In an era marked by rapid change and unprecedented challenges, LONDON Advertising stands as a beacon of resilience and creativity. Founded in Soho, London, in November 2008, just two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the company faced the global financial crash head-on.
Despite the tumultuous start, LONDON Advertising not only survived but thrived, demonstrating the power of innovation and strategic thinking. This interview with the agency founders delves into the company's origins, its remarkable journey through adversity, and its unique approach to creativity and client success.
How was your company born and where are you based?
Soho, London 3rd November 2008 (two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers)
What was the biggest challenge to the growth of your company?
The Global Financial crash when companies stopped advertising or pitching – they had other priorities at that time.
Which was the first huge success that you can remember?
To prove our ability to work globally without a network of offices, we created a review of the best ideas for marketing in a recession from across the world. When we published our report we secured a front page story on Ad Age and were interviewed on CNBC globally, as well as coverage in key media from NY Times to China Business Daily.
What’s the biggest opportunity for you and your company in the next year?
To secure another global client of the scale of our key showcase client, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group who we work with in 38 markets across the globe.
Can you explain your team’s creative process? What makes it unique?
We work with fewer, more senior people who get things right first time rather than reams of juniors who are being paid by the client to learn their job.
How does your team remain inspired and motivated?
Five years ago were the first ad agency to become an Employee Owned Trust – this means every employee owns the company and is motivated, as everyone shares in our success.
How has COVID-19 affected your company?
We lost 80% of our revenue in one month and were almost wiped out. Our response was to ask the question “What would we advise our clients to do?”. The answer was to run an advertising campaign with 10 TV ads on 6,500 spots on Sky News and 29 different poster ads that ran on Ocean Outdoor premium digital sites across the UK.
We ran pre/post research which showed we had the highest brand awareness of any ad agency in the UK and we won 5 new clients on the back of it.
Which agencies do you gain inspiration from? Do you have any heroes in the industry?
The Founding Partners of LONDON were also Founding Partners of M&C Saatchi and worked with Maurice Saatchi for 20 years from whom we learnt the benefits of applying ‘’Chutzpah’ – shameless audacity - to everything we do.
What is one tip that you would give to other agencies looking to grow?
Think of your agency as a brand and apply the same strategic and creative thinking that you would to a client. For example, our name is about our positioning, not about the egos of its founders who have their names on the door. It also means that we come up first in organic online searches for “London advertising agencies”.
How do you go about finding new clients/business? (Pitching, work with retainers, etc.)
This is the hardest challenge and never stops. The best advertising is word of mouth so having personal recommendations is the best way to get new, meaningful business.
What’s your one big hope for the future of the industry?
Creativity to solve our challenges – that is after all what we are selling.
Can you share a defining moment in your company's journey that shaped its identity or direction?
We realised that in the 21st Century you don’t need a network of offices around the world to do international advertising.
We also realised that clients globally saw London as the best place to source creativity. We therefore positioned ourselves to be the first global agency with one office and named our company “LONDON Advertising”.
How do you foster a culture of innovation and experimentation within your team?
“By example shalt thou lead” is a defining motto of the agency and we share what we have done in the past to inspire our team to think about how they can innovate.
Can you describe a project that challenged your team creatively and how you overcame any obstacles?
Our client Mandarin Oriental had a hotel in Knightsbridge that was undergoing a 9-month restoration which required having an ugly white tarpaulin the size of 68 London buses to cover its façade.
We thought this would be a great canvas for an ad to promote the brand, but Westminster Council does not allow advertising on Grade 1 listed buildings. We had the idea to commission Peter Blake to do a collage of 100 of the hotel’s most famous guests leveraging the advertising line for our campaign “Our fans by Peter Blake”.
We attended all the planning meetings with the Council over 18 months and argued that this was not an ad but a piece of ‘civic art’. We were successful and secured 100 of the world’s most famous individuals to send us a photo without paying them to take part.
We even united the Beatles as we got Paul and Ringo to appear in an ad for the first time. The result was £4m in media value, £4m in PR coverage (including main TV news and front pages of national newspapers) and 11m shares on social media. All for an investment of £30,000 to commission Peter Blake.
How do you balance maintaining your company's unique creative voice while meeting the diverse needs of clients?
To thine self be true.
What strategies do you employ to adapt to changes and trends in the industry while staying true to your company's values?
We believe that for any piece of communication to be effective it needs to be:-
- Simple
- Stand out (being distinctive is more important than being differentiated)
- Well-branded
We apply this philosophy to any new media opportunity. Because simple messages enter the brain quicker and stay there longer. Because, if you don’t stand out, your message won’t be noticed. Because, if people don’t know who the brand is, what’s the point?
Can you share a memorable client success story that exemplifies your company's approach and impact?
Crime Stoppers International wanted to create a campaign about the hidden costs to society of buying fake goods, and to test it to prove to their Board that it could engage consumers.
Our strategy to achieve this was to create a fake brand – The Illegal Empire – to represent all the illicit players involved in the global trade in fake goods and to bring to life the victims of the slave trade, sex and drugs trafficking etc.
We created a powerful ad that brought this to life and launched it via social influencers in Latvia, Lithuania and Czechia supported by social media advertising. The results beat the benchmark by over 700%.
In what ways do you invest in the professional development and growth of your team members?
We bring in talent we see as having great potential and they get to learn by working with the senior members of the team, which creates accelerated learning and benefits the entire agency.
How do you approach sustainability and ethical practices within your company's operations and projects?
We adopt the mantra of the ASA: Legal, decent, honest truthful.
We pioneered working remotely across the globe before the Covid crisis and have created campaigns that have run in 135 markets, without ever taking off in a plane to visit the majority of them.
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?
When social media arose in the aftermath of the financial crisis our Board offered to secure a £4m loan to buy a social media agency. We did not want the debt burden and at that time social media agencies wanted a valuation of 22 times their profits so it would be impossible to make the money back. Instead we again said, “What would we recommend to a client?”
The answer was to develop a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style competition offering a £100,000 prize to find the best digital talent. We secured the Times as media partner and got the Prime Minister to announce our competition in Downing Street. We got PR coverage from the US to China and entrants from 62 markets. The winners had the idea to turn tweets into video messages automatically using tagging. We got Getty Image to change their business model from pay per view to revenue share and secured £4m in funding pre-revenue and pre-product, making us the highest funded tech start up in Europe.
