A year less ordinary for marketing agency of the year Earnest

Summary

Earnest’s mission has always been to chase the humdrum out of B2B marketing, and this year it’s gone great guns – for the agency, its people, its clients, and the community it operates in.

About

Earnest was founded in 2009 by Chris Wilson, Paul Hewerdine and Matt Frost. Earnest’s mission is to chase the humdrum out of B2B marketing – because it knows that being humdrum, settling for ‘okay’ doesn’t cut it and won’t deliver results.

Earnest is a creative B2B specialist agency that believes businesspeople are still people – they just happen to be at work. That’s been its mantra since the day it started and it’ll never change.

Today, that motivates its 50-strong team and is behind everything it does; building brands, shaping strategies, delivering content programmes, creating experiences, deploying new digital technologies or campaigns.

Fortunately, it’s lucky enough to work with clients who share its belief and the ambition to challenge the status quo.

Contribution to clients’ businesses

Its work with clients is more than just campaigns and content – it changes clients’ businesses, how their marketing teams are perceived internally, and how customers view their brand.

• Centrica: Reframing how businesses think about energy.
• Gumtree: Smashing its yearly lead target.
• Samsung: Helping the European team instil best practice in B2B marketing.
• Vodafone: Helping their UK business/enterprise team coordinate their lines of business, products and agencies into a single go-to-market strategy.
• Globalscape: Creating and implementing a new brand in just 12 weeks that has fundamentally and permanently changed its business.

For the second year running, Earnest has had 100% client retention.

Delivering results for its clients

Creative thinking at Earnest isn’t just words and pictures, or the latest marketing fad or channel. It’s more fundamental.

It’s about real customer understanding – meeting its clients’ customers in the flesh, whether they’re energy managers at multinationals or car dealers in Rotherham.

And it always finds rich seams of data-driven insight relevant to its clients, whether it’s social intent data, web analytics, transactional history or original research information.

If you add this up, you can see why Earnest is known in the industry for coming up with an innovative solution to client problems.

Here’s some examples:

• Centrica Business Solutions: dramatising the issue of energy resilience using a unique mobile format video for CEOs.
• ADP: putting a different spin on payroll with a podcast series discussing how people need to be ‘unboxed’.
• Samsung: launching a new product using influencers to create the story in documentaries.
• Cvent: making its GDPR message positive, to make it stand out in the noise.
• Kronos: Creating awareness for an unknown brand, setting up a thinktank to debate ‘the always on con’.

Financial performance and stability

Earnest has had another record financial year. It’s invested time, money and effort into growing its people, refining its processes and making an efficient, scalable and robust business.

Staff and community engagement

These days there’s no such thing as a job for life, but Earnest believes it can help people start a career for life – it gives people the best possible support on growing their knowledge, skills and, ultimately, career.

Everyone has their own personal training budget, and Earnest invests in specific activity to keep it ahead. Some examples:

• One-to-one exec coaching for all of Earnest’s management team.
• It’s trained all its ‘traditional’ designers to work in moving image.
• APG (account planning group) courses on strategy and use of new tech.
• Culture budget: £200/person to spend on anything that expands our minds creatively.

Earnest believes yearly reviews are not enough. It holds monthly WAWAs (where are we at) to help accelerate their progress.

All this (plus the important hygiene factor of good pay and benefits) explains why its staff retention is over 90%.

For the greater good

Tap for Change goes mainstream: Its contactless donation solution for charities went massive this year. Over 200 charities are now signed up, and over £3000 was raised on a single day for Royal Trinity Hospice.

Championing women in business: Bloom is a not for profit organisation championing women in creative services. As an agency, Earnest 100% supports its message and is helping Bloom expand its membership and update its brand.

Building the bridge between students and business: Earnest is leading an initiative with the DMA/IDM called ‘Career Adventures’, helping students to understand the B2B industry, available career options, and how exciting it is! We recently presented to Bournemouth University with more to follow.