Wilderness
London, Berlin, Cape Town, LA, Austin
Website: Wilderness
Founder: Tom Jarvis
Year founded: 2015
UK headcount: <50
Locations: London, Berlin, Cape Town, LA, Austin
I now have more time to focus on growth and growing the business.
Profile
Wilderness is the agency built somewhat “by accident”. Its founder, Tom Jarvis, was working in the entertainment space around 10 years ago when he noticed a clear shift happening across marketing generally. Digital and social was all still very new and big entertainment companies didn’t know how, or where, to look for talent.
Within six to 12 months, Wilderness had unwittingly become an agency, increasingly in-housing social experts into global entertainment giants including Sony Pictures (its first client), 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal.
Since launching in 2015, Jarvis and executive creative director Jamie Maple – along for the ride from day dot – have grown the team to 40, with offices spanning London, Berlin, Cape Town, LA and Austin.
Today, Wilderness considers itself to be the world’s first social media transformation agency. Rather than focusing solely on talent, it has evolved to support organisations with the operational side of social, such as structuring teams and developing strategies.
While much of its growth had been organic in its formative years, Wilderness has been making moves more recently to help it scale to a truly global business. This includes hiring its first non-executive chair, Sarah Vick, in 2019; and, in 2024, being acquired by Havas Media’s Play Network.
Giving up independence can be challenging for many agency founders, but it has been a freeing experience for Jarvis, who now has more capacity to focus on growing the business. Joining the network has given Wilderness greater access to talent, accelerated the development of tools and tech, and broadened its skillset and expertise across a range of clients and sectors.
The agency’s internal scorecard helps it keep track of those key drivers of growth, one of which is team satisfaction. Wilderness can, quite literally, quantify culture and directly correlate it with revenue. An integral part of that culture involves being seen as a “career accelerant”, where talent can learn, grow and find their niche in the industry - whether that is at Wilderness or on to pastures new.
Ultimately, Jarvis is on a mission to make Wilderness the “standard bearer” of great social practice and craft, which is something that will benefit the whole industry in the long-run.