A deep dive into the UK branding and marketing market from the perspective of independent agencies
(link to full article including interactive heatmap)
Clide Research | February 2026 | getclide.com
When an agency achieves the remarkable feat of 7-digit revenue, the owners (and their teams) are often not content with continuing as a lifestyle business and want to grow further into 8-digit.
A larger agency is not just about more revenue; domain authority does deliver premium pricing (30+%) and better profit margin (5+%).
This is rarely achievable by “doing more of the same”, especially in a market dominated by large global networks at the top. Most agencies try a lot of ideas, which brings the challenge — there are often more ideas than the resources available.
We studied the growth paths of hundreds of UK agencies to analyse what propelled them to 50-100+ people organically, not to offer a playbook, but to illuminate the proven paths and help agency owners anchor their thinking.
The analysis revealed intriguing patterns:
We identified 4 structural changes that independent agencies could seize next 1-3 years, driven by AI adoption and key regulatory changes.
The report concludes with a high-level framework for agency owners to identify the 2-3 strategic bets that best suit them, and how to narrow down to a winning bet.
Getting an agency to seven figures is genuinely hard. Most new agencies never manage it. You survived the project feast-and-famine of the early years, built a team you trust, developed a body of work you are proud of, and found enough clients who value what you do to sustain something real.
The success also means your team no longer just show up to do a job, they gather because of your vision, and what it could mean for their futures. The anticipation for further growth is strong.
You have no shortage of idea. That creative, entrepreneurial instinct is precisely what built the business. It generates hypotheses constantly: a new sector to target, a new service to offer, a new positioning to test, a new market to enter.
The problem is not the ideas. It is the fact that you cannot try everything.
When many ideas are pursued, experiments multiply. The team follows each new direction with diminishing energy. The founding partners become stretched across too many fronts.
This is a familiar pattern at the seven-figure level, and it is not a failure of ambition or effort. It is the natural consequence of a business growing beyond its original design.
Large company chief executives solve this differently. They also face resource constraints and uncertainty, and they invest efforts into identifying a small number of strategic bets that suit their organisations. It’s followed by clear evaluation and aggressive narrow down based on evidence. This approach feels like a luxury when you are building from zero. When you are running a team of twenty or thirty people, it starts to become a necessity.
That is what this article is designed to support. It does not offer simplistic playbooks. It offers a structured view of the UK market from the independent agency perspective, and draws from hundreds of case studies to illuminate the proven paths.
The goal is to help you build conviction from evidence — and then commit to it.
KEY INSIGHT The UK agency fee pool is £8-12bn, but is dominated by large global networks. However, enterprise buyers increasingly prefer best-of-breed capabilities, providing opportunity for well-positioned independents to capitalise.
The UK advertising and marketing market generated £42.6 billion in total spend in 2024, according to the AA/WARC Expenditure Report, and is expected to grow by c.10% per year.
But much of this number is not relevant for independent agencies.
75-80% of this is media spend: the cost of buying airtime, ad space and search/social placement. That money flows through agencies in many cases, but it does not represent fees earned for thinking, creating, or advising. The actual fee pool for branding and marketing services is estimated in the region of £8 to £12 billion.¹
Within this fee pool, the global networks like Omnicom/Interpublic, WPP, Publicis, Havas and Dentsu dominate, by holding the agent-of-record relationships with the largest spenders.
That said, independent agencies have consistently carved out a corner — the top 50 UK independent agencies generated £2.23 billion in the most recent survey year.³ Opportunities usually come from two sources.
Enterprise customers increasingly prefer best-of-breed capabilities on specific areas (e.g. product launches, customer communication, etc.). This opens a wide spectrum to attack for agencies with unique creative philosophy, deep audience understanding or channel expertise.
Most established independent agencies built their businesses in this space and there is a continuous supply of opportunities for up-and-coming agencies. To name a few recent examples:
In each case, the independent agencies provided specialist depth that the networks could not match on that specific brief.
Global networks don’t tend to pitch for customers with <£500k annual fees, constrained by the overhead costs in their business models. This floor is likely increasing due to persistent cost inflation.
This market is collectively large, but the challenge is finding consistent spend streams. The companies in this segment are typically smaller and do not spend consistently on brand strategy and creatives. However, some sectors do reliably spend on communication (e.g. financial services) and downstream marketing services (most B2C sectors).
KEY INSIGHT Financially, scaled agencies are not just bigger versions of smaller agencies. They earn more per person, hold structurally better margins, and have materially more options — including the choice of whether to remain independent.
The 2025 Moore Kingston Smith Annual Survey of UK Marketing Services Companies reveals a clear and consistent gap between group-owned agencies — those within network or PE structures — and independent agencies.
Fee income per head averaged £130,072 at group-owned agencies against £100,926 at independent agencies.³ That is a 29% premium in revenue productivity. At the size where this gap opens up, it is not a marginal difference — it is the difference between a business that generates surplus capital and one that does not.
The margin picture tells a similar story. High-performing agencies — defined as top-quartile for both revenue growth and operating profit — achieved a margin threshold of 18.2%. The industry average operating profit margin was 10.2%.³
These numbers are not benchmarks to aspire toward vaguely. They are a description of what a different business model — one built on specialist positioning, recurring client relationships, and pricing power derived from genuine expertise — actually produces financially.
The mechanism is compounding rather than linear. Specialist positioning commands higher fees. Higher fees fund better hires. Better hires deepen the expertise that justified the premium. Deeper expertise attracts stronger clients, who tend to extend relationships and commission broader scopes of work. Broader scopes generate recurring revenue. Recurring revenue produces more consistent margins.
Each element of that sequence reinforces the next. The agencies that broke through to 100 people did not do so by doing more of what they were already doing. They did so by reaching a position where the compounding effect kicked in — where sector or audience depth was deep enough to justify premium pricing, and premium pricing was sufficient to fund the next hire that deepened the moat further.
KEY INSIGHT Most combinations of sector and specialism could not support an independent agency reaching 100 people. A small number of combinations have consistent examples. The shape of that pattern is not random — it reflects where client spending is large enough, repeatable enough, and specialist enough to support scale.
We studied hundreds of UK agencies and mapped the growth path of 100+ that achieved 50+ people in scale. The analysis focuses on what propelled each agency into scale during its independent phase. Many of these agencies have since been acquired and have expanded into multiple specialisms under network or PE ownership. What matters for this research is the positioning and model that created the foundation — not what the agency became afterwards.
We divided the market into 13 sectors and 11 disciplines. For each growth story, we asked two specific questions:
The heatmap makes the patterns visible. The majority of sector/discipline cross-sections did not consistently produce large agencies. This does not mean opportunities do not exist there — plenty of <50 people agencies built sustainable businesses. It just shows the larger market forces and client spend patterns historically did not support independent scale.
Important: the heatmap does not prescribe a formula. Every growth story has its own ingenuity and market backdrop; it’s too much to cover everything in this report, so we focus on the patterns in the results.
KEY INSIGHT The agencies that scaled all demonstrated strong discipline focus, they occupied positions where the market structure — client budget size, brief repeatability, knowledge barriers to entry — could support a large independent specialist. The breakout opportunities were often presented during significant changes in their target markets.
The heatmap shows five patterns that can be useful for agency owners’ thinking.
The agencies that reached 100 or more people consistently built around a specific positioning — a sector, a channel, a specific audience type, or a defined part of the value chain. Agencies that remained generalist rarely scaled.
This is not a coincidence. Specialist positioning does several things simultaneously: it commands higher fees than generalist alternatives; it creates genuine switching costs as the agency’s knowledge of the client’s world becomes embedded; it builds a reputation within a specific community that makes new business more efficient; and it provides a clear basis for senior hiring. Generalist agencies compete on execution and relationships. Specialist agencies compete on knowledge — and knowledge compounds in ways that execution does not.
FMCG, financial services, technology, and healthcare supported the largest number of scaled agencies. Other sectors attract significant agency activity without producing a meaningful number of agencies reaching 50 people or more.
Property, sports, education, and gaming all show this pattern. Strong creative communities exist. Talented agencies work in these sectors. But no consistent pattern of sizeable independent specialists has emerged.
They share common characteristics: client budgets are smaller or less consistent; brief types lack the volume and repeatability that supports a large team.
The heatmap makes this visible. For anyone considering a deliberate sector bet, this is important information — not a reason to dismiss the opportunity entirely, but a signal that the structural conditions may be working against you.
Looking across the last 3 decades, independent agencies have been consistently fast at capturing, and dedicating to, structural shifts in the broader economy. And such focus is frequently rewarded with scale.
In almost all of these cases, the work they delivered was already covered by existing agencies, but they brought a sharp focus that won the market over. For example:
With the exception of performance marketing, we found no visible examples of an independent UK agency reaching 100 people by focusing primarily on mid-market clients. Even startup-focused Koto has since expanded into digital-rebranding for enterprise customers.
This is a meaningful finding, because the mid-market is where many independent agencies get their early new business. Mid-market clients have smaller budgets, typically want a broader range of services than a specialist can efficiently provide, and tend to be more price-sensitive.
The agencies that scaled worked with large companies — often ones where global networks were also present on different parts of the account. The independent won a specific mandate, not the whole relationship. The brief was large enough to justify the expertise, and the client was sophisticated enough to value it.
This does not mean mid-market clients have no role. They are often where the specialism is first developed and proven. But scaling required moving up the client tier, not across it.
Brand strategy is a frequently used phrase to encapsulate the work by an agency. Intriguingly, very few agencies have reached scale by focusing on brand strategy/architecture alone (with limited/no creative), almost none in recent years.
This reflects the traditional high value segment for brand strategy (brand transformation, mergers & acquisitions driven brand consolidation, major rebrand) is increasingly taken by large global networks; yet the brand strategy spend by smaller companies is not sufficient to support an agency at scale.
There are smart angles such as Brand Finance turning brand valuation into a product (WPP has similar capabilities, but used more internally), but that’s more an exception than a pattern.
KEY INSIGHT The agencies that scaled built positions where the pricing power lived in their thinking, not their production. All three growth architectures involve execution capability — but in each case, the execution is the delivery mechanism for specialist knowledge, not the source of the value.
Across the agencies that exceeded 50 or more people independently, three distinct growth architectures emerge.
The growth paths across the architectures are similar. Deep knowledge commands premium fees. Premium fees fund specialist hiring. Specialist hiring deepens the moat. A deepened moat attracts international clients — and international clients create the natural demand for a second studio, which is typically the inflection point that changes the growth trajectory from linear to compounding.
These agencies consistently sold downstream into implementation as they scaled — packaging production, communications delivery, campaign execution — creating significant revenue volume on top of the strategic and creative fees. But their downstream offering is focused on their specialty, avoiding significant ballooning of headcount usually associated with downstream services.
An agency that builds institutional knowledge in a specific industry sector, and tangibly tailors how it approaches its specialist discipline — the clients regard it not as experienced, but as genuinely expert. The moat is the knowledge and demonstrable approach, perpetuated by a growing roster of highly relevant case studies.
The knowledge starts to live in the agency’s processes, methodologies, and people — not just in the founder. That is what makes it scalable.
This architecture is most commonly observed in creative and communications specialisms. Creative specialists focused on FMCG and consumer brands produced the most successes, for example:
Financial services communication specialists produced the second largest cohort of scaled agencies, for example:
Technology corporate communications specialists produced the third largest cluster, for example:
Healthcare and pharmaceutical is also worth a mention, supporting multiple communications specialists to above 50 people (e.g. Madano, Hanover Communications, etc.) and helped Lynx grow to 400 people.
Deeply expert in a specific audience type: consumers, investors, employees, a particular demographic or cultural community. Many scaled agencies focused further on an audience type within a sector (e.g. financial services shareholders).
The moat is built on audience insight and a methodology that’s visibly tailored for the audience. The positioning is: we know how to speak to this audience — and that understanding is proprietary, systematic, and often transferable across client sectors.
Some notable examples:
The audience-focused model is one of the most dynamic over time, heavily driven by the way people consume information and generational shift.
The sophistication of search and social channels increased in line with the rising usage by advertisers; extracting optimal performance started to require deeper channel-specific expertise.
Unlike traditional media buying, the concentration of the channels created large execution-focused agencies. It’s also one of the rare examples where mid-market clients provided growth engines given their significant and consistent performance marketing spend.
The winners are focused on data but also have knowledge about content-channel fit and deploy proprietary software to link campaign management data to the client’s systems. They usually work alongside creative firms, delivering content rather than creating it.
Scaled agencies in this model usually have high headcount (large offshore workforce to handle manual processes), some examples:
KEY INSIGHT The agencies that scaled most dramatically did not do so only through internal excellence. Their growth was typically punctuated by structural market changes that created demand for specific capabilities at the right moment. Multiple structural changes are unfolding in the UK in the next 1-2 years.
As we discussed in Section 4, seizing structural changes in the market has created a large number of scaled agencies.
Looking further back in history, this pattern holds extremely well. FMCG packaging specialists scaled on the back of globalisation. As brands expanded from domestic markets to international portfolio management in the 1990s and 2000s, the agencies that had built the deepest expertise in brand design and packaging found that the same global clients who valued their work in the UK needed it replicated in Amsterdam, New York, and Singapore. The agencies that followed their clients into new markets grew significantly larger than those that did not.
Healthcare communications specialists scaled on pharmaceutical deregulation and the global clinical trial boom of the same era. Corporate communications agencies scaled on the privatisation waves of the 1980s and 1990s, and more recently on the rise of ESG disclosure requirements that created volume demand for stakeholder and investor communications.
In each case, a structural shift in the market created conditions where a specific type of specialist expertise became substantially more valuable. Agencies already positioned in that space captured a disproportionate share of the resulting demand.
Structural changes in the UK to watch out for
Several structural changes are afoot in the UK at the moment. Below are a few that are unfolding in real time and could have systematic impacts on how companies approach branding and marketing.
UK HFSS restrictions on advertising of high-fat, salt, and sugar products — which came into force on 5 January 2026 for TV and online channels — are creating a material change in where major food and drink brands allocate their marketing budgets.¹⁴
A few reaction patterns are emerging:
Industries experiencing rapid AI-driven disruption — software, professional services, financial services, education — are under significant pressure to articulate their value proposition in a world where their investors expect their core offering to be impacted by AI. The brands that navigate this well need genuine strategic depth: the ability to reframe positioning, rebuild messaging architecture, and communicate clearly through a period of structural uncertainty.
This creates demand for strong communication capabilities and the ability to deal with the urgency of the situation (a broad spectrum of companies have suffered 20+% share price decline in the first two months of 2026). The window in which a brand can define its position in an AI-disrupted landscape is not indefinite — the categories are moving fast, and early positioning decisions will be difficult to revise.
AI chatbots have taken a visible chunk out of search activities, and the trend is likely to increase with the chatbot builders rapidly rolling out new use cases (e.g. shopping, travel planning, etc.).
This changes the way consumers access information, which will likely impact how brands communicate with them effectively:
Marketing and customer services are the first two areas that saw mass AI adoption. While this brings efficiency and gives customers a faster experience, the de-personalisation and the repetitive “AI tone” are also drawing customer resentment.
As AI adoption grows further, brands will most likely start to respond and seek to bring on-brand tones and communication approaches to their AI agents.
Multiple startups recently backed by Y Combinator are already focusing on delivering on-brand and personalised experiences via AI agent, indicating growing awareness of the issue. And Definition already lists a service that helps to tune their client’s AI agent.
KEY INSIGHT Most agency founders know what they believe they are best at, but market forces and competition could mean the commercial results look different. A commercially honest audit is the crucial foundation for strategic planning.
The market map and the three growth architectures are useful frames. But the actual paths have to be built from your own data. You have intuition about what you are good at, but that should be checked against what your business has won, charged and retained, and profited to clarify your genuine competitive advantages.
A structured way to surface that signal is to review the last three years of work through four lenses simultaneously.
Fee rates and margins by sector and service type. Where has pricing been strongest? Where have write-offs been lowest? The data almost always reveals concentrations the team has not consciously registered. If you have consistently charged more for a specific type of brief than any other, that is worth understanding.
Client lifetime value by segment. Which engagements led to extended relationships, expanded scopes, and referrals? Long-tenure clients are not just commercially valuable — they are evidence that the agency is delivering something the client cannot easily replace.
Close rate by brief type. Where does the agency win most consistently? High close rates in a specific category are a reliable signal of genuine competitive advantage. Low close rates in a category you are actively pursuing is a signal worth paying attention to.
Team energy. Which types of work generate genuine engagement from your best people? The alignment between what the team finds meaningful and what the market rewards well is the foundation of a durable position. Misalignment — strong commercial performance in areas the team finds draining — is a warning sign for sustainability.
The intersection of all four is where your positioning should be built. In most agencies at the seven-figure level, this intersection is considerably more specific than the agency’s current official positioning suggests.
Once you have identified your strongest intersection through the commercial audit, the next question is which paths you should bet on.
You are usually the main salesforce, and your time is limited, so it’s critical to identify 2-3 strategic bets that exemplify your strengths.
Home in on your star discipline, identify 1-2 sectors where you and your team feel strongly, and that have sufficient spend power. Create positioning ideas with your team that captures potential catalysts facing those sectors that you can address better than anyone else. This makes sure everyone is on the same page and attacks these angles at full energy.
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Adjustments will be necessary. That’s why it’s critical to have full visibility on progress in real time. When you feel the need to try a new angle, it means at least one of the existing angles should be shut down. This is critical to ensure you do not overstretch your resources and your own bandwidth.
Moat first. Scale follows.
1. AA/WARC Expenditure Report, April 2025 — UK total advertising expenditure £42.6 billion in 2024. Media spend proportion estimated by the authors. https://adassoc.org.uk/our-work/uk-advertising-records-42-6bn-spend-in-2024/
2. Omnicom Group and Interpublic Group merger announcement, December 2024; merger completed November 2025. Combined revenue figures per company disclosures. https://investors.interpublic.com/news-releases/news-release-details/omnicom-acquire-interpublic-group-create-premier-marketing-and
3. Moore Kingston Smith Annual Survey of UK Marketing Services Companies, 2025. https://mooreks.co.uk/insights/snapshot-annual-survey-on-the-financial-performance-of-marketing-services-companies-2025/
4. Historical analysis of Publicis/Saatchi and WPP/JWT merger periods; authors’ assessment.
5. Epoch Design company profile; client claims per company website. Employee count per 6sense and LinkedIn data, February 2026. https://epochdesign.com/
6. PMLiVE — Havas Lynx company profile and Campaign Healthcare Agency of the Year citations. https://pmlive.com/pmhub/havas_lynx/
7. Dentsu Aegis Network — Gyro International acquisition announcement, July 2016. https://www.dentsu.com/us/en/news-releases/dentsu-aegis-network-acquires-gyro
8. Emperor Design — company website and Companies House filings. https://emperor.works/about/ | https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/03160710
9. Buttermilk — company website and Favikon employee data, February 2026; Unilever appointment per industry press, 2025. https://thinkbuttermilk.com/
10. Amplify — Brand Experience Agency of the Year 2024; financial figures per company announcement. https://weareamplify.com/
11. The Imagination Group Limited — Companies House filing, August 2024 accounts. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02275977
12. Inflexion Private Equity — Goat Agency investment announcement, March 2021; WPP — Goat Agency acquisition by GroupM, March 2023. https://www.inflexion.com/portfolio/goat/
13. Brainlabs, Croud, and Jellyfish — company profiles and PE/acquisition announcements per company and investor disclosures. https://www.brainlabsdigital.com/ | https://www.croud.com/ | https://www.jellyfish.com/
14. ASA/CAP — HFSS advertising restrictions on less healthy food and drink, came into force 5 January 2026. https://www.asa.org.uk/news/new-rules-and-guidance-for-less-healthy-food-and-drink-advertising.html
Clide helps independent branding and marketing agency owners think through the strategic questions that will shape the next five years of their business.
getclide.com | © Clide 2026
Congratulations! You’ve produced a video you’re really happy with. Now all that’s left to do is upload it to your preferred streaming platform and forget about it, right? Well, not quite. Uploading it to one platform and moving on is a missed opportunity. A single video can generate weeks or even months of marketing content when used as part of a structured video marketing strategy.
There’s a much better way to maximise your investment, and it’s far less expensive than you might think…
As video becomes more and more important in buying decisions (don’t just take our word for it) making the most of your content has become essential. The aim is to maximise the number of opportunities to engage with your audience and that means translating your content into the most eye-catching formats and showcasing it on the most relevant platforms.
Ensuring the consistency of your brand’s look and feel across each touch point is also key to helping build trust and recognition. Plus, it means you can have content that can more easily be used at a later date.
This is where the strategy of producing one main film and cleverly repurposing it with mini edits comes into play. Where appropriate, you can also use it to create micro content (films or animations). Extracting key moments and insights from the hero video means marketers can tailor their content to suit different platforms and audience preferences.
So how is it done? There are 3 main ‘Ms’ to bear in mind.
(view image in the original article here)
The first M (Main) is pretty straight forward, so we won’t spend too much time here. Your Main is the complete film you’ve put all your effort and time into. A tight script, some fun effects and clever camera work and you’re good to go.
As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to put this on YouTube or your preferred streaming platform etc. YouTube is perhaps the best know and makes your videos very discoverable, but you might benefit from the additional insights a platform such as TwentyThree can provide. This allows you to continue refining how you position your content and helps you attract more views.
*Don’t forget that you might want to hype your main film using your shorter pieces of content first, so hang fire on posting it until you’ve released a few canny ‘teaser’ edits.
We’ve used an example from the TOUGHBOOK campaign we produced for technology pioneers, Panasonic, highlighting how we maximised the video assets – from the primary film to short clips and teaser content.
(view the video in the original article here)
The second M (Mini) is where you start to create shorter, more focused edits of your Main film. A Mini edit’s purpose can either be to build a queue of people ready to watch your main film OR highlight unique parts of your offering.
For example, your Main film may be about your complete suite of products or services, but your Mini edits might break it down into your specialism in individual sectors. Equally, you might have produced a tutorial on how to use your product and found that people are most often searching for (and watching) one particular step of the process. Creating a Mini edit focused on that one step, packed with quality SEO, can increase your discoverability to new prospects.
The key here is not to create lots of new content, you should be aiming to recycle, reuse and reformat as much as possible into new edits.
Here’s a quick shorthand for how you might define those different types of edit.
These give the audience a reason to watch your main video. What are you audience going to find out? Does it give a glimpse of a new product or service? Are you announcing a particular date or event? Perhaps your interview had a nugget of gold in, you can create a short edit that leads up to that point, encouraging viewers to watch your main film to find out more.
Think of this as a short snappy edit that sets everything else up. This will come out in advance of your main video, so the goal is to create a queue of people ready and waiting for when the main video launches.
Here’s a little teaser video from the Panasonic Toughbook campaign.
(view the video in the original article here)
These combine as many hooks as possible to pull people towards your main film OR provide another CTA i.e. to a landing page or sign-up form.
By condensing the most compelling moments and messages from the core video into shorter formats, marketers can deliver targeted edits that resonate with different segments of their audience.
Now’s the time to think social media: using LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok etc. With these platforms, your audience often wants smaller bite-size content.
Whether it’s a brief teaser, a highlight reel, or a quick tutorial, each edit serves to capture attention and drive engagement, ultimately leading viewers back to the full video for a deeper dive into the content.
Check out this short snippet from the Toughbook campaign- a quick example of how a single core video can evolve into engaging mini content that grabs the attention of the viewer.
(view the video in the original article here)
This most often refers to content such as Gifs, presentations or web animations. Think of them as small single-issue messages, or very brief statements. Examples could be:
The key here is to keep it concise. If someone asked you to explain your micro edit, could you sum it up in one sentence? You’re giving potential customers clarity in seconds, and for the time-poor that’s a compelling reason to click.
The outputs for Micro tend to fall into gifs, MP4s, or Lotties and Rives, and the use cases are the broadest:
Here’s an example of how we make the most of one explainer video. This is our Atomic Design explainer video. We use the complete video to kick off pitches, giving the audience a quick overview of the methodology.
(view the videos in the original article here)
Video marketing remains a powerful tool for brands looking to engage audiences and drive meaningful interactions. By creating one full video and repurposing it into shorter edits, marketers can maximise the reach and impact of their content across various platforms –without drastically increasing the total cost.
A well thought out video marketing plan should guide your production of the video. It lets you know up-front exactly what the strategy is and the exact content you’ll need to produce. For example, when you animate that icon, is it also going to be needed for a Lottie? And, if so, what steps do you need to take to minimise additional work?
By combining compelling visuals with strategic messaging, and getting under the right noses, brands can create memorable experiences that resonate with their audience and drive tangible results.
If you’re wondering how to squeeze even more value out of your video content, or just want to talk through your ideas, get in touch at [email protected].
We’ve seen how branded content evolves from campaign support into institutional infrastructure. At a certain point, what’s needed isn’t more output – it’s an engine.
There comes a point in many complex organisations when branded content stops being a marketing activity and starts becoming an operational, commercial responsibility.
The shift is gradual. Calendars fill up and channels multiply. Thought leadership, product storytelling, web content and social activity begin competing for attention. Regional teams interpret messaging in subtly different ways. Leadership asks for clearer evidence of impact. And the system begins to strain.
We’ve encountered this pattern repeatedly in global institutions and growth-focused organisations: nothing appears broken, but momentum becomes harder to sustain.
At that moment, the problem is rarely creativity or ambition. More often, it’s architecture.
Branded content has become central to reputation, growth and authority, yet it’s often still managed as a series of disconnected outputs – campaign by campaign, post by post, asset by asset. What’s missing isn’t volume, but continuity: a defined, constant engine that turns strategy into sustained, measurable narrative in market.
When branded content reaches that level of importance, it requires more than coordination. It requires a deliberate operating model behind it: a branded content engine.
Limits of the traditional approach
Most organisations respond to rising branded content demand in practical ways. They expand internal teams, commission freelancers, or engage agencies to support campaigns. Each approach can work, particularly in the short term, but none fully resolves the underlying question of operational design.
Internal hires bring proximity and brand familiarity, yet rarely encompass the full spectrum of skills required for sustained branded content leadership – editorial strategy, tone governance, digital optimisation, performance reporting and cross-channel adaptation. Freelancers offer flexibility but depend heavily on internal direction and oversight, which can create bottlenecks. Agencies often excel at campaign bursts, but episodic engagement doesn’t necessarily create institutional continuity.
Over time, this can lead to fragmentation. Tone drifts subtly between markets. Institutional knowledge resides in individuals rather than systems. Reporting becomes retrospective rather than forward-looking. The branded content function grows in importance, yet remains structurally underdeveloped.
Many marketing leaders recognise this – even if they don’t initially describe it in these terms. The challenge isn’t volume. It’s structure.
When branded content becomes infrastructure
As organisations mature, branded content stops being simply supportive. It becomes infrastructural. At that point, the question shifts from “Who can produce this?” to “How is this function designed to operate over time?”
Treating branded content as infrastructure means building a system rather than assembling outputs. It involves defined workflows, clear roles and accountable leadership. It calls for integration between editorial thinking, design execution, digital performance and governance requirements. It also requires financial visibility, predictable delivery rhythms and continuous optimisation.
In our experience supporting large-scale branded content programmes – from multi-market institutions to global campaign partners – the difference is rarely the idea. It’s the engine behind it.
In this context, branded content is no longer an occasional marketing initiative; it’s an ongoing organisational capability. Thought leadership programmes, executive commentary, website ecosystems, social storytelling and campaign narratives need to align under a coherent operating model. Without that model, even the strongest strategy risks dilution through inconsistent execution.
We’re also seeing this shift in organisations moving from service-based models into self-serve or SaaS products. Launch strategy is only the beginning; sustained growth depends on a consistent branded content engine that educates, reassures and converts over time.
Importantly, this doesn’t mean adding layers of bureaucracy. A well-designed structure doesn’t slow creativity; it supports it. When briefing processes are clear, approval pathways are agreed, and optimisation and reporting are embedded into the workflow, teams can focus on insight and storytelling rather than navigating friction.
Recognising the structural signals
Not every organisation requires a fully embedded branded content division. However, there are clear signals that a more deliberate model may be needed.
This moment often arrives when content demand becomes continuous rather than cyclical; when multiple markets need alignment around a shared narrative; when leadership expects performance data alongside brand storytelling; when procurement and finance require greater transparency around investment; and when internal teams find themselves managing coordination more than strategy.
These signals point to a structural reality: branded content has grown in strategic importance, but the operating model behind it hasn’t always evolved at the same pace.
Once that gap becomes visible, the solution isn’t simply to produce more material. It’s to design the system that sustains it.
Building the operating model behind branded content
A structured branded content function integrates several disciplines within a unified framework. Editorial leadership ensures narrative coherence and tone consistency. Design and digital expertise translate ideas into engaging, multi-channel formats. Optimisation and analytics provide visibility over performance and audience behaviour. Governance processes align the function with procurement, compliance and reporting structures.
Rather than treating each campaign or article as a standalone project, this model establishes continuity. Planning becomes strategic rather than reactive. Reporting becomes a regular, forward-looking discipline rather than an afterthought. Institutional memory accumulates and strengthens the organisation’s voice over time.
For Marketing Directors and CMOs, the benefit lies in predictability and clarity. Branded content activity can align directly with organisational objectives, budget visibility improves, and cross-market consistency becomes achievable without heavy-handed control. Expertise scales without permanently expanding headcount, and the organisation retains the agility to respond to emerging opportunities.
This approach also provides a stable foundation for innovation. As technologies such as generative AI and advanced analytics become more prominent, a structured operating model ensures that new tools are integrated thoughtfully, with human editorial oversight safeguarding quality and credibility.
A more deliberate future
Over the past decade, many organisations have invested heavily in brand positioning and digital platforms. Increasingly, attention is turning to the systems that sustain those investments. Strategy defines direction and platforms extend reach, but operational design determines whether branded content can deliver sustained impact.
For organisations navigating complexity – multiple stakeholders, global audiences, formal governance and high editorial demand – the conversation is evolving. The issue is no longer whether branded content matters; its strategic value is widely understood. The more pressing question is whether the structure supporting it is robust enough to match its importance.
If branded content now shapes reputation, authority and growth, it deserves the same rigour applied to any other critical function.
Because in many organisations, the real challenge isn’t content at all.
It’s structure.
If your organisation is reaching the point where branded content needs more than coordination, we’d be pleased to continue the conversation. Explore more of our work, or contact us to discuss how we can help.
In summer 2021 we ran an event discussing funding for creative businesses with the south west team at Innovate UK EDGE and a group of Bristol Creative Industries members.
During the discussion, attendees said it would be useful if we could provide regular updates on the finance schemes that are available for creative companies in the south west and beyond. This guide is our response.
The guide is one of Bristol Creative Industries’ most popular ever blog posts. We keep it updated with the latest funding schemes for creative businesses so check it regularly. We also include the post in our monthy email newsletter, BCI Bulletin. To sign up, go here.
Funding news:
The West of England is one of the government’s priority areas for the creative industries and the West of England Combined Mayoral Authority will receive £25m of the funding to support the region’s creative industries through the Creative Places Growth Fund.
The funding will run for three years from April 2026. Read more details about the fund here.
SMEs can apply for 50% match‑funded grants contributing toward projects valued between £20,000 and £80,000.
Funding can be used to address specific challenges or opportunities, such as adopting new technology, developing new products or services, or increasing operational capacity. The grants aim to support growth activity for SMEs from the UK government’s eight high-growth, high-potential sectors, known as the IS-8:
All funded projects must create at least one full-time equivalent role per £10,000 of grant awarded, ensuring meaningful economic impact for the region.
Eligible businesses must:
Applications close at 12pm on 12 March 2026. Companies need to complete an expression of interest prior to receiving an application pack.
The British Business Bank, the government-owned business development bank, has launched the £200m South West Investment Fund (SWIF) “to help address market failures by increasing the supply and diversity of early-stage finance for UK smaller businesses, providing funds to firms that might otherwise not receive investment”.
Aimed at businesses in Bristol, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, the fund provides:
SWIF is managed by four fund managers:
The region is split as follows:
North of the region:
South of the region:
The funding is split as follows:
Businesses can apply for funding directly to the relevant fund managers here.
Grants of £2,500 to £10,000 are available to help small businesses, sole traders, charities, community interest companies (CICs), community organisations and creative and cultural groups open new premises.
The deadline for applications is 11.59pm on Monday 30 November 2026.. If all available funding is allocated before the deadline, the scheme may close early.
Successful applicants must start trading from the funded property by Friday 26 February 2027.
This £35m Creative UK and Triodos Bank investment fund provides loans of £100,000 to £1m.
Finance is directed to post-revenue creative businesses presenting promising growth potential and who:
PRS Foundation offers various grant funding schemes for music creators and organisations, including The Open Fund for Music Creators and The PPL Momentum Music Fund for artists/bands to break through to the next level of their careers.
The Black Artists Grant, offered by Creative Debuts, is £500 no-strings attached financial support to help Black artists.
The fund is an open access programme for arts, libraries and museums projects.
Funding of between £1,000 and £100,000 is available.
Loans of between £100,000 and £1.5m to UK charities and social enterprises based in England, Wales and Scotland.
Funding of between £20,000 and £50,000 for social enterprises grow. Repayments are based on a percentage of revenue so if revenue falls, repayments reduce.
This fund from Arts Council England supports individual cultural and creative practitioners in England thinking of taking their practice to the next stage through things such as: research, time to create new work, travel, training, developing ideas, networking or mentoring.
Grants of between £2,000 and £12,000 are available.
The next round of funding will open to applications in April 2026.
The £5m Supporting Grassroots Music fund supports rehearsal and recording studios, promoters, festivals, and venues for live and electronic music performance.
The Four Nations International Fund helps artists and creative practitioners from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales collaborate with each other and with partners around the world.
Th deadline to apply is 2pm on Wednesday 25 February 2026.
Travelwest provides match-funded grants for initiatives that improve sustainable travel provision in a business.
The aim is to provide financial support and incentives to employers to enable them to encourage sustainable modes of commuting or in-work travel (including site visits and meetings) amongst their staff.
The grants can be used for the implementation of physical measures, promotional events or any other measure that will encourage mode change amongst staff.
Grants are currently availables for businesses in Bristol and North Somerset.
Innovate UK’s £100m BridgeAI programme aims “to help businesses in high growth potential sectors such as creative industries, agriculture, construction, and transport to harness the power of AI and unlock their full potential”.
The programme offers funding and support to help innovators assess and implement trusted AI solutions, connect with AI experts, and elevate their AI leadership skills.
This fund supports organisations who work at the intersection of art and social change. It offers grants between £90,000 and £300,000 over three years.
Applications are currently closed but details of the next round will be announced soon.
This new £23m social impact investment fund is for socially driven arts, culture and heritage organisations registered and operating in the UK. It offers loans between £150,000 and £1m repayable until May 2030.
The Elephant Trust says its mission is to “make it possible for artists and those presenting their work to undertake and complete projects when frustrated by lack of funds. It is committed to helping artists and art institutions/galleries that depart from the routine and signal new, distinct and imaginative sets of possibilities.”
Grants of up to £5,000 are available. The next round of funding opens on12 March 2026, with a deadline of 12 April 2026.
Grants of up to £100,000 are available for arts, libraries and museums projects.
The grants support a broad range of creative and cultural projects that benefit people living in England. Projects can range from directly creating and delivering creative and cultural activity to projects which have a longer term positive impact, such as organisational development, research and development, and sector support and development.
The UK Global Screen Fund (UKGSF) is designed to boost international development, production, distribution, and promotional opportunities for the UK’s independent screen sector. It has the following schemes:
This fund aims to grow exports and global demand for UK independent film by supporting the UK film industry to achieve measurable results which would not have been achievable without the support.
Applications close on at 11.59pm on 31 March 2028.
This scheme supports the festival launch of UK films in order to enhance their promotion, reach and value internationally.
Applications close on at 11.59pm on 31 March 2028.
Supports UK producers to work as partners on international co-productions and help create new global projects.
The next round of funding is due to open for applications in February 2026.
A Start Up Loan is a government-backed unsecured personal loan for individuals looking to start or grow a business in the UK. Successful applicants also receive 12 months of free mentoring and exclusive business offers.
All owners or partners in a business can individually apply for up to £25,000 each, with a maximum of £100,000 per business.
The loans have a fixed interest rate of 6% p.a. and a one to five year repayment term. Entrepreneurs starting a business or running one that has been trading for up to three years can apply. Businesses trading for between three and five years can apply for a second loan.
If you’re running a creative social enterprise you may be able to access funding from UnLtd.
Finance of up to £5,000 is available for starting a social enterprise and up to £15,000 for growing a social enterprise.
Successful applicants also get up to 12 tailored business support plus access to access to expert mentors and workshops.
Businesses can apply for up to £3,500 to cover the costs of installing gigabit broadband.
Check if the scheme is available in your area here.
Grants to provide support towards the costs of the purchase, installation and infrastructure of electric vehicle chargepoints at eligible places of work.
The scheme covers up to 75% of the total costs of the purchase and installation of EV chargepoints (including VAT), capped at a maximum of £350 per socket and 40 sockets across all sites per applicant.
The deadline for applications is 11.59pm on 31 March 2026.
This grant supports the uptake of electric vans and trucks. It currently offers discounts up to £2,500 for small vans, £5,000 for large vans, £16,000 for small trucks, and £25,000 for large trucks.
On 18 August 2025 the government announced the plug-in van and truck grant has been extended until 2027.
If you know of another scheme that we haven’t listed and you’d like to share it with other creative businesses, email Dan to let us know.
GEO… have you heard of it?
The answer to that is probably yes. Because those three little letters have been on the lips of every marketing, PR and SEO person for the last 12 months and more.
They’ve been the subject of countless LinkedIn posts, blogs, articles, features and commentary. Everyone has something to say about Generative Engine Optimisation – we’ve even written a few ourselves.
But the big thing about GEO and all of these insights and opinions being offered up is that most of them are either misinformed or outright incorrect… and it’s creating something of a rift.
A rift in understanding, which, if you’re on the wrong side of, could end up pretty harmful. As it might lead you off-piste when it comes to your digital marketing strategies.
Which is why we’ve written this piece. To cut through the noise of all the online GEO chatter and give you a concise overview surrounding some of the most prevalent GEO misinformation you’ll come across.
This is the big one. But despite what the headlines and hot takes would have you believe, GEO is not replacing SEO.
This is one of the more potentially damaging pieces of misinformation out there. Becasue when you have reputable media outlets running articles with headlines like ‘Forget SEO, Welcome to the world of GEO, ‘ it creates an ecosystem which makes us feel we have to choose between one or the other.
That’s not how it works and it’s this narrative that’s the most harmful, because it creates a false choice dilemma. In this particular case, it’s the logical fallacy that you have to choose between either SEO or GEO.
The fallacy is then negatively reinforced by layering the argument completely in favour of GEO – but without a full understanding of what it is and how it works.
In short, people on the internet are telling you to ditch SEO for GEO – they don’t understand how the two are linked.
When the terribly clever folk were building Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity… what do you think they trained it on?
They trained it on web-scale data, which means a lot of Google-indexed content. These tools are still using web-scale data to provide responses. So all that SEO content that it’s pulling from is kind of important.
More and more people are using AI tools as search alternatives; this is true.
Where the truth gets somewhat lost is in playing up the scale of this growth. Some paint the picture of Google being a quickly sinking ship, its search dominance dropping like a stone to the bottom of the ocean.
Now Google has lost some of its dominance. Its market share dropped to below 90% for the first time in 15 years. But 89% market share is still billions and billions of searches. ChatGPT is on the rise, but 17% market share is paltry in comparison.
These patterns may continue; they may not. The most dangerous this we can do is to assume one way or another. The best thing to do is to react to the here-and-now, while keeping one eye on the future.
Don’t lose sight of the current reality, that Google still has a lot of power and search volume isn’t tanking quite as hard as sensationalist LinkedIn posts would have you believe.
Now this one is 100% true. AI and LLMs are indeed having a huge negative impact on web traffic.
In Google, thanks to the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews, zero click searches are on the rise.
A zero click search, if you don’t already know, is a search query which doesn’t result in a click to any sourced website. There are two reasons why this would happen.
One is that the search itself did yield the appropriate outcomes and was abandoned. The other is that the searcher did get the answers they needed, but from other sources.
Pre-GEO, those ‘other sources’ could have been featured snippets, knowledge panels, people also ask. All these various features, bells and whistles that Google implemented to enrich search, whether that actually happened or not is a debate for another time.
But in a GEO age, the AI overview is pulling focus. Here’s what the data shows:
These numbers are a bit of a problem for all parties.
Zero-click journeys mean people aren’t getting into the traditional search engine results, meaning they aren’t converting into visitors and leads.
So, your traditional search visibility and SEO strategies are compromised – this is where the GEO visibility conversation rightly takes root.
The second issue is one of Google’s own making. Because this also applies to paid search. By keeping attention within the overview itself, Google is compromising its own PPC income stream – an issue they’re rapidly trying to fix by deploying ads in the overview itself, though it’s very early days for this
The argument being made, over and over again, is that you should abandon keywords in favour of contextual meaning.
Logically, linguistically, literally, this is a completely flawed argument.
It’s incorrect to say GEO doesn’t use keywords at all. It would be more accurate to say that GEO is not so rigid in specific keyword matching. But they are still present, viable and useful only in a different way.
Case and point, research is showing that when using AI tools, searches and questions get longer, and when they get longer they get more complex. In response to this, a term you might hear being used is the ‘query fan out technique’
In technical terms, this means that multiple, contextualised searches across several subtopics specific to that search are being run. In Leyman’s terms, it’s answering multiple questions, across various search intents, all at once. Something like this:
Seven word search (Google Search)
What’s the best seafood restaurant in London.
20+ word search (AI)
Can you recommend five highly rated seafood restaurants in London. Lobster and mussels must feature on the menu, outdoor seating would be preferred, they must take walk-ins and have a broad wine selection.
The ani-keyword argument is grounded in the theory that keywords as a sole tactic of search visibility won’t work in GEO. That is correct.
But in trying to create nuance, it actually misses more than it answers.
A more apt description would be to say that you need MORE than just keywords.
It isn’t enough to just say ‘we are the best seafood restaurant in London’ over and over and over again, trying to game the search system.
It’s about showing, not telling.
So, this is the million-dollar question… when people are talking about GEO strategies, what do they actually mean?
There’s a lot of jargon out there, but not a whole lot of clear answers. So here they are.
The three things that you should be doing to ensure you’re featuring in AI results.
Earned Media: quality, consistent media coverage in relevant and trusted outlets earns you critical brand brownie points. Offering signals to LLMs that you are to be trusted and therefore surfaced.
EEAT-driven owned content: creating and publishing all manner of content that leverages your expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness,
Technical structures: clean site structures, good UX, readability, load times, mobile friendliness and accessibility as well as coherent AI-friendly data structures and schema markups.
Now those versed in contemporary SEO might look at these things and think, wait, that looks familiar. If you aren’t, let me give you the insight.
Earned media, EEAT and clean technical structured data – they’re fundamentals of SEO
So, in truth, SEO and GEO have a lot more in common than those on the internet would have you believe.
What works for SEO also works for GEO.
There is no SEO vs GEO debate. You don’t and shouldn’t have to decide between one or the other. As we said at the top, this is entirely a false choice dilemma.
This isn’t a divergent moment. It isn’t a question of SEO or GEO.
The two are converging. It should be SEO AND GEO, and those who would tell you anything otherwise – like how SEO doesn’t factor in things like entity association, trust signals and semantic depth – have an outmoded view of SEO and how it fits into digital PR.
This entire debate around generative AI search results fails to understand how integrated digital communications already answers many of the apparent problems that GEO causes.
So the false choice dilemmas, the LinkedIn hot takes, the countless blogs and features attempting to explain away concepts that are already very well established.
It all comes from a completely one-sided point of view. People who’ve experienced SEO as a keyword stuffing, word matching exercise, designed to game search engines and push SERP position and only that.
This one-sidedness fails to take into account that this is one aspect of a broader digital PR strategy.
We can see the numbers and the data. Reputable sources like Ahrefs are showing us, as clear as day, that earned media and EEAT content are the two biggest drivers of visibility in AI search. Which we know, because they also drive SEO performance.
SEO hasn’t been about who has the most keywords for a very long time. It’s been about quality, relevance and consistency across earned media and owned channels.
That’s the face of digital PR now. GEO is just another aspect of it.
In 2011, we first filmed a Dr. Thomas Scott at the University of Bristol‘s Interface Analysis Centre. This summer our latest project with (long since Professor) Tom was the Hot Robotics team’s Cerberus robot. This gave us the chance to spring a sneaky retrospective on him…
Our new ‘Now and Then’ film charts a 14-year journey of Tom on film. But it’s more than a timeline; it’s a masterclass in building the social proof that attracts funding and shapes policy.
For a researcher seeking grants, a start-up or a VC, this is what de-risking an investment looks like. Consistent video storytelling is a key ingredient to transform a brilliant scientist into a trusted leader whose vision you can back with confidence. It creates a track record that speaks for itself.
Professor Scott is a powerhouse for attracting investment and talent because he tells persuasive stories that complement his research groups’ brilliant science and academic graft. Video allows him and his colleagues to articulate the ‘why’ of complex science clearly and succinctly. These days, he makes speaking to the camera look easy; however he’ll freely admit how much his on screen skills have grown since 2011. He’s embraced media training, become a dab hand at teleprompters where required, and always works collaboratively with the production team to get the tone and messaging right.
So watch and enjoy.
Great science deserves a powerful voice. We’ll help you find it.
Bristol, UK – January 2026 — Ignition DG Ltd, the Bristol-based strategic events and exhibitions agency, as part of Istoria Group, today announces significant business growth. From expanded global reach to continued leadership, Ignition DG continues to generate impressive results in the sector.
Founded in 2007 with a mission to challenge traditional “build and burn” event practices, Ignition DG has grown into an award-winning creative agency known for blending strategic planning with world-class delivery.
Global Growth
Ignition DG designs and delivers hundreds of exhibitions and event programmes each year – serving clients across pharmaceutical, beauty, biotech, aerospace and technology sectors.
To support recent successes, Ignition DG ended 2025 with the opening of a new European office. With strategic hubs and warehouse facilities now established across the UK, EU and the US, Ignition’s global growth goes from strength to strength. Paired with trusted partners across Asia, the Middle East and South America, the business has consolidated its ability to support global programmes with local expertise.
Client Success
From complex exhibition portfolios and major congresses, Ignition’s work emphasises strategic intent, creative innovation, and seamless project management – underpinning sustained client retention and growth.
Alongside continued client success, Ignition has won awards for booth designs, creative event executions, and bespoke modular solutions that deliver high impact and cost efficiencies for global brands.
With recent client wins, Ignition has attracted new talent to the company, seeing a 19% increase in employees throughout 2025.
Innovation Through Change
In recent years, the company has responded to shifts in the events landscape by scaling its digital and hybrid capabilities. This adaptability has reinforced client partnerships, enabling Ignition DG to deliver hundreds of virtual events and hybrid programmes that seamlessly blend creativity with technology.
Innovation continues to be part of Ignition’s DNA. New strategic capabilities, such as building exhibition attractors in-house, are being launched, alongside medical content writing as a service.
Looking Ahead
“We’re proud of the sustained growth we’ve achieved while staying true to our founding values,” said Sam Rowe, CEO of Ignition DG. “Our team’s focus on creativity and strategic excellence has allowed us to support clients around the world with meaningful, measurable experiences.”
With continued investments in strategic solutions, talent and technology, Ignition DG is poised to grow further into 2026 and beyond. The company remains committed to helping clients across regulated industries to create impactful live experiences that drive business results without compromising environmental or ethical standards.
For media enquiries, please contact:
[email protected]
There is so much noise right now about how the ultimate hack to getting your brand featured in AI results is simply to ensure it is all over Reddit.
The popular advice is to make sure you’ve got a number of posts mentioning your brand across the right topics and, BOOM, ChatGPT will be your number one lead generator and biggest brand advocate.
But is Reddit really the one place you should focus your AI Visibility efforts to get results?
Let’s get the quick bit out of the way. Reddit DOES play a role in the knowledge gathered by the Large Language Models (LLMs), and therefore, it does impact which brands are included in their answers.
We know this by looking at LLMs themselves. OpenAI have been transparent about their partnership with Reddit since last year, Gemini leverages Google’s existing Reddit partnership and Perplexity are currently being sued for scraping Reddit to train their LLM.
It is true that User Generated Content, and particularly Reddit, is rapidly growing in momentum as one of the major sources of data used by AI tools when deciding who and what to surface in the answer.
There is also a growing pile of evidence that tells us Reddit is important in shaping AI’s decision-making. From a recent analysis of a quarter of a million Reddit posts, Semrush found that Reddit is among the most cited sources by the major LLMs.
This is the big question. Pretty much every major brand across the globe (at least every brand that’s even remotely switched on) is currently scrabbling to make sure that they are the brand that AI tools are recommending when their target audience asks their favourite LLM which product or service to use.
Right now, the data shows us that this will likely get results, so this should be part of your strategy. But this comes with two important caveats.
Actually, no.
This is exactly why we came up with the concept of Earned Visibility (EV) as our approach to brand discoverability in a world of AI search.
Whilst this may sound self-promoting, it’s not (well not, really). The whole point of EV is that AI optimisation isn’t just simply the next generation of SEO.
Why? SEO as a discipline has often focused on tactics that are more likely to get results. This works when there is only really one major search tool, and they only make major algorithm updates a few times a year.
The dawn of AI search is a seismic shift. Consumer behaviour has fundamentally changed, with ChatGPT now seeing 5.8bn monthly site visits and AI search now used by half of all consumers.
But, and this is an important but, there is still no dominant tool, and each LLM has a different algorithm that will prioritise different sources.
Even if that wasn’t the case, the speed of evolution in the AI game is significantly faster than it was with search. Chat GPT launched their best model ever (5.1) in November, and then they launched their even shinier and better 5.2 barely one month later.
As tools evolve, how they make decisions – and the factors that shape which brands are included in the answer – will change.
The upshot of this? If you put all your eggs in the Reddit basket, you may see returns now, but you are also highly exposed to risk and could see an equally rapid negative impact from this as the models evolve.
The point of the Earned Visibility approach is to treat AI search tools as if they were a smart consumer – which is what they are effectively all striving to be.
Instead of focusing on one area, it’s important to consider your brand presence in the round. Don’t think “how can I game this AI tool” but instead ask “what are the factors that a consumer would look for” and layer this into your AI visibility approach. If you’re only considering one channel (or worse, one tactic) you’re missing the bigger picture.
Things like authoritative media coverage, credible third-party citations, genuine community discussion, high-quality content that demonstrates expertise, consistent brand signals across platforms, strong technical foundations, reviews and recommendations, and clear entity information in trusted data sources are all important.
When it comes to deciding where to focus your efforts for AI visibility, you need to consider how you are performing when it comes to all of the above – and make your action plan on the back of this.
Want more? Sign up to our fortnightly AI brand discoverability email – three or four quick bullets about what’s going on in the space and one or two recommendations on what to do.
That, or drop [email protected] a line and ask me whatever you want directly.
Jurassic Park is often cited for its technical innovation or iconic moments, but its real influence runs deeper. Long before immersive experiences became the buzz word we know today, the film demonstrated how to build a world audiences could fully step into, understand, and believe in. For creatives, designers, and producers, Jurassic Park functions as a near perfect case study in experience architecture.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is how clearly it establishes its internal logic. Before the dinosaurs appear, the audience is oriented.
We are shown how the park operates, how guests move through it, what is automated, what is controlled, and where the boundaries lie.
This mirrors best practice in immersive experiences. Audiences need orientation before participation. Clear rules do not limit immersion, they enable it. When people understand how a world works, they relax into it. When those rules later fail, the impact is emotional rather than confusing.
Jurassic Park earns its chaos because it first earns its structure.
The arrival sequence, the branding, the orientation film, the guided tour vehicles. This is onboarding in its purest form. The park reassures its guests that they are safe, looked after, and part of a carefully designed experience.
Experience design relies on the same mechanism. Audiences need to know what kind of experience they are entering, how they are expected to behave, and what level of risk or participation is involved. Without this, surprise becomes anxiety rather than engagement.
Jurassic Park understands that trust must be built before it can be broken.
A common misconception in immersive work is that closeness equals immersion. Jurassic Park proves the opposite. The audience is rarely placed in direct danger. Instead, tension is created through perspective. Watching from inside the car, behind glass, under the fence.
The film controls audience position with precision. This is exactly how immersive experiences maintain emotional intensity without overwhelming participants. Immersion is about relationship to events, not physical distance from them.
The science in Jurassic Park is famously flawed, yet the film remains emotionally convincing. That is because its characters behave like people and its consequences feel earned.
Immersive experiences do not need realism. They need emotional logic. Audiences will accept extraordinary premises if the world responds to them honestly and consistently.
At its heart, Jurassic Park is a cautionary tale about creation without accountability. The ability to build something spectacular does not absolve the creator of responsibility for its impact.
This is a vital lesson for immersive practitioners. Immersion amplifies emotion, vulnerability, and trust. With that comes a duty of care. Designing worlds is not just a creative act, it is an ethical one.
Universal
Jurassic Park matters because it is not just a blueprint for brilliant world building, it is also a quietly terrifying dystopia for the future of live experiences and attractions if we get complacent.
Strip away the dinosaurs and you are left with something uncomfortably familiar. A premium attraction driven by scale, automation, branding, efficiency, and spectacle. Guests are processed, reassured, and managed. Human complexity is treated as an inconvenience. Risk is assumed to be solvable by systems. Sound familiar? If not, spend five minutes in a badly designed immersive experience where no one quite knows what is allowed, where the exit is, or who is actually in charge.
Jurassic Park shows us what happens when experience design prioritises control over care, throughput over trust, and innovation over responsibility. It is the logical end point of the thinking that bigger, faster, smarter, more immersive is always better. The joke, of course, is that this is exactly how people get eaten by raptors.
For immersive creators, this is the real takeaway. World building is not neutral. Immersion magnifies everything, emotion, fear, delight, confusion, vulnerability. The more convincing the world, the greater the responsibility of the people who build it. Consent, clarity, pacing, agency, and safe failure are not nice extras. They are the difference between magic and meltdown.
This is where thoughtful immersive design matters. Not just how impressive something looks, but how it behaves under pressure. What happens when things go wrong. How audiences are supported, not managed. How trust is earned, not assumed.
At Bristol based Immersive Ideas Experience Agency, this is exactly where we focus our work. We design experiences that respect audiences, honour story, and understand the emotional mechanics of participation. We build worlds that feel alive because they are coherent, human, and accountable. Not theme parks with better tech, but experiences with purpose, care, and consequence baked in from the start.
Jurassic Park endures because it understood something the industry still occasionally forgets. Just because you can build it, does not mean you should build it that way.
And if the future of live experiences ever starts to feel a bit too much like a glossy orientation film promising everything is completely safe, while the fences quietly hum in the background, that is probably the moment to pause, step back, and rethink the design.
Why reach beyond English?
Everybody sort of knows about translation: books by international authors, certificates and diplomas for immigration purposes, even those cheap electronic gadget user manuals that sound like they were written by aliens from outer space… But what about business?
If your company is based in an English-speaking country, it feels natural to use English in business and to target English-speaking markets. As for creatives, so much of their work is tied with culture and words, that they feel more at ease operating in their mother tongue.
And yet, there is a world out there. So, gaining more visibility, and more customers, is worth the effort to reach beyond English.
Visibility abroad and new client profiles
While still using English in day-to-day business relations, all kinds and sizes of businesses can use translation to reach a bigger audience. Let’s look at a few examples:
An independent travel writer can pitch their articles for publication in more travel and in-flight magazines if they can also include the destination countries they write about.
Video game devs will get more players by having their games localized into key market languages. Or if sticking to English for the in-game content, there’s multilingual community management.
In film and video, foreign subtitles and dubbing open up new audience bases.
For artists, photographers, musicians, production companies, applying for an international award or exhibiting at a festival abroad will be a real visibility booster.
And agencies that are translation-capable are able to compete on a bigger stage: a lot of international groups and global charities need to work with PR, web and marketing agencies that can handle copy in multiple languages.
How best to approach your translation project
Once you’re clear on why you want to use translation, comes the how? question.
Choosing the best fit between a translation agency and freelance translators will depend on your project’s specifics: do you need a lot of different languages or only one/a couple? Is consistency in quality and tone of voice important? Do you need additional services like DTP and graphic design? High volumes translated with a short turnaround time? Or shorter, recurring pieces of copy where a long-term relationship will help?
Whatever the form your translation team takes, keep in mind these three essential tips.
Need translation help?
For help adapting your public-facing content for a French audience, or defining the scope and workflow of your translation project, get in touch for a chat (in English or in French): https://bristolcreativeindustries.com/members/sandra-mouton-french-translator/
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