Mediaworks Goes From Strength To Strength

Bearing in mind that Mediaworks was only set up in 2007, their rate of growth has been nothing short of staggering.

They are now recognised as one of the UK’s leading independent agencies specialising in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Paid Search (PPC – Pay Per Click), Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), Online Reputation Management (ORM), Web Development and Content Marketing.

They’re based in the North East but they are spreading their wings and now have offices across the country.

We spoke to the boss, MD Brett Jacobson, 12 months ago, so we thought it’d be a good idea to go back and find out how the last twelve months have gone.

When we last interviewed you, you were aiming to double the number of Mediaworkers, so how are things going?

“Things are going fantastically well. We’ve delivered another record-breaking year in terms of growth, with turnover surpassing the £5m mark for the first time and we are forecasting to scale the business further over the next 12 months and beyond. We’ve grown our team from 55 heads in 2017 to just shy of 100 full-time staff today, which forced us to move to our new state-of-the-art HQ in Gateshead a year earlier than planned. We are now managing in excess of £20m per year of digital ad spend across our client portfolio, and we helped to deliver over £250m of digital revenue for our customers during the past 12 months”.

You’re into your 2nd decade…..what’s been achieved in the last 10….what’s the plan for the next 10?

“The first 5 years was all about survival, scale and rapid growth to establish ourselves as one of the leading, single service (SEO) agencies in the UK. However, we knew that in order to realise our long-term ambitions for the business, we’d need to diversify our proposition and evolve into a fullservice digital agency.

We invested heavily in our people, systems and processes to professionalise the business and we established the infrastructure that would enable us to scale and accelerate towards our aspiration of being a £10m turnover agency.

We are now established as a nationally-recognised full-service digital agency and we act as a trusted partner to some amazing clients. It’s now onto the next phase…to establish ourselves as the undisputed leading digital agency in the north and a top 10 UK agency.”

You’ve always had a vision to see the huge potential for an agency like Mediaworks in the digital age. Is that vision coming to fruition and where is the ‘business’ going? “We’ve always had the aspiration to be recognised as the best in our industry – not just regionally, but nationally and internationally too. We’re a Google Premier Partner, an accolade that only 3% of UK agencies hold, and we recently won Bing’s European Growth Partner Award at a ceremony in Amsterdam, which shows we are holding our own with the best in Europe. Next month we’re heading to Seattle for Microsoft’s global awards event where we’ll be competing head-to-head with the leading agencies on the planet. We’d love to bring the trophy home to the North East to showcase the world-class talent we have in the region. We’ve also recently been recognised in the Northern Tech Top 100 digital businesses and The Drum’s Top 100 UK Independent Agencies.”

Are firms now switched onto the idea of SEO, using websites, using social media….or do they still need beating with a blunt instrument?

“I think the days of needing to explain to a CEO that their website is more than just a digital business card are long gone. Of course, there are businesses that are further up the digital knowledge curve and have embraced those commercial opportunities more than others. However, that just makes the journey for those clients who are only beginning to embrace digital so much more exciting.

We have a fantastic array of clients across various industries which allows us to apply the knowledge and insights we harvest from all those different environments and collectively apply it to each of our digital projects. This gives us a real competitive advantage over other agencies who might not have that breadth of experience.”

Lastly, what new developments/innovations are you now using?

“Our focus for the next 12-18 months is to further leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to increase our efficiencies and ultimately drive even stronger performance of our clients’ digital campaigns. We are in an age where it’s possible to process billions of rows of data in an instant and to correlate a data set with any number of real-time environmental factors to produce powerful business insights, which can allow you to make vastly more informed strategic decisions. We have access to a wealth of high-quality data which we aim to leverage to its fullest potential; we have been working on a product which will revolutionise how we service our clients and how we interrogate data to deliver even more success for them in the future.”