The year of blue chip brands and going global
Three years ago the new management of Ias b2b Marketing made a bold claim that the company’s objective was to become the number one specialist B2B agency in the UK within five years and number one in the world in 10.
Last year saw IAS establish itself at the top of the UK pile, winning a clutch of blue chip accounts, scooping 29 awards including eight in the World B2B’s and growing on-going revenue (fees) by 39 per cent and net profits by 144 per cent.
And because we were reigning champions in the only two B2B Agency of the Year competitions that exist in the UK blue chip and global clients came a-calling. And we invited them in with a vengeance.
Among 15 new client names added to the IAS portfolio were TalkTalk, Sage and Magnet in the UK, but it was in other parts of the world that the big breakthroughs were made.
Eight new international clients join the IAS roster
Early in the year, Global conglomerate Trelleborg were persuaded into a single brand and online marketing strategy for all its companies, instantly turning it into the agency’s biggest account at the time.
Next an IAS team flew out to Paris and sold a new brand positioning of ‘Take It Further’ to the CEO of French oil giant Technip.
To follow, a pitch against US agencies won IAS the worldwide lead agency role for Infineum, the global leader in fuel and oil additives, a Joint Venture company owned by oil giants Shell and Exxon\Mobil.
It was then back to the French capital to land the Global Digital Marketing account of asset management giant Amundi, a JV between Credit Agricola and Societe Generale.
The coup de gras came in December in Munich, when the IAS big guns, including new planner director, Rodger Jones, who joined IAS from his role as VP strategy of Chicago based Bader Rutter, won the global account of Siemens IT Services by convincing them to drop the IT tag and become the first technology biggie to position themselves as Business Technologists.
However we were not finished there. In an unprecedented end to the year, IAS pitched and won the accounts of US Information Management giant, Iron Mountain, Cologne headquartered Air Partner, the founding company in the sector of Private Jet provision and Swiss based logistics market leader, Kuehne + Nagel.
The not-so secret of our success
So what brought about such dramatic success in one year, particularly at the height of a recession, with marketing budgets at an all-time low?
The answer lies in the fact that IAS have been pioneering a revolutionary new approach to B2B marketing, which integrates all marketing activities with sales efforts and is 100 per cent trackable and accountable.
We call it Web Based Integrated Dialogue. It puts a client’s website at the centre of all marketing activities and fully integrates and monitors all online and offline activities, tracking a customer or prospect’s ‘user journey’ from point of entry to point of purchase.
IAS has also pioneered the use of advanced social media and online marketing techniques in B2B, completely retraining all staff in a radical cultural change programme called ‘Total Immersion’ (in digital). The programme won IAS a national training award and Best of Category in the culture change section of the world B2B’s.
It resulted in IAS forming a specialist Social Media ‘pod’, where digital marketers, content specialists and technical experts combine to offer IAS clients a totally integrated social media planning and implementation service.
Creative through and through
Running alongside Total Immersion was a parallel programme called Total Emergence (in creativity) which put every single member of staff through a four-stage ideas generation course, run by creative training specialists Brain Juice.
The result is that IAS has been blazing a creative trail in B2B marketing, which has long been seen as a ‘tell it like it is’ discipline Reuben Webb has pioneered the concept of turning the ‘big idea’ into the ‘long idea’. He maintains that in B2B, creativity ideas not only have to be positively engaging and have cut through, they have to be contextual and multi-dimensional in order to take into account complex audience segmentation and long buying cycles.
Planning for future success
And with the recruitment of American national Rodger Jones, arguably previously the US’s top B2B planner and author of the BAM (Brand Asset Management) system, IAS now boasts a blank-sheet-of-paper to results offering, unmatched in B2B.
Since joining IAS, Rodger Jones has added the following modules to ‘BAM’: Internal Culture and Communications, Integrated Content /Key Message Planning and a unique process for interrogating a client’s business offering to establish key areas of thought leadership and how to lever them in all channels of communications.
To facilitate delivery of these new innovations, IAS recruited an expert in internal culture, whose background is in HR and management training and has ‘switched’ a copywriter from the creative team to the planning team to work on content and key messaging strategies.
It’s no wonder that in the year, IAS lost no clients due to the commercial success they enjoyed in partnership with the agency; whilst at the same time celebrating our best ever financial performance.
Client testimonials:
“IAS blew me away (pouf) with their digital offering”.
Stéphane Munier, Brand Planner on Amundi.
“When Reuben Webb unveiled Business Technologists, the account was in the bag. It’s the best piece of Thought Leadership strategic input I have ever seen from an agency”.
David Burnand, Siemens IT
“When Craig Duxbury of IAS told me we should get one agency to plan all our activities, I was highly sceptical. We had never done it before. One year on I can’t see it being done any other way”.
Paul Higgins, TalkTalk Business
“The unprecedented success of our with brand extension with the launch of Benchmark, the new business we’ve won and the industry accolades achieved as a result, would never have been possible without IAS”.
Chris Witte, Kingspan
