In an industry often driven by short-term results, constant optimisation, and relentless pressure, Launch has taken a refreshingly different path. Founded in 2012 at a kitchen table in the South West of England, the agency has grown into a 30-strong performance marketing team working with some of the world’s most recognisable consumer brands, including Weird Fish, Icelandair and Bremont. At the helm is CEO Jaye Cowle, whose early expertise in Google Ads and commitment to measurable growth helped Launch expand rapidly across the UK, Europe and the US, all while maintaining a remote-first ethos rooted in collaboration and trust.
What truly sets Launch apart, however, is its belief that commercial success starts with people. Built around its philosophy Powered by Happiness, the agency has embedded culture, psychological safety and long-term partnerships at the core of everything it does. From navigating the sudden loss of 40% of its client base during the pandemic to becoming B Corp certified and pioneering a full-funnel Connected Performance model, Launch’s journey is a compelling case study in sustainable agency growth. In this interview, Jaye Cowle shares the defining moments, challenges and values that have shaped Launch into a performance marketing agency where happy teams create better work, and better results.
How was your company born and where are you based?
Like many of the very best agencies, Launch was founded at a kitchen table, grew into a small team of experts and then a fully-fledged performance marketing agency.
It was 2012. After spending a number of years working in sales and marketing in London, I made the decision to move back to the South West. It aligned with a time when Google Ads was a new kid on the block. It rapidly became a smart and measurable way for businesses to grow revenue quickly with very little competition. Experts were scarce, but I was one of them.
More or less straight away I was approached by a number of businesses looking for external support to drive more impact from their marketing campaigns. As well as the consultancy needed to leverage Google Ads.
Demand grew beyond my expectations (and capacity).We expanded across the region, the UK and then further afield to the USA, Nordics and beyond.
I’m proud to say that Launch has grown into a 30-strong team of industry experts who have become trusted partners to some of the world’s biggest consumer brands. This includes Weird Fish, Icelandair, Bremont, Access Self Storage and Piglet in Bed.
In terms of where we call home - we have a remote-first ethos, but have office space in both Bristol and Exeter. We understand that collaboration is vital, and also we’re a pretty social bunch and enjoy that face-to-face time.
What was the biggest challenge to the growth of your company?
Performance marketing is an intense job because we’re managing millions of client money that is used to drive revenue and a return on investment. The pressure to get results means that the job is intense and requires a lot of team support. That’s why we invest so much in our culture.
Early on, there was one thing that really stood out, the fact that happy people create better work, which in turn delivers stronger results for clients and sustainable agency growth. This is how Launch’s philosophy Powered by Happiness was born. Sitting at the heart of everything the agency does and says, it focuses on: powerful client relationships; innovative person-centred performance marketing campaigns; and a psychologically safe agency culture where Launch’s people can do their best work.
As any agency leader will tell you, one of the biggest challenges to agency growth is how to scale a culture in a hybrid working environment - with an incredibly difficult economic climate thrown into the mix.
Our solution has been investing in our cultural handbook - the ‘moments that matter manual’. This covers everything from hiring and onboarding to stay interviews and offboarding into our Launch alumni. It talks about our values and the good and bad day behaviours that demonstrate these values and enable us to reward and give feedback to our team. We’ve come very mindful of possible issues in hybrid working like location bias – the tendency for cliques or unconscious advantages to form based on where someone works. We have worked hard to ensure every team member, whether office-based or fully remote, feels equally included, heard and valued by having quarterly get togethers and online ‘ribbit’ sessions which are our weekly cross department check ins that helps foster team bonding.
Which was the first huge success that you can remember?
When the first lockdown was announced, Launch lost over 40% of its clients overnight as so many were in the travel industry and they stopped all their advertising. However our largest client stayed and we worked closely with them to build a strategy that would mean they could recover faster than their competitors when the lockdown ended. This collaborative work not only kept our doors open but it went on to be hugely successful for the client and it won over 7 awards. Many more clients found us because of this groundbreaking work and it was foundational in our industry leading growth since 2020.
What’s the biggest opportunity for you and your company in the next year?
Brands are realising that they need to invest in brand building if they want to grow. Customer acquisition is more costly and more challenging with an increasing number of channels for customers to discover brands. If businesses don’t invest in full-funnel marketing, they’ll miss being discovered by new customers and worse, lose their own customers to competitors. We’re able to help brands grow by designing and managing their customer acquisition.
How does your team remain inspired and motivated?
I believe this is down to our Powered by Happiness philosophy. Centred around four values: Happy to Own It, Happy to Grow, Happy to Create Impact, and Happy to Play it has truly shaped a workplace where curiosity, collaboration, and creativity prosper.
By engendering curiosity, accountability, and autonomy this has fuelled new ways of working, high-impact campaigns and long-term growth for clients. Thus enabling everyone to do their best work and make a genuine difference and ensuring the team remains inspired and motivated.
What is one tip that you would give to other agencies looking to grow?
Commercial success isn’t an accident. I truly believe it is the result of a deliberate balance between a motivated team and doing work worth doing. After all, happy people create better work, which in turn delivers stronger results for clients and sustainable agency growth.
When it comes to client partnerships trust, transparency, and collaboration are essential and they should always be transformational, never transactional. Offering tangible value that the client recognises and the team can feel valued for. By prioritising long-term partnerships over constant acquisition, an agency can create predictability in revenue and efficiency in delivery – offering the ability to plan investment in learning, technology, and wellbeing, without compromising profit.
How do you go about finding new clients/business? (Pitching, work with retainers, etc.)
Agency growth is about striking the right balance of new business vs retainer.
At Launch we prioritise long-term partnerships over constant acquisition, focusing on a proactive client happiness agenda that is built on mutual respect and a strategy for more meaningful, higher-value work for fewer clients.
The reason? We wanted to move away from the ‘churn hamster wheel’ that’s almost endemic amongst performance marketing agencies. Instead, our approach creates predictability in revenue and efficiency in delivery – allowing us to plan investment in learning, technology, and wellbeing, without compromising profit.
Our 79% new business win rate and overall growth prove that this approach, combined with our Powered by Happiness philosophy and Connected Performance Model that covers media, measurement and experimentation, has resonated deeply with existing and prospective clients.
What’s your one big hope for the future of the industry?
That marketing measurement becomes easier - although for that to happen, humans might need to become a bit more predictable!
Can you share a defining moment in your company's journey that shaped its identity or direction?
In 2019 I was diagnosed with cancer (which luckily was cured) and it meant I really had to rely on my team to take the pressure and day to day running of the agency. They were amazing and we’ve been growing strongly ever since. I’ve definitely got a more philosophical view of life now and what’s important.
How do you foster a culture of innovation and experimentation within your team?
We have an experimentation academy! Led by our Head of Experimentation, Joe Johnston, every member of our team goes through this and it means we have a test and learn ethos that helps us get better results for our clients.
What measures do you take to ensure diversity and inclusion are prioritised within your company?
Our commitment to diversity is such that we don’t shy away from investing in our people’s future. Costing over £1,000 plus significant internal time investment, we successfully applied to become an A-Rated licensed sponsor under the UK’s Skilled Worker immigration route scheme. We immediately sponsored a highly valuable member of staff, allowing her to legally and confidently continue in her role – as well as future talented non-Brits.
Can you describe a project that challenged your team creatively and how you overcame any obstacles?
Our work with Icelandair on a large-scale ad content and targeting experimentation project was incredibly rewarding but challenging at the same time. It required a different type of creativity - the ability to design and execute a custom framework that set out to test a specific assumption. In this case it was that personalised creative sets tailored to specific audience segments will outperform their generalised, broad creative counterparts.
The experiment not only validated our hypothesis across all key data points, it showcased significant improvements in the performance of tailored creatives. As well as providing actionable insights into the effectiveness of segmented messaging.
The results speak for themselves - the personalised approach led to a 16.3% blended increase in click-through rates (CTR) on Meta platforms and a 59.3% blended increase in CTR on Google Display networks compared to broad control groups. User feedback from focus groups confirmed that all test variations outshone the control creatives.
It illustrates the power of segment-focused creative strategies in driving measurable marketing success. Alongside, providing a compelling example of data-led advertising that resonates with diverse audience segments.
What strategies do you employ to adapt to changes and trends in the industry while staying true to your company's values?
Performance marketing is a discipline known mainly for short-term wins and bottom of the funnel success, but we believe that lasting growth comes from moving media spend further up the funnel to create more awareness and discovery.
Our full-funnel thinking blends creativity, robust experimentation and marketing measurement to fuel long-term growth. We educate and empower our clients to embrace this full-funnel approach because it tackles the huge challenge of ‘performance plateau’ – which results from more demands on shrinking budgets due to media inflation, rising costs, and ever-growing channel proliferation.
We call it Connected Performance.
Can you share a memorable client success story that exemplifies your company's approach and impact?
Our work with UK-based retailer Weird Fish to shift its performance marketing focus from discounting to brand-led campaigns most certainly meets this brief. Launch rose to the challenge by bucking the status quo with a strategy to shift stock through seasonality and industry trends, rather than price reductions. Innovating with the latest AI-driven tools across Google and Meta, the Launch team honed in on key new audiences, building connections with a demographic less attached to discount prices. As a result, the campaign supercharged CTR across various platforms, +15% AOV growth on Google, Bing and Meta, 24% increase in impressions for the term ‘Weird Fish' on Google, and much more.
In fact, it’s a case study (which can be read in full on Creativepool) that attracts the most attention and a lot of questions from clients and new prospects!
Not only does it exemplify our approach - ‘The Launch way’ - it highlights the importance of an open and trusting client /agency partnership. The impact of the work we conducted for Weird Fish was only made possible because we were gifted with autonomy.
In what ways do you invest in the professional development and growth of your team members?
At Launch we have a Career Path Framework that clearly defines and maps the skills and competencies for all levels in each role. This provides a clear route for progression for every team member that reduces ambiguity. Investment in learning and upskilling includes dedicated weekly training sessions for all employees, mixing external training providers with internal experts. And we moved from annual performance reviews to continuous performance management with monthly one-on-one catch ups, so every employee can track their personal development plan progress on an ongoing basis, then course correct as needed.
A sense of belonging is fundamental to happiness/employee wellbeing, so we allocate 1% of our turnover (over £30,000 this year) to quarterly agency get-togethers. They’ve become the glue that binds our culture: hiring out restorative spaces like country homes and campsites, inviting speakers to train the team on soft skills tied to wellbeing such as confidence, and making space for everyone to collaboratively shape agency priorities. Feedback is acted on and get-togethers ensure inclusion for all by accommodating diverse needs, like quiet spaces for neurodiverse employees or those feeling overwhelmed.
To nurture cross-team collaboration and retention, our wellness strategy emphasises personal development: Mental Health First Aider training for more than 10% of staff members, monthly wellbeing newsletters, and quarterly health challenges (e.g. walking 10,000 steps a day for one month).
Recognising that people have a range of personal needs inside and outside the workplace, we champion robust benefits programmes: flexible/hybrid working; generous parental leave, including miscarriage; a menopause policy; and medical packages covering everything from GP appointments to free counselling. This fosters a supportive environment and empowers employees to prioritise their wellbeing, addressing their needs without judgement.
How do you approach sustainability and ethical practices within your company's operations and projects?
In 2023 Launch became B Corp certified to hard-wire people, planet, and community into how the agency grows. I believe that B Corp certification isn't something to be taken lightly. As an agency, it means holding ourselves accountable to the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and governance. That’s why we’re hard-wired to give back to the marketing community and wider society.
Can you discuss a time when your company had to pivot or innovate in response to unforeseen challenges, and what lessons did you learn from that experience?
Losing 40% of our clients in COVID in the space of just a couple of days was horrendous but with a little bit of luck (our largest client stayed along with others) and then offering a lot of value to our network with free workshops, webinars and drop in clinics - we were able to quickly win work as the world moved more digital. The biggest lesson was that I ended up not furloughing the team so we were able to spend time creating all these valuable moments for our clients and network. That value we put out for free was our biggest driver of new business in the end.
Do you have any websites, books or resources that you would recommend?
For psychology of workplace happiness, books like Dan Pink’s ‘Drive’, and Nic Marks, ‘Happiness is a Serious Business’. I also think the WARC whitepaper on The Multiplier Effect is very insightful.