to take ownership of their careers, have more opportunity for personal growth and shape. It is also the catalyst for ensuring that all of our clients continue to receive the service we’re renowned for.”

“We’re delighted to start the year on a high, after uncertainty across the industry this time last year. After steering our clients through the pandemic, we’re well set up to help businesses maximise their digital channels, and it’s also great to be helping such a wide range of companies who are new to Loom. Biddable media management has been particularly in demand and requires specialist skillsets. We need to employ and nurture the brightest digital talent and in Jacob, Matt and Ellen we’ve been able to welcome three stars”.

If you’re looking to supercharge your digital marketing, please get in touch with us for a no obligation consultation.

Advertising in 2030 will be fundamentally different to how it has been for the past 10 years.

Of course, we accept that for the most part, the same tried and tested methods will continue to work for a while yet – entrenched approaches don’t change overnight.

But individuals and organizations that fail to adapt over time will gradually fade out of relevance. They will slowly become less equipped to support and grow their employees, to help them in their careers and, therefore, the business they are part of.

As customers increasingly embrace digital platforms, the challenge is on.

The challenge is on for business owners to embrace the changes in advertising over the coming years. Doing so enables us to remain relevant and able to foster enduring relationships with customers in cost-efficient ways.

“All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation” – Max McKeown

The Trends and Topics Shaping the Future of Advertising

The one thing I will say before I get into these trends is that they are exactly that…

It is critical we monitor how advertising evolves, but a lot of these topics are fueled by folklore.

These topics change as the facts become clearer. We are in danger, as an industry, of creating that folklore through loud herd debate, which then becomes misunderstood fact.

It is our job as an agency to monitor these topics, contribute positively to the conversation, establish our own stance through investments and ensure we can support our clients as the future becomes clearer.

But be in no doubt – these trends and topics are driving the future of advertising and we need to embrace the conversation.

Marketing Clouds

Marketing clouds will become indispensable elements in the advertising processes of the future. They control the creation and management of marketing relationships with your customers and manage campaigns.

This is already best practice, but it will become standard to integrate solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content handling and analytics.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is ubiquitous in the advertising space. It supports our decision-making and analyzes consumer behaviour.

Enriched with data about how consumers interact with advertising, it substantially optimizes campaigns to perform better. Implemented consistently and to its full extent, AI understands consumers better than they do themselves.

This is very clearly tied to the performance improvements that we have seen in recent years by increasing our adoption of AI within campaigns.

The large tech vendors will continue to embrace artificial intelligence because of the opportunity to scale and, in the future, perform better than humans.

As an agency, we will spend less time in the future on the implementation of administration (eg search query reports) and more time on strategic conversations with our clients to support their business growth.

Programmatic

Programmatic will be standard for digital advertising. It is also the future of more traditional advertising methods.

Think first-party data collected through radio stations (like Sonos radio) and how that could be used over time for programmatic purchasing of audio.

It’s already used for TV and outdoor. Expect to see this more.

Context

Digital advertising is predominantly contextual. This will grow – cohort advertising, for example, is still contextual.

Ads will be selected and placed by automated systems, based on ever more detailed user-profiles and the content displayed. There will be a continued increase in mobile and location-based advertising, which will strengthen this trend.

Consolidation of Adtech

The fragmented supplier landscape within adtech will consolidate. Large adtech players will acquire almost all their smaller but highly specialized competitors that manage to evolve.

Alternatively – and more likely in my view – is that these smaller vendors will be rendered redundant through policy and legislation evolution.

The desire for improved services, additional scale and more first-party data will be the main driver behind any M&A activity.

Working With the Right People

The agency model is changing and the type of people we need in our agency will change over time too. Client-side, supplier-side, agency-side – everyone will be competing for the same kind of job profiles.

It will create a battle for the best talent and create a requirement to deliver the best training.

Employers will compete for experts with scarce, specialized skill sets.

As is the case now, agencies and vendors will be breeding grounds for some of the best talent and we have a responsibility to embrace that change and train people in their careers to create the best outcome for clients, but also the best opportunities for our colleagues in the future.

Demand for data scientists, analytics experts and creative minds is huge at present and will remain high or become more competitive in the future.

The Decline of Linear TV

After print, traditional linear TV will lose its importance.

Large digital platform companies generate similar reach through video-on-demand, social or messaging functionalities.

This reach combined with first-party data and artificial intelligence will create incredibly efficient opportunities to reach audiences at scale through digital platforms.