Enter, Digital Agency Coach’s Agency Accelerator Canvas, or AAC, for short.
Put simply, the Agency Accelerator Canvas is a template for designing your very own growth strategy. Designed to help you and your digital marketing agency create a considered, thorough and actionable roadmap for stratospheric growth.
The AAC prompts thinking and understanding across ten core elements of your agency growth strategy; Purpose, Customer, Value Proposition, Services, Vision, Goals, Strategy, Objective, Milestones & KPIs.
With handy guiding questions along the way, the AAC is easy to follow and easy to complete.
Our Agency Accelerator Canvas demands focus, defines your vision, establishes what it is your agency is trying to achieve, but most valuable of all – it produces an actionable roadmap to get you there.
Free from business school jargon and written in plain English – the AAC is designed to be helpful, straightforward, and easy to follow. At each of the ten stages, you’re offered a handful of guiding questions to formulate thorough and rounded definitions for each component.
While it all sounds so simple and straightforward, the results that populate from the AAC are powerful. At the end of your AAC strategy workshop, you will have defined objectives and measurable KPIs to drive your digital marketing agency forward and measure your success along the way.
Finally – a business strategy document that you can take action on!
The Digital Agency Coach consultants recommend hosting a workshop with your fellow directors or senior management teams to complete the AAC as a group.
Once you have defined your strategy, share it with your employees and wider team – print and mount it within the studio to encourage daily interaction from your cohort.
If there is anything the last two years have taught us, it’s that our world can change in an instant and we, as business owners, must be nimble and adapt our strategy accordingly.
While your AAC will be right for the time, as the seasons change, your strategy will require regular revision. We recommend reviewing your AAC quarterly, asking if any changes need to be made and if you and your team are meeting the objectives.
Use these quarterly reviews to nudge your agency’s strategy back in the right direction, then host a full review workshop and overhaul the overall strategy annually.
First things first, print out the blank AAC template and supporting documents and begin your workshop with our short explainer video to get your meeting off to a productive start.
The AAC is then separated into two focus areas;
We start by defining your digital agency’s purpose. There’s no right or wrong answer here, but it’s important your purpose aligns with your passion – so keep it true to yourself.
Secondly, the AAC takes a look at your customers. You’ll define a specific and targeted niche that your digital agency can approach and service.
Then, we ask about your value proposition. Which problems and pain points do you solve for your clients?
Then finally, – you’ll define your services. This is super important, as this defines your agency’s skill set and the work you agree and disagree to take on.
Then, we move on to…
The AAC then asks you to define your digital agency’s vision and articulate top-level, measurable goals.
Next, strategy. You’re encouraged to think about how you are going to achieve these goals? What are the big moves you’re going to make this year?
Once the big moves are defined, it’s all about the objectives. What daily tactics and functions will your team carry out in order to make the strategy happen.
Then you define growth milestones, or success indicators. What will illustrate that you’re on your way to success?
And then finally, what are the KPIs? How will you measure success and keep your team accountable? We’ll help you define realistic, aspirational and measurable Key Performance Indicators to pull your entire AAC together and ensure it’s the actionable document we promised.
Now you know how it works, it’s time to download the template and start formulating your growth strategy.
Each download includes a ready-to-complete AAC template, a supporting document with key questions to kick-start your thinking and a link to a short explainer video to walk you through the process.
Of course, if you need any help or guidance or you would like a Digital Agency Coach consultant to host an AAC workshop for you and your marketing agency please get in touch via our website.
At Proctors, our people make us who we are. Bold. Brave. Imaginative. Resilient. But resilience doesn’t mean things are always easy.
It’s truly taken a village to see us through the last 12 months. And this article explains more about how our team spirit and collaborative culture have helped us to balance the books throughout these difficult times – and flourish, rather than just float.
When COVID first hit in the beginning of 2020, the consensus was this epidemic would be around for three months in the UK, and we should start to see signs of economic recovery beginning in July 2020. (No comment!)
At the time, we’d just finalised our financial forecasts for the year ending March 2021, but it was clear we needed to review these figures.
After revisiting our forecasts, we worked on a realistic model which would see a dip of around 30% in the company’s income for the first quarter of 2020, before gradually returning to 100% by the summer. We then expected we’d see an uptick in work – to around 130% by the end of the year – as clients rushed to spend already -approved budgets.
Despite knowing now that the information on the pandemic’s duration proved to be inaccurate, this approach placed us in excellent stead.
Our biggest challenge was managing cashflow. With fee income dropping, we still had to cover our business costs. It became crucial to cut costs wherever we could – and quickly.
We reviewed our overheads, and any payments deemed non-essential were stopped or placed on hold. The government also launched an initiative called the CBIL Scheme, and allowed us to defer our PAYE and VAT payments, helping us manage cashflow.
We also made the decision to place any money received from loans or PAYE and TAX deferments into a savings account. As we knew the funds were always going to have to be repaid in March 2021, we decided to only use them if we had to.
Employee utilisation is something we’ve always used to measure productivity across the business at Proctors. It describes how much time any staff member is spending on achieving paid work each month.
During the pandemic, we were able to use our employee utilisation data to forecast upcoming work, and quickly identify the staff members who would be under-utilised over the coming weeks and months, and the skillsets where there wouldn’t be a lot of work coming in from our clients. We could then place those affected employees on furlough, whilst ensuring all other staff had high utilisation levels, reducing our costs while keeping our clients happy.
Over the last few years, we’ve introduced a number of KPIs to ensure we’re always performing efficiently, aiming to be within the top 10% of agencies of our size, financially. This has given us a strong financial foundation, allowing us to continue to support our clients who were also struggling though uncertainty.
Our relationships
Externally, we’ve been part of a working group of Financial Directors within creative agencies for the last four years. Pre-COVID we would meet quarterly, discussing all things financial and operational as well as sharing ideas, best practice tips, and KPIs.
At the beginning of the pandemic we met via Zoom, and as usual shared our latest updates – only this time, we discussed how to approach the upcoming challenges which would affect all of us.
Many agencies cut back on their non-fee earning staff, including new business and marketing. But our own stance differed: as long as we weren’t at a net loss, we would continue to look for new clients and deliver new initiatives to our existing ones.
We kept our new business and marketing team together, giving them the creative and technology staff needed to work on pitches and ideas – and for us, it paid off, resulting in new clients and new business.
Despite a number of businesses in the aforementioned Financial Directors group making different decisions based on what might work best for them, being part of a community that shares knowledge, resources and support has been invaluable.
Those invaluable relationships have extended to our clients too. Like many other businesses, we’ve been there for our clients – and vice versa – during an incredibly testing year. In most cases, we’ve gotten to know each other even better, and have built even stronger business and personal relationships with many of them.
A challenging time for the world, for our business, and for our people. It was so important to us to ensure our employees felt valued, informed – and were able to have just a little fun wherever possible.
Over the last year we’ve introduced a number of new staff initiatives, including our Quarantine Quiz. We originally introduced the quiz to raise money for the Quartet Community Foundation, donating to their Coronavirus 2020 Response Fund, as well as to boost our teams’ morale while we’ve all been forced to work remotely.
And unlike many of the Zoom quizzes we might have held in our personal lives, to this day The Proctors Quarantine Quiz lives on! The format has now evolved slightly, with different staff members hosting each Wednesday, and one lucky winner claiming a £50 Amazon voucher in a nice little midweek boost.
We’ve been rewarding staff for more than just their general knowledge, too. 2021 has seen the return of our famous Proscars awards. The Proscars are our quarterly awards by employees, for employees, with every staff member able to vote for three colleagues they believe should be rewarded for their hard work. Our three winners then get to choose a prize – either £250 in cash or £400 in vouchers.
To get us all moving, we’ve been further breaking up the working week with weekly lunchtime fitness and yoga sessions, hosted by a personal trainer online. And if you’d rather gin than gym, on Fridays our weekly virtual social kicks off at 5pm – although, it’s strictly BYOB!
If all that wasn’t enough, each Friday afternoon our Chairman, Roger Proctor, sends out his weekly ‘Good News’ email. Just as it sounds, it’s a cross-department weekly catch up about all things good – inside and out of work – and an informal welcome to the weekend.
As well as looking after our finances, it was also critical our staff had access to the support they needed to look after their personal wellbeing.
We engaged a psychotherapist and Mental Health Consultant to run a series of wellbeing workshops and Q+A sessions with all Proctors employees. This was followed up with a further series of workshops with our managers, providing them with additional tools to guide and support their team, as well as handouts on working from home, managing stress and more.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve continued to promote our Employee Assistance Programme, offering 24/7 GP, legal and financial helplines, with options for counselling and psychiatric therapy available through our private medical insurance.
We also felt it was important to offer extra help to those who might be struggling with the pressures of family life in lockdown. Therefore, we sought to share helpful guidance and tips to P+S parents for effective home school and balancing with work as well as providing additional flexibility for maintaining work balance and wellbeing during additional childcare and home schooling. We even set up regional and international remote working agreements for those who benefited from being with their family outside of Bristol.
Christmas looked different in 2020, but we still managed to celebrate in style. In lieu of our traditional knees-up, we sent a hamper brimming local treats and bubbles from The Mall Deli in Clifton to each of our staff. But it was also important for us to give back too.
We joined forces with Caring in Bristol to donate a video in aid of homelessness in our city, helping to raise over £20,000. And we’ve kicked off the new year in a similar way by sponsoring Lebeq Ladies – a local women’s football team, in our community of Easton, Bristol.
Our future
None of the positive action we’ve taken should be viewed as temporary.
We intend to continue treating Wellbeing as a priority across the Group, and are continuing with initiatives in this area, such as with Mental Health First Aid training for select staff in June.
Above all, our people will continue to steer our direction moving forward: whether that’s via team surveys, policy and process updates or with lots of creative ideas. Because this has been one of the hardest times in recent memory to manage and market a business. And tough times lie ahead. But with a strong foundation, and an overwhelming commitment to your original values, it is possible to stay above water – even in the most testing of times.
If you’d like to talk to a truly ‘people first’ agency, we’re herewith a listening ear. So talk to us, at [email protected].
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.
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.
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.
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.
Innovative and creative businesses are welcome to join us for a webinar about grant applications and funding on 7th June 2021, delivered by Dr Ben Masheder and Adele Reynolds of Business West’s Access to Funding and Finance Team and James Wheale, Creative Sector Lead at Innovate UK EDGE.
The webinar will discuss grants available to support innovation within the creative industries.
We will cover:
During this special focus session, time will be dedicated on how to apply to the newly announced Creative Industries Fund: fast start business growth pilot (https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/919/overview) from Innovate UK, Deadline for this £25,000, 100% funded innovation grant opportunity is Wednesday 16th June at 11am.
Free registration for BCI members (£10+VAT for non-members). Webinar link will be shared before the event.
More information about Innovate UK EDGE can be found at: https://www.innovateukedge.ukri.org/
To connect with Ben, Adele and James to see how they may be able to support you and your business, email [email protected] with ‘Access to Funding – Creative’ in the subject line.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We’re all different, aren’t we? Some of us need a tight deadline to focus the mind. Some of us just need a clear ‘to do’ list to work our way through and feel good about as we start to tick things off. Whatever it is that gives you the boost you need to get stuff done, be aware of it so you can try to harness it on the days the motivation isn’t coming quite so naturally.
I’m writing this blog on the back of a productive session – one more tick on the list before I finish for the day. I know I’m affected to a degree by the weather. It’s not warm but the sun is shining today and that in itself helps my productivity. Admittedly that’s a tough one to control but there are other things I know I can control that helps me to do what I need to do.
Make a list
I’ve always found lists helpful. I have a list for everything and if I don’t have my list handy when something pops into my head, I write it down or even e-mail it to myself, so I find it when I next log in. We can all hold a certain amount of information in our heads but when it starts to get overloaded it’s only natural that things start to slip.
Delegate
Sometimes we have to admit that we can’t do it all ourselves, so we have to delegate. This can be hard for some people but there are lots of tools that can help you hand over control gradually and in a way that you are comfortable with. Whether you are delegating to in-house members of your team or outsourced freelancers you can maintain full visibility of delegated tasks via regular communication, or via tools that are dedicated to precisely such visibility. Trello (www.trello.com) or Asana (www.asana.com) are just two examples of the kind of software that is available to help you manage your projects in the most efficient way.
Track your time
If you’re not yet sure which areas you need to delegate, it might be useful to track your time for a week or a two. We all think we know where we spend our time, but often our perceptions are wildly out of kilter with reality. It’s also very easy to focus on the jobs we enjoy and leave the tasks we don’t by convincing ourselves that what we are doing is important. By tracking your time, you might find that you are spending too much time in areas that are no longer adding value. And perhaps there are more important areas of the business that are being neglected.
Increase productivity
To increase productivity, it may simply be a case of being more mindful of what motivates us, how we spend our time and which behaviours we can adjust to become more productive without burning ourselves out. Or it might be time to delegate. If you are spending too much time on an aspect of the business that could be handed over to someone else, or if you don’t have time to do the things you know you need to do to drive the business forward, it is probably time to delegate.
Once you have identified the areas you need to delegate, you can set about delegating them. This could be to various in-house fractions, or perhaps to an outside resource. A company’s marketing is one area that often gets left when things get busy and top of the list of things to get forgotten, is your business blog. Smart businesses know they need to blog but getting around to doing it regularly is another matter. By delegating this and any other aspects of the business that you know you are simply not giving the attention they deserve, will free up more time to boost your productivity in other areas of the business.
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.
Do you have a small business that you are trying to grow? There are a lot of balls to keep in the air when you’re just starting out, or when you are in the first couple of years of running a business. You need to market yourself, get the leads coming in, keep existing customers happy, have an eye on the finances, and of course try to enjoy yourself! After all, that’s probably the reason you set up a small business in the first place! But as the business grows, it can become more and more difficult to keep all those balls in the air.
The tipping point
There is often a tipping point that is reached and sometimes breached, before we accept we need help. Sometimes because we want to keep every aspect of the business under our own control, or sometimes because we don’t realise how much we’re struggling, until it gets so bad our body or mind give us away.
Perhaps you’ve realised you need help, but you can’t really afford to take someone else on a sustained full-time salary just yet. Perhaps it just feels like too big a task to let anything go. If this sounds like you, this is where outsourcing to freelancers can allow you to have your cake and eat it!
Changing priorities
Marketing is a common outsourced discipline. Some larger companies use big agencies to take care of all their marketing needs, but a lot of smaller businesses retain control of managing the overall strategy, while outsourcing some of the ‘doing’ to a freelance writer, social media expert or marketeer.
Company blogs are a good example of how things can start to slip as business gets busier. A new start-up sets up a blog to gain new business. They grow awareness, position themselves, and achieve their search engine ranking and then as the leads start coming in, the blog diminishes. It’s not a criticism, it’s a time-consuming aspect of any marketing campaign that can be incredibly hard to stay on top of once the business is doing well. And your priority must be focussing on the customers that need something from you day to day. However, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you have a business blog that was bringing you inbound leads and improving your SEO, you don’t have to let it go.
The business blog you want, without the work
The aim of the Blog Write Blog is to be a source of tips and advice for small to medium businesses who want to build and maintain a blog. However, I completely acknowledge that once your blog is up and running and doing what you wanted it to do, it can be difficult to stay on top of it for the long term. Particularly as your venture grows. Small businesses or start-up companies that want to grow an online presence, but don’t have the time to do it themselves may be able to find an affordable helping hand from a local freelance copywriter.
Find the best fit
Different copywriters will work with you in different ways, so take the time up front to find the best fit for your business. For example, you may be ready to hand everything over from the beginning, in which case you’ll need someone who once briefed, can come up with topics and write the blog for you to sign off. Or, if you would like to keep a little more control, plenty of freelancers will happily take a list of topics you would like to cover and a brief for each one and work their way through the list.
A good copywriter won’t be precious about their writing either, so just because they’ve submitted a blog post to you doesn’t mean you’re obligated to post it immediately with no changes. Particularly in the beginning you should expect to make a few changes while your new copywriter learns your voice. But, if you are prepared to build a working relationship with one person, they will soon be producing content that you would have been proud to write yourself.
If you have a small business that’s gathering pace to the point you don’t know which way to turn, drop me an e-mail today at [email protected] for more information about my blog copywriting services.
The West of England has a strong legacy as a creative industries hub attracting major broadcasters, film companies and digital industries alike to our vibrant towns and cities. Like all industries, however, COVID-19 has hit creative companies hard and the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) has been here to support the creative industries as they work to get through the impact of the pandemic.
To support this, WECA has launched a new business support programme for businesses and individuals working in the creative industries, as part of its Regional Recovery Plan. The programme is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) working in the creative industries, including creative freelancers, and is designed to build resilience and support change in response to COVID-19.
There is also a grant fund for creative freelancers that will give self-employed people the opportunity to become more resilient by developing their own creative product, practice or service, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Grants for creative businesses will fund creative projects that support recovery and resilience, employ freelance creatives, engage local communities and advance diversity and inclusion.
The business support programme has been designed in consultation with members of the creative and cultural sector. The programme also fits with WECA’s ambitions to establish a West of England Cultural Compact, an initiative jointly funded with Arts Council England. This will involve the creation of a new strategic cultural partnership which will lead on the development of a Cultural Strategy and new activities to help increase investment across the creative and cultural sectors in the region.
WECA recently announced a £11.8m investment to boost creative jobs with the expansion of Bottle Yard Studios, which plays host to a wide range of productions, including drama, children’s TV, feature films, gameshows and commercials. Bottle Yard’s growth will also help to support other businesses across the region which rely on film and TV production opportunities.
Almost 60 companies from a range of creative industries across the region have also benefitted from WECA’s Creative Scale-Up programme. This two-year pilot helps creative businesses access finance and peer mentoring through an intensive six-month minimum sustainable growth support programme. WECA has opened applications for the fourth cohort of the programme
Here’s a snapshot of some of the businesses that have benefitted from the programme:
Since joining the Creative Scale Up programme in January 2020, Bristol-based independent development studio and games consultancy Auroch Digital has secured a new publishing deal and taken on 15 new members of staff.
“The Creative Scale Up programme, particularly the mentoring process, was great – we were able to pick mentors targeting specific needs we have. We got direct support with business questions as they arose and that helped us deal with them and move forward.
“As a result, we’ve been able to advance some key areas of the company. We’ve landed one big publishing deal for a new IP game and are circling a second big project, and that mentoring advice has been part of the mix of positives getting us there. Information provided by the Creative Scale Up team also led us to a UWE Digital Innovation Fund grant.” Dr Tomas Rawlings, chief executive, Auroch Digital
Noiser, which specialises in history and drama storytelling with immersive sound design, used the WECA Creative Scale Up £2,000 business grant to develop a sales team and define a clear strategy to drive sales.
“For Noiser, we are not looking for generic business support; I liked how the scheme’s supervisors made us aware that we could find our own mentors and they were able to help connect us with pertinent professionals they were in touch with. This was crucially important.”
Stornaway.io accessed grant funding to re-invest in the creative development of the business.
Having identified a gap in the market for a collaborative web application that lets media producers write, test and publish interactive films easily and affordably without coding, the team was, understandably, wary about how to effectively promote and launch a new product in lockdown.
To showcase the product’s capabilities, Stornaway.io used grant funding to commission and produce a short film called “A Little Hungover”, which would premiere as part of the Immersive Encounters Festival. In order to help futureproof the business, the team at Stornaway.io also made great use of the peer mentoring aspects of the Creative Scale Up programme.
“Launching this new product in the middle of lockdown, the Creative Scale-Up peer mentoring programme was an invaluable community of practice. It was fantastic to meet and develop connections with the leaders of such a wide range of creative businesses in the South West. We have developed a number of ongoing relationships with our peers which we hope will continue to be mutually beneficial.” Kate Dimbleby, co-founder, Stornaway.io
Creative scale-up support includes a £6,000 grant to spend on mentoring support, a dedicated Peer Support Network and sector specific business development training. Businesses are also supported to consider their future finance options and are supported to learn about investment and engage with investors.
Creative businesses wanting to find out more about the new business support programme, grant funds and the Creative Scale Up programme should visit WECA’s Growth Hub page.
The West of England Business Support Guide can also help you navigate the range of support available via the combined authority’s dedicated business support service, the Growth Hub, which provides tailored one-to-one advice and access to finance, support and expert guidance.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.