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Out of the Pond with Paul Houlding: Founder & Chief Executive @ isobel

Published: Monday 16th December 2024
No matter how good we are, we can all get blown off course from time to time or get lost, muddled, disheartened even. And given the last couple of years anyone could be forgiven for any of the above. It can seem as though everything is conspiring against success no matter how talented you and your people might be. It’s hard running an agency and winning new clients is becoming harder by the minute, becoming more and more like some ridiculous lottery nightmare. At isobel we are no different. We have had our fair share of headwinds and the year before last we wobbled. Coming off the back of a good year we accepted every pitch that we were invited to do and won very little. Probably one of our worst years for pitch/win ratio. Everybody was worn out from too much pitching and deflated by not winning. So what did we do? We took a good long look at ourselves and realized that we had lost sight of who we are. We weren’t being true to ourselves. We weren’t being strong. We were pitching for anybody that seemed to have a half decent budget (and some who didn’t) regardless of…
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Out of the Pond with Tom Poynter: Managing Director @ KEEL London

Published: Wednesday 4th December 2024
We are a founder-led brand agency, and new business is critical to our journey, with everyone sharing responsibility for our success. But 2023 was a hard year for Keel for converting new business. 90% of our client portfolio is global so we tend to attract international opportunities but we’re equally keen to grow our UK portfolio. Some pitches we lost in the final cut and the feedback was that it was purely a creative decision. Others were lost due to clients acquiring companies, as we were pitching, which became a distraction. And others we just lost because the client preferred another agency. A lot of these pitches were in our control to change or switch up, but some aspects were outside of our control. Notably all these opportunities were via outreach or networking as we looked to convert suspects to prospects to friends…but it was taking a lot of our scarce time and resources, and bottom line, we weren’t converting enough of them, so we had to jump out of the pond. ‘Eat, Sleep, Lead Gen, Repeat’ wasn’t working and the agency was feeling deflated with no progress. We needed to switch it up. Like most agencies, time was scarce due to our ongoing…
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Out of The Pond with Jessica Gibb: CMO @ St Luke’s & Co-Chair of the IPA New Business Group

Published: Wednesday 27th November 2024
It is not new news that 2024 has been a challenging year on all fronts for New Business and that keeping agencies top of mind for clients and prospects and maintaining a strong pipeline has never been more important. But what has also been clear in 2024 is that identifying and delivering innovation in response to client (current or prospective) challenges has been key to staying ahead. One such example has been production, which has been changing dramatically over the last few years and 2024 felt like a real escalation with clients demanding a different kind of output for their brand. Production questions appearing in RFI’s and clients asking to meet heads of production during the pitch process were both clear indicators of a sea change in requirements, especially concerning cost effective production solutions. So, we relaunched “Apostle Studios’, our in-house multi-media production capability, a team of creative collaborators with a ‘let’s do this’ attitude. Whether it’s low-cost social content deployed at speed, a reactive stunt, or an interactive build, we have built a proposition to make sure our clients can deliver rich content for its consumers at any touchpoint. This also included our expanded (in 2024) branded content capability,…
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Out of The Pond with Richard McHardy: Founder & Co-Founder @ McHardy Collective and BD100

Published: Thursday 21st November 2024
  The past 12 months have been tough…the word ‘roller-coaster’ has been used by both brands and agencies sooooo often yet not as a throwaway comment, genuinely with good reason. Uncertainty has reigned supreme and new business has been way harder to find. Even at the best of times, there are so many things that BD people must do constantly; be active, attend events, enter awards, communicate on social media, show empathy, show authenticity…show up!…research, plan, pitch, build relationships, gather intel, etc. etc. etc., but being VISIBLE is crucial and when your clients are unsure, your agency colleagues get nervy, and you  – the BD –  can get very, very twitchy making it even more difficult to be your chirpy, VISIBLEself! Whilst I love small groups, have no problem speaking to strangers and make a living out of connecting the dots between people based on gutfeel and instinct, I do suffer from anxiety on stage – I also feel a good amount of Imposter Syndrome generally. But personal brand and VISIBILITYare key ingredients to overall business development success, and I reached a point in April 2024 and another in October 2024 when I had to dig deep and try some…
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Out of The Pond with Ellie Olliff: New Business Director & Partner at BBH

Published: Friday 15th November 2024
As the agency whose reason for being is ‘When the world zigs, zag’, we realised that we weren’t always practising what we preach. In an oversaturated market when all agencies are saying similar things, creds all look very similar and chemistry meetings follow a very predictable formula, we knew we needed to stand out from the sea of sameness of our own category and break out of ‘the pond’. It’s what we tell clients to do and we needed to listen to our own advice. Recognising the massive opportunity the explosion of AI offered, we decided to create our own AI new business tool, called the Zig Index. The Zig Index is BBH’s way of formalising cliches in a category. We take all the brands in a category, run it through AI and some brilliant BBH brains and we get a snapshot of the most used colour palettes, language and stories everyone else is using. The Zig Index then generates an ad that’s willfully generic. We’ve always done all this on the walls of BBH more informally, now we’ve just strapped some supercomputers on to make it more rigorous. Perhaps slightly naively we thought this would be a really simple…
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Out of The Pond with Chris Pearce: MD EMEA & US, GreenPark

Published: Wednesday 6th November 2024
The main change for us wasn’t so much a question of stop doing this, start doing that. It was more a question of stepping back and realizing that we needed to be far more coordinated and strategic in our overall approach. We’d always been fairly successful at making direct approaches to prospects, building pipeline and creating opportunities. But we weren’t as joined up as we needed to be so this year we set out our strategic goals, defined the types of clients we wanted to help solve problems for and fine tuned our offering around omnichannel search and social. Alongside introducing better orchestration of our new business efforts we’ve also increased our use of personal network content outreach. By this I mean we’ve encouraged all of our staff to regularly post useful, insightful content that previously we may only have published on our company social pages and websites. ‘Go to Network’ over ‘Go to Market’ was a phrase I kept hearing in 2023 and we took that to heart in 2024! The challenges with this approach, of course, are rooted in the usual enemies – time, aptitude, commitment to consistency! It’s also fair to say that sticking to the strategic…
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Out of The Pond with Tina Fegent: Founder @ Tina Fegent Ltd

Published: Wednesday 30th October 2024
I have been fortunate over the past 18 years, with client referrals and organic growth driving my consultancy business. However, over the last 12 months of sharing my weekly #TinaTells on LinkedIn, I’ve come to realise the importance of investing time in building your personal brand. People buy from people and want to know you’re the best trusted advisor for the job. A strong brand and clear proposition reinforce that trust and hopefully then leads to new business opportunities. While there’s value in staying within your niche ‘pond’ and honing your expertise, I found that stepping outside and expanding my network was key to unlocking even greater success. I would recommend networking and attending events that will broaden your thinking or meet a different community of people. For me this could be meeting new agencies; attending subject matter events e.g. on AI or the Future of News or attending CEO talks by the Marketing Society. As always time is a challenge. When you run your own consultancy, time is money and any time spent outside your ‘pond’ is when you are not earning but believe me, it is worth it. Be selective on the events and meetings that you want…
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Out of The Pond with Oli Richards: Chief Marketing Officer, Beyond Collective

Published: Tuesday 22nd October 2024
“It will come as no surprise to those involved in growing agencies that 2024 hasn’t exactly been a vintage year. And when the market is tough, we usually tell ourselves that we just need to push a bit harder, be a bit louder, or chase down that story in Campaign a bit faster. We quickly realised that the solution wasn’t simply to do more, but to think more laterally about where our growth might come from. Instead of relying purely on hope that “something” would drop in from the open market – and shouting harder into the void – we implemented a strategy aimed at tapping into our existing networks. This included getting in touch with partners at other agencies, engaging with ‘warm’ prospects, and reconnecting with lapsed clients we hadn’t spoken to in a while. Via Yonder Media and Collective Studios, we packaged up our media buying and creative production credentials and started reaching out to more targeted audiences. We also have the advantage of being part of Worldwide Partners, a global network of independent agencies, which was a natural starting point for expanding beyond the UK. As we fine-tuned our offering, our reach quickly broadened.  And it worked. Over the last 12 months, this approach has driven growth…
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The jfdi / Opinium New Business Barometer 2025 is now live

Published: Wednesday 16th October 2024
  The one-of-a-kind industry report that gives you the numbers, you need to measure and benchmark your performance, to put you on the front-foot.
Click here to complete it to be part of it and to ensure you receive the full report early in the new year to accelerate growth 👇 jfdi / Opinium New Business Barometer Survey See the film below of the exclusive 2024 event, where we reported and unpacked the findings of last years report – want to join the exclusive event in January showcasing this years findings? Just drop us an email on mark@jfdi.uk.com
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Out of the Pond With Martin Jones: AAR

Published: Thursday 10th October 2024
“In 27 years of running pitches, “which is the campaign that you wish you’d never made?” is probably the best client question to an agency that I have ever come across in the agenda for a Chemistry Meeting! What was particularly interesting about it was the fact that for all the participating agencies it was the Creative Director who answered and in every case their explanation as to why they wished they’d never made a particular campaign always concerned craft / technical factors: “We only had enough money for a 20 second ad and we needed 30 seconds”, “I wanted to shoot it in South America but we had to use a studio”, “I wanted X as the voiceover but they weren’t available” were typical examples. However, as the client pointed out after the meetings, nobody said “because it didn’t sell any product”. Whilst agencies are superb at understanding their clients’ target audiences, they are often not quite so good at understanding their own target audiences. The requirement from clients for their agencies (and their work) to demonstrate value and show a return for “shareholders” has never been as great as it is today. Agencies therefore need to bear this…
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Out of the Pond with Fran Brook: Head of Growth at Ultra

Published: Wednesday 2nd October 2024
“Becoming part of the leadership team of an agency that’s still in its infancy is incredibly exciting, and there’s a real opportunity to shape the direction of the business going forward. Since joining, my focus has of course been to look at the new business process and growth mindset of the agency – that being said, there wasn’t a proper process in place, so I’ve had to do a lot of work in setting us up for success with new business basics. Though there’s a lot of work to be done in starting everything from scratch, the big benefit is that I can put in a process that feels right and works for us. Coming into an environment with fresh eyes has meant that I’ve been able to sit with my team to really take the time to assess our business values and ambitions. I’ve challenged them on how we want to grow, where we want to get to, what new business we need to get there, and importantly, why. These are the key questions you need to ask yourselves when new business opportunities come in against how they ladder up to your broader business objectives. Thus far, they’ve been…
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Top Seven Takeaways from Campaign’s Year Ahead Breakfast Briefing 2024…

Published: Thursday 18th January 2024
By Rachelle Headland Last week jfdi joined the Campaign Year Ahead Breakfast Briefing in London to hear brands and agencies predict the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, and Rachelle Headland was there to give us the low-down: As someone who’s been a Managing Director of an agency and is now a new business consultant, I was interested in how agencies can sharpen their new business propositions to meet the CMO’s expanding scope of responsibility and also how agency leaders can create vibrant workplaces to get people back to the office and liberate creative teams to create their best work. Here are my top 7 take-aways: The ‘Great Negotiation’ between bosses and employees comes to a head. Jay Young, Chief Client Officer, Talon told us that this will be the year conversations between bosses and young people around hybrid working will come to a head. The tension is largely around the fact that the cost of a ‘basic level of life’ for young people exceeds entry level salaries and so saving c.£2-4k a year on travel is a good reason not to come into the office. Talon also told us that 76% of people agree they’ll be outside more in…
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