The IPA Accelerator scheme is designed to give up-and-coming agencies whose some guidance, help and inspiration as they grow their businesses. Here, we meet some of the newest members of the IPA Accelerator community.
Meet the agencies
Beta Firinn
Describe your agency in no more than five words
Pioneering, exciting, challenging, diverse.
What’s the most important thing to your agency?
Results. We don’t buy into the fluffy side of media. We’re here to deliver results for our clients, and to do that in the most effective way possible.
Advertising is…
…a powerful force for good. The economic impact of improved business performance, driven by advertising performance, converted in to the lives of real people in the real world is incredible. How many (unsuspecting) people are employed by companies because great advertising made corporate growth possible? Superb.
What do you hope to get out of being an Accelerator?
As a new firm, offering a completely new product, being an IPA Accelerator is a stake in the ground. We’re here to be taken seriously, we’re here to make a difference. We’ve spent most of our careers in the industry, and it’s nice to have the warm comforting blanket of the IPA there when we need it.
Biege
Describe your agency in no more than five words
Iconoclasts unifying form and function.
Which piece of work are you most proud of?
Executing a campaign to promote whilst organising an auction for Project Harar. They are a beautiful charity that changes the lives of ostracized children and young people in Ethiopia suffering from complex facial disfigurements by providing treatment, rehabilitation, and reintegration services.
What's been the most challenging campaign that you have worked on?
Changing the perception of remote work for Bark.com ( a web-based services marketplace). Fiverr got it very wrong. Look it up. We went into our work with Bark.com driven in a mindset to focus on the benefits of autonomy, whilst promoting the “weirdos” and fringe figures that create the beautiful tapestry that is our world.
What's the most important thing to your agency?
The most important thing for us as human beings is the survival of our species, whilst reducing suffering. As an agency we want to make people happy while confounding them; we want to support sustainable products; we want to keep people employed by generating excessive revenue for our clients. What they do with it is up to them (watch out...)
What does the future of advertising look like to you?
It is exciting to say the least. Technological innovations are giving us new product categories and new dimensions of outreach. From drone symphonies to augmented reality; the future is fascinating. We worry about the stewards of potential. This is why we are getting our skin in the game.
What industry issue is keeping you up at night?
Hyper-personalisation… We hold a firm belief that within a world of information overload, advertising is necessary to separate redundant products from category leaders and game changers. It is not our place, however, to manipulate or incite reactionary purchases that do not help our clients achieve sustainable growth.
Advertising can...
...help the UK economy recover from the current malady that is our current state. We are good at this. Our cities are blessed with a gesamtkunstwerk of cultures, enabling a creative advantage that can help lead global companies to growth.
What do you hope to get out of IPA?
Industry knowledge. We are tiny. Growing, but tiny. To have the opportunity to learn from the network and devour CPD hours is massive for us. Certain industry bodies are charlatans. IPA is a beacon and we are grateful to be part of the accelerator program.
Buy Media HQ
Describe your agency in a photo
We help SME advertisers turn the chaos of their current advertising into order by streamlining the process. By making minor improvements to the planning, purchasing, managing and monitoring of their advertising we have a major impact on their advertising return on investment.
Describe your agency in no more than five words
Intelligent Media Platform for SMEs
Which piece of work are you most proud of?
The creation and development of our platform has been our biggest achievement so far. To take a highly manual, time consuming and costly process that has remained unchanged for over 100 years and automate it has taken us 50 years of experience and 5 years of technical development.
Now, having the ability to democratise data and insights and make them available to medium sized businesses is hugely rewarding for us. We believe that small and medium businesses should be given the same opportunities to plan, purchase, manage and learn from their advertising as bigger brands. We are helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses and organisations when advertising.
The exciting thing is we’re only getting started. The more advertisers that use our platform the more valuable it becomes for each business, it’s a virtuous circle.
In terms of client work, our recent work with a small regional charity that allowed them to achieve a 50:1 return on their advertising spend to raise much needed funds for medical research into heart disease is one of the campaigns that gave us the most tingles.
What’s been the most challenging/interesting campaign you have worked on?
We are working with a retailer with a large number of outlets across a wide geographic region. Their personas are diverse and the geographic range means that our platform needs to deliver a huge number of campaigns, to personas through multiple media channels and titles within each channel. The client does not have the resources or expertise to plan, purchase and manage the media plan as effectively as our platform can and therefore it has allowed them to move away from the obvious media options and explore media that they have never used before. The great thing for the client is that they can make these decisions based on data and therefore they have the confidence to allocate budget to more effective channels, reducing their exposure to risk and wastage.
What’s the most important thing to your agency?
Our advertisers are the centre of everything we do. We focus everyday on research, insights, discovery and negotiations that will help our advertisers get more effective advertising campaigns. Our ultimate goal is to help businesses grow through more effective and efficient advertising. We’re also obsessed with making the advertising process easier and less stressful for SMEs.
What does the future of advertising look like to you?
The future of advertising from a suppliers perspective will look like a cyborg. Human and machine working together to create more effective advertising.
From a consumers perspective sales activation will become more personalised and immediate, while brands will need to become a part of their customers everyday lives rather than a spotlight that dazzles when the brand decides.
What industry issue is keeping you up at night?
The fallacy that a business can engage with a customer through digital advertising only. Our challenge is to integrate campaigns across multiple channels targeting many persons. Our holy grail is to map the customer journey from awareness to action on the advertising plan and attribute budget to each step. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create an intelligent recommendation advertising engine for SMEs based on industry and business data.
Advertising is…
...not a cost but an investment in business growth.
Advertising can…
...ignite and invigorate SMEs and local communities by helping them compete with bigger brands at a local, national and international level.
What do you hope to get out of being an Accelerator?
To connect with partners, learn from the best in the business and grow on many levels.
Coal
Describe your agency in a photo
Describe your agency in five words
Creativity with hard edges
Which piece of work are you most proud of?
We are most proud of the recent work we delivered for TikTok. The team and talent who delivered the campaign worked tirelessly despite all the restrictions and challenges thrown at us by Covid and National Lockdowns. Despite all this, our campaign creatives performed exceptionally well for the client.
What’s been the most challenging/interesting campaign you have worked on?
The Department for Education, Fosterline campaign was very interesting. We have seen so many sadvertising campaigns that focussed so much on the plight of the child needing fostering. Our task was to flip this on it's head and reach out directly to potential Foster Carers across all backgrounds and show them that they too can foster and that Fosterline is there to support them. Alongside the primary challenge of recruiting new Foster Carers, we were challenged with needing to retain and show how much existing Foster Carers were valued for what they do. This complex set of requirements saw us needing to speak to very diverse and different audiences.
What’s the most important thing to your agency?
Investing in the future and being able to support young talent to get experience, training and a foothold in the industry.
Find out more about the IPA Accelerator Programme
Last updated 10 March 2021