For those of you that missed my team’s little note last week, I am delighted to announce that my agency, Prohibition, is celebrating a record year for 2012-2013 which has seen us double in size, move to much larger and funkier offices, and appoint a new board director.
The year has been extremely busy with a number of new high profile business wins, including Country Baskets the UK’s largest wholesaler of floristry supplies and artificial flowers, and the national market leader in sustainable housing, Keepmoat Homes. Our agency has doubled in size in terms of people and revenue and our trajectory for this forthcoming year looks strong too.
Our news includes the appointment of my good friend Will Ockenden as board director which I am thrilled about. Will and I have worked together many times before and he previously ran the Sydney office of Lucre, and prior to that worked at a senior level in its Leeds office. He will be responsible for developing the team’s professional services and B2B offering.
He will also work to help commercialise our self-published online student magazine, Student Wire, which is currently the third-largest magazine of its kind in the UK, with more than 60,000 readers. The magazine forms the core of our growing student and youth marketing division which already has a number of new and exciting clients.
We have also hired a number of others including Rebecca Wharmby, former PR executive at Disney who joins us as an account executive and Adam Worrall, who is a professional journalist, and he joins us an online content manager.
If I am honest the last 12-months have been extremely eventful and I am thrilled we have managed to achieve record growth when the economy still wasn’t recovering. We focussed our business on delivering non-traditional PR services such as content marketing, online influencer engagement and social media eCommerce services. We have tried to focus on results rather than outputs and delivering sales through social media and online PR.
I made sure we invested heavily in new talented people and new technologies to ensure we continue to deliver our clients outstanding work and stay ahead of the curve. I think you know I love technology and that goes hand in hand with everything my team delivers.
All this new stuff follows last year when we won the CIPR’s Best Use of Digital Award and were shortlisted for Best Use of Social Media in November. I am really proud of my team and this year we plan to enter several of our campaigns so I will update you on that front at a later date.
I am just hoping 2014-15 will be even better and we can become the most remarkable social media and PR agency in the North of England.
