SLING & STONE ACQUISITION

Tuesday 09 November 2021

We are delighted to announce that VCCP Business has acquired Sling & Stone, a multi-award winning PR and communications agency with offices in Sydney, Auckland, and Los Angeles.

Sling & Stone launched in 2010 with a specific focus on startups, high-growth tech and challenger brands shaping the future. The agency has grown to three countries, 70 people, multiple agency of the year and best place to work awards, and a world-class client roster.

Through the acquisition, Sling & Stone will become part of VCCP Business, and will work in partnership with leading technology agencies Method in North America and Harvard in the UK, as well as advocacy specialist agency inEvidence. The combined global PR and communications group will help clients everywhere shape the future of how we live, work, and play.

It will grow our group’s technology billings to £30 million, with a 250+ strong team, cementing our global presence.

Sling & Stone, which was founded by Vuki Vujasinovic 11 years ago, has enjoyed rapid growth partnering with some of the most exciting startups, category-defining unicorns and publicly-listed industry leaders, including current clients Twitter, Google, Stripe, Xero, and Zip.

Jo Parker, Group CEO VCCP Business, said: “From the moment we met Vuki and his team, we had so much in common — a challenger mindset, a global ambition and a culture of collaboration and openness. We are really excited to work with all the Slingers and to build on our shared global vision.”

Vuki Vujasinovic, Founder and CEO of Sling & Stone, said: “We’ve been partnering with innovative and important brands for more than a decade now, playing a key role in their growth. Working with these types of clients is what we’re good at, and what we love doing.

“I’m so happy that we’ve found the perfect growth partner in VCCP Business. We have a shared vision to focus on telling these stories that are reshaping the world around us.

“Sling & Stone has always been mission-driven and ambitious, and we know our future is going to be even stronger with the smarts and the skills of the VCCP group backing us. We get to immediately plug into the global scale and skills of VCCP Business — unlocking reach and expertise for our clients, campaigns, and team.

“This is the beginning of a new and exciting chapter for Sling & Stone, and we’re just getting started.”

PLANET MARK ACCREDITED

VCCP Business, along with VCCP and the rest of the Chime agencies, is proud to have received the Planet Mark sustainability certification – joining just a handful of accredited advertising, marketing and PR members.

Certification to the Planet Mark is based on the commitment to continuous improvement in sustainability within our business operations, by measuring and reducing our carbon footprint and engaging our stakeholders. Holders are required to measure and reduce their annual carbon emissions associated with business operations by a minimum of 2.5% every year. It also measures the amount of time and money invested in community work.

We are delighted that through our Planet Mark Certification, we are protecting an area of endangered rainforest thanks to their partners Cool Earth; a charity working alongside rainforest communities to halt deforestation and in particular supporting the Asháninka community in Central Peru. We are also helping the Eden Project, an educational charity whose aim is to build connections with each other and the living world, exploring how we can work together towards a better future.

We recognised that still have much work to do and we won’t be resting on our laurels, but this accreditation is important because it reflects our holistic approach to sustainability – measuring not just environmental but also community impact – and has enabled us to understand and focus on areas for action and also where we need to collect data better.

We’re committed to playing our part in fighting climate change and reducing our carbon footprint through ongoing, meaningful action. That’s why we will be also committing to becoming Net Zero and are working on science based targets in order to define our target date. Stay tuned.

GLOBAL CMO RESEARCH FINDINGS

No one could have predicted Covid-19 and how much it would derail the year as it has. Now, as we embark on building back better, the timing feels right to share the insight from our latest research with fifty CMO’s of the world’s largest B2B companies. Read how improving customer experience remains the No.1 challenge for all global CMOs. And of the five underlying principles of great customer experience, Integrity is ranked highest and Personalisation ranked lowest.

Download here ‘Maintaining Relevance through Customer Experience’, the summary report of the findings and our interpretation of what the priorities are for B2B CMOs. Please get in touch if would like to discuss how we can help your business respond to your B2B challenges.

VCCP LAUNCHES GIRL&BEAR

VCCP Group supercharges production offering with the launch of global content creation studio, Girl&Bear.

Girl&Bear becomes the new home to makers from across the VCCP network and will deliver world-class content creation, global production services and a bespoke technology solution.

Spanning the full range of content production, the studio’s capabilities will include film, audio, design, print, photographic and digital production and brings together 250 makers with VCCP’s expertise and focus on craft. Alongside the makers within the studio, Girl&Bear will continue to work with production partners to ensure access to the best talent in the industry.

Challenging the modern production dilemma of choosing between beautifully crafted creative, or efficient delivery of assets at scale, Girl&Bear will deliver craft without compromise. Bringing cutting-edge technology and automation into the production process in the right way, at the right moments will ensure Girl & Bear’s makers around the world can work more efficiently as well as give clients a seamless delivery experience.

Girl&Bear will service VCCP’s global network, offering clients borderless content production across eight markets including London, where it is headquartered, Madrid, Prague, San Francisco, New York, Singapore, Sydney, and Shanghai. Girl&Bear will also offer cost-efficient production at scale in every region of the world through offshore solutions which will be run out of the Czech Republic, South Africa and Asia Pacific.

Brought together by a team of passionate makers, Girl&Bear will be led by Managing Director, Claire Young, Executive Head of Production, Anthony Austin and Global Head of Operations, Dan Montalbano. Young has over 20 years of production experience working at some of the industry’s most well-respected creative agencies including Mother, exposure, JWT, and has led production for VCCP London for the last six years. Montalbano has led global operations for the VCCP Group for the last two years and brings both client-side and top-tier London agency experience from brands including National Geographic, Barclays and agencies Razorfish and AKQA.

Girl&Bear are also working with VCCP Group towards achieving B-Corp status.

Committed to uncovering, supporting and attracting new and diverse talent both in front of and behind the lens, Girl&Bear are working with partners Free The Bid, BRiM, Justrunners, Brixton Finishing School and SCA to help create a diverse and inclusive workforce. In November they will host the Shiny Awards, which champions underrepresented directors. For more information about Girl&Bear, visit www.wearegirlandbear.com

VCCP OPENS AN ACADEMY IN STOKE

VCCP has today announced the opening of a new office in the birthplace of the British creative industry, Stoke-On-Trent. It becomes the agency’s first UK office outside London and reflects the challenger network’s ambition to open up and attract more diverse talent. In its initial phase, the office will function as an Academy with staff from VCCP London working to raise awareness, provide training, work experience, mentoring and paid internship schemes, with a future apprenticeship scheme set to launch next year.

Set against a backdrop of recent art colleges and advertising school closures and a global pandemic that has exacerbated the situation, the pathway to the industry has become narrower with more and more opportunities being removed. People outside London are struggling to see advertising and media as a career option, especially those from low-income areas or from diverse backgrounds.

Stoke has one of the highest rates of economic deprivation, especially amongst black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. Within the creative industry, cities like Stoke are often overlooked in favour of Manchester or Leeds when setting up outside the South East.

Open to people in Stoke and surrounding areas, VCCP Stoke Academy will tackle three major recruitment barriers faced by the industry which include a lack of awareness of the creative industry as a potential career option, a dearth of pathways into entry-level jobs around the country and the extremely high cost of moving to and living in London where most entry-level job opportunities are to be found.

To find out more about VCCP Stoke Academy please visit https://www.vccp.com/news/2021/oct/vccp-opens-an-academy-in-stoke

FUNNEL VISION

Originally published in Campaign UK.

Is your funnel top-heavy, bottom-heavy, or perfectly proportioned? This question has come to dominate budget discussions, almost more than raw value for money.

And there is a good reason for our funnel fixation. There has always been a balance between top-of-funnel brand building and bottom-of-funnel trading. However, the tech-driven delta between the two has widened dramatically over recent years. Nowadays, if you get the balance wrong you could be wasting millions (or worse, you may actively be damaging your brand). Get it right and you have successfully mastered the most complex and intermeshed media matrix that has ever confronted the marketing community.

The upside of this new complexity is the prospect of unprecedented levels of ROI for those marketers canny enough to avoid its various pitfalls. That’s because we live in a world that has long superseded Marshall McLuhan’s dictum of the medium being the message. Now, the medium isn’t simply the message, it can also be the sale.

This is what makes funnel optimisation so critical and so lucrative. People can see your ad, respond to it and transact from it all at the same time, on the same screen in the same controlled ecosystem. And this transactional element is by no means limited to digital or streamed services and products. With the right media mix, you can sell out of an analogue product from an analogue location in minutes without customers moving more than their index finger. Fashion houses have been harnessing this dynamic for years through pre-sales and fashion drops. And these are simply microcosms of the wider e-commerce system. The medium is becoming far more than the message. The medium is becoming the market.

If you would like to continue reading about our point of view on the marketing funnel please visit https://www.vccp.com/news/2021/oct/charles-vallance-in-campaign

Chime Pride Get Together

Wednesday 16 September 2020

Our annual Chime Pride Get Together will be taking place on Thursday 25th June. This speaker panel event will be followed by Q&As and a chance to hang out after.

The speaker line-up is seriously impressive so make sure you don’t miss out:

Sandy Downs and Melissa McGowann – Chime Colleagues: Introducing the event, educating us on the connected history of pride and black people as well as helping us understand terms, pronouns and some queer slang.

Christopher Kenna – Founder and CEO of Brand Advance, diversity advocate in media and advertising and military veteran: Talking about his experience in this new environment of Pride and BLM and helping us understand the importance of reaching queer, niche audiences in their communities.

Ethan Spibey and Soren Scharf – Founders of Proud Beer, queer activists and campaigners: Talking about the challenge of running a queer brand that is both representative and gives back to a diverse community.

Rich Miles – CEO and co-founder the Diversity Standards Collective: Telling us about their research, project and findings into racism and their new programme to help organisations in the aftermath of BLM protests.

Fashion Goes Digital

Since lockdown, our lives have all become more virtual – and the world of fashion is no exception. VCCP’s Innovation Lead, Peter Gasston, investigated this emerging trend for The Marketing Society, and analysed its implications for the future of retail and sustainability.

Read the fascinating piece here.

Give me a compass, not a crystal ball

A view from VCCP’s Founder and Chairman, Charles Vallance:

Things become axiomatic because, broadly, they’re true.

A stitch in time frequently does save nine. Many a true word is, indeed, often spoken in jest. Clichés such as these stick because they are reliable, if imperfect, guides.

Of the many clichés doing the rounds at the moment, one that seems to be bearing up well to overuse is the old saying that a crisis “brings out the best and worst in us”. Time and again, we see evidence of this essential truth – a truth that applies equally to brands as it does to people.

There is a clue within the wording that provides an important protection against the biggest danger facing brands during the crisis, which is to overestimate how much Covid-19 will change the way your brand should behave. I say this because, although the virus is undoubtedly having a massive impact on behaviours and attitudes, these impacts don’t alter the fundamentals for a brand.

Perhaps the biggest fundamental to consider is that people don’t really change, as Bill Bernbach memorably observed: “It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary… a communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive desire to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.”

In a crisis, it is easy to forget the inherently long-term nature of brand-building and to get moved around by the headwinds rather than the tide.

Jeff Bezos is another marketing titan who reminds us of this point. In one of his most famous quotes, he contrasts the frequency with which he gets asked “What’s going to change in the next 10 years” with the scarcity of how often he’s asked “What’s not going to change?”. His conclusion is simple: “I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around things that are stable in time.” You can build a brand strategy around them as well.

Obsessing about what is going to change is not only less revealing, it is also more complicated and thus more likely to get you to the wrong answers. According to Bezos, one of the advantages of asking what’s not going to change is that it’s a far easier question to answer: “When you identify those big ideas that are stable in time, they’re usually customer needs. You don’t have to do a lot of research. These things are so big and so fundamental – you know it.”

The implications are clear. While the effects of Covid-19 will be serious and lasting, people and their needs will fundamentally remain the same. So will the brands that succeed. This is not, however, an argument for stasis. Far from it. To paraphrase the old adage I quoted earlier, every brand can use the crisis to bring out the best in themselves and drive out the worst.

The point to highlight, the clue I mentioned lurking in the wording, is that the answer does not lie outside the brand, it lies within. We need to “bring it out”, not graft it on. This is not a time for grandstanding or superficial gestures. This is a time for brands to dig deep into themselves and latch on to what they do best. What they have always done best. They need to be a heightened version of themselves, not a retrofitted post-Covid identikit slapped on from the outside.

I could mention a few VCCP client examples of heightened brand permanence, but that would look like favouritism. So, instead, I’ll use the updated Budweiser “Wassup” ad to illustrate the point. This is an ad that is so old, it first ran in the last millennium, but it’s as true today as it was back then. Bud is, was and always will be about the idiosyncrasies and occasional profundities of true camaraderie. Of course, the updated ad needs the voiceover tweaking to reflect the new socially distanced context, but the overall truth of the message remains the same as when the ad originally aired back in 1999. Moreover, it will remain the same if we fast-forward to 2041. Or 2062.

When the waters are choppy, you don’t need a crystal ball. You need a compass. A compass not only guides you forward, most importantly it tells you where you’ve come from. This is the only way to plan a course and safely reach your destination.

VCCP win Walkers account

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Walkers has awarded it’s advertising account to VCCP after a competitive pitch.

White Door Consulting and Tina Fegent assisted with the process.

Julian Douglas, Vice-Chairman at VCCP, said: “Walkers is an iconic brand, creating some of the most memorable advertising in history, and we are thrilled and delighted to be their partner in creating the next chapter. A massive thanks to the whole team at Walkers and White Door Consulting for running a superb process under lockdown. It showed what is possible and we can’t wait to get started.”