transmission

Find out how Transmission won for ‘Marketing communications agency of the year’

Find out how Transmission managed to win agency of the year using creativity and engagement to win some key awards this year.

About the agency

Transmission is a global, data-driven unified B2B marketing agency, founded by Chris Bagnall in 2013. Transmission believes in the power of intelligence, and by digging deeper to unearth real understanding, it better understands Transmission’s clients’ customers. It does this by combining insight, creativity, and digital innovation to deliver deeply personalised marketing programmes that drive clients’ growth. The stated mission is to become the most renowned and respected global agency in B2B marketing.

As a full-service agency Transmission has a huge range of end-to-end services spanning planning/strategy, creative services, content, activation across all channels (paid/earned/owned) and measurement and analytics. 

Transmission is best known for: 

  • ABM approach and expertise 
  • Integrated campaign management 
  • Cutting-edge media planning and buying 
  • Innovation in and understanding of Martech, AdTech, and analytics

The agency focuses 100% on B2B clients, and now represents 75+ organisations. Many clients are tech brands (HP, VMware, Oracle, LinkedIn, Verizon, Dropbox). In recent years however, Transmission’s non-tech client base has grown (Maersk, CBRE, Korn Ferry, Capita).

From humble beginnings in 2013, Transmission has consistently grown, achieving first or second fastest-growing agency for the past four years and now competing on a global scale. It currently has close to 200 staff in London, San Francisco, Munich, Sydney, Singapore, and Delhi. Offices in Beijing, Tokyo and New York are planned in 2020. And all with no outside investment. 

The agency’s core principles are: 

Customer obsession: Applying extremely detailed and personalised approaches to ensure Transmission is obsessed by the needs of customers.

Innovation: The use of data and technology to drive insight and to create successful marketing programmes with a core understanding of the needs of the customer.

People: Transmission prides itself on its progression, fulfillment, and enabling their potential.

Contribution to clients’ businesses Transmission’s client retention rate runs at around 85% YoY. Highlights from the past 12 months: Winning a multi-million-dollar pitch to become HP’s global ABM agency of record, to help deliver a five-year marketing and digital transformation project across the entire business. A direct mail programme for Tanium, which delivered an ROMI of 188:1!

An HP 3D print campaign resulting in a $4,200,000 pipeline and a 52:1 ROMI. A $20k social selling programme for Conduent, which resulted in face-to-face meetings with senior decision makers and generated $1.2 million in pipeline. Becoming the digital agency of record for VMware across EMEA, supporting 100+ marketing team members, driving significant economies of scale in programme and media pricing and with a huge increase in results for the entire organisation. 

Creative thinking 

Last year, Transmission set up an interdepartmental and multi-geo working group focused on developing and evolving new services. To date this has resulted in: 

A data-driven social prospecting service, incorporating personality profiling and intent data to tailor personal outreach at scale. This was adopted by 20+ clients in 2019. 

A personalised video content service, allowing Transmission to create custom videos, populated with key bespoke data points tailored specifically to individual client prospects. An ABM analytics dashboard that pulls in all data feeds (CRM/marketing automation/intent/content consumption/1st party web data/leads) into one view, allowing clients to track the engagement of prospect accounts and across all activity. Three clients are using the dashboards. Working with LinkedIn to bring new functionality for their data through APIs, allowing Transmission to build new offerings using the power of LinkedIn’s (and Microsoft’s) phenomenal data scale and granularity. 

Financial performance and stability 

2019 was a key investment year as it opened up multiple new offices. The plan was to grow revenues 50% YoY and maintain similar prot levels. Transmission overachieved with 71% growth in revenues. Profitability dipped slightly because of such large investments but still reached £530k PBT. New client wins totalled £3.6M. More importantly, additional agency revenues from existing clients, mainly because of growing current clients into new territories via new offices, exceeded £5.8M. Transmission only participated in 11 formal pitches, winning five of them. Most new business doesn’t come as a result of pitching, the agency preferring to build relationships with existing clients, and also winning new business based on inbound inquiries and existing relationships key staff have with potential clients

Staff and community engagement 

It launched a new flexible employee benefit scheme, giving staff the ability to customise their hard and soft benefits. This came on top of a new initiative launched with the aim of customising all staff’s learning and development with bespoke programmes tailored for them. Transmission also continued its policy of rewarding everyone with away weekends. Last year, the entire UK and German offices travelled to Portugal, the US team enjoyed a weekend in Vegas and its Asia teams went to the Gold Coast, Australia. Consequently, staff churn remained extremely low at 12% YoY. Transmission focused much more attention on CSR this past 12 months, supporting multiple initiatives including ALPFA, Blue Skye Thinking, The British Heart Foundation, The Trussell Trust and International Women’s Day. Chris Bagnall, Transmission’s founder, joined Action for Children’s board, resulting in staff participation in an event called Byte Night, raising money for youth homelessness. Key spokespeople regularly presented at industry events during 2019. Transmission also launched its own video content series, Transmission Talks, which tackles different B2B marketing topics and features leading client-side marketers.

Key initiatives and achievements 

The past 12 months have been the most successful the company has ever seen, with a range of independent accolades and awards: 

  • Named in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list (43rd), which ranks Britain’s top 100 private companies with the fastest growing consistent revenues. 
  • Placed in the Financial Times’ 1,000 fastest-growing European businesses (67th). This list covers all sectors of industry. 
  • “Marketing Agency of the Year” by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The award recognises the most impressive allaround marketing agency in the UK (B2B and B2C). -“Agency of the Year” at the Drum DADI awards 2019, rewarding outstanding agency achievements in the digital sector. -“B2B Agency of the year” at the UK Agency Awards 2019. 
  • The 2nd fastest-growing agency in the UK in B2B Marketing’s Benchmarking report. 
  • Awarded Silver “B2B Marketing Agency of the Year” at B2B Marketing’s first US awards in May 2020 – one year since its entry into the US market. 
  • In addition, Transmission became LinkedIn’s largest independent agency advertiser in the UK and was accredited as a LinkedIn “preferred content partner”. 

“I really love the work I have seen so far on the North Sea tender pilot. Great work! Please pass on my compliments to those who have been involved.”

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