What We Do is help brands innovate at pace in their marketing. Read an overview and see our capabilities for more, or meet our team.
Overview
Our work is diverse but linking it all is a belief that brands can build competitive advantage through innovating at pace in their marketing and product development.
Our mission is to help our clients leverage emerging trends and platforms to build their businesses, and we also believe that long term success is increasingly dependent on the extent to which your business leaves the world a better place.
We place great emphasis on both helping you spot emerging trends and opportunities, and on helping you act fast to take advantage of them. We work hard to maintain our curiosity and strategic rigour. We strive to be fearless about creating positive disruption, and we cultivate a spirit of entrepreneurialism to ensure our solutions are commercially grounded and fast to market.
We can help with brand strategy, marketing plans, brand platforms, and we create engaging campaigns and partnerships. Our team is capable of executing across social media, app development, content production in all forms, branded content partnerships, events and brand / product experiences.
All agencies claim to be unique in some way, so here's three things about us that we feel demonstrate our difference in a tangible way.
One
We're a marketing agency with a large proportion of non-marketers in our team. This means we ask the important and often overlooked questions and think differently about the problems we are given to solve. We recognised early that content and marketing were becoming one and so we recruited people from publishing, music, TV and film industries.
Two
Our very name encapsulates our mission to harness the best independent thinking, ideas and talent into a coherent team which has proven capability to deliver the world over. Visit our offices and see that we even created our own furniture to facilitate this collaborative way of working.
Three
We're confident enough in our ideas about what people are into that we back those ideas with our own money and create our own wholly owned ventures and digital media properties
Our capabilities
Brand Strategy, Positioning and Brand Platforms
Whether for a new brand or a brand facing new competitive pressures, we have worked with some of the world’s leading brands to develop brand beliefs, or to devise brand platforms which have relevance to today’s consumer environments.
We’ll use an appropriate mixture of internal workshops, external stimulus, research, consumer insight and strategic thinking, but we’ll also bring in non-marketing expertise to help brands work out the passion point they share with consumers, and where they fit in a fast changing environment.
Campaigns, Content and Social Media
We don't believe brands need a social media strategy, but we do believe that social media should be an integral part of your overall communications plan. Finding points of shared interest, creating the right assets and building the right audiences are all part of a process we've used to deliver great work for our clients. We do everything from creating frameworks through to daily posting and community management. We’ve built and deployed multiple Facebook apps, and we’ve got extensive experience of using social media channels to drive sales and profits. We’ve got extensive experience of running participative campaigns inviting contributions from users and we know how to engage consumers and get them creating on behalf of your brand.
New Platforms
Our network of partner companies together with our restless search for new opportunities means we can help you spot the potential of new platforms at an early stage, and quickly get activity live. We developed and deployed nine iPad applications in 21 different languages within six months of the iPad’s launch, capitalising on the consumer’s desire to experience the iPad first hand before distribution expanded to all markets. We use our own projects including Festival Annual as a test-bed, ensuring we can experiment fast and then offer you tested solutions.
Partnerships
When a brand talks of "our consumers" it is forgetting that no one owns the audience any more, so partnerships which create win-win-win situations for brands, rights/content owners and consumers are increasingly important. We know how to put world class partnerships together – particularly where there’s a music element. We can then develop deals into fully baked execution plans, ensuring our clients maximise value by creating compelling consumer activity
Brand Experience and Events
We've staged events for thousands of people in places as far away as Moscow and Shanghai, and we've also created intimate tasting experiences for consumers to learn how to appreciate the blend of fine scotch whisky. Getting close to your consumers can deliver great results, and by planning the appropriate generation of content and online conversation you can leverage events and exhibitions to deliver outstanding ROI
Retail Activation
We pride ourselves on our work having a solid commercial foundation – we like to measure its success not in the number of industry awards it gets, but in the volume of sales it drives. We’ve got extensive experience in bringing brand beliefs to life in a motivating way at the point of purchase, and of using social channels to drive sales for brands.
Team
We grew out of a network of small companies and freelancers who believe in collaboration and open ways of working.
IU (that's how most people, including us, refer to the company) was incorporated in 2006, but the core team had been working together for several years before that.
We come from a wide range of backgrounds, and being able to look at a problem from many different angles is the cornerstone of our approach. Some of us have a traditional marketing training, but strategy, broadcasting, PR, research, design, TV production, the Hollywood movie industry, journalism, acting, music, club promotion, architecture and fashion all contribute to our work through the variety of experience within our team.
Collaboration and the sharing of ideas and experience is right at the heart of our approach – if you visit our office you'll find our teams grouped round hexagonal desks talking face to face, not separated into cubicles or factory style rows.
When working with clients we're often described as "the missing team member", working in ways that suit your organisation rather than our pre-conceived ideas of project management, and we thrive in agency teams collaborating to deliver great work for clients.