A HOLYWOOD-based agency was the only consultancy in Northern Ireland to feature in a top agency poll recently compiled by PRWeek.
This is the second year in a row that the PR and content agency, Smarts Communicate has featured in PRWeek’s Top 150 rankings, having moved up eight places to 58 it remains the number one consumer agency outside Greater London
With offices in Northern Ireland and London, Smarts Communicate currently employs over 60 people and has clients across more than 20 countries,
with a portfolio that includes Ministry of Sound, British Airways, BT and Johnnie Walker.
The company’s growing success has been driven by a commitment to investing in creativity and clever thinking. Earlier this month, the agency launched a new Research & Development division called Smarts Labs – an innovation hub, for individuals and teams within the agency to pursue creative ideas beyond the everyday pursuit of delivering big ideas for clients.
Global CEO at Smarts Communicate, Pippa Arlow said: “Innovation is at the heart of what we do and underpins our core values of curiosity, bravery and commitment. For over 20 years, our business success has been driven by creativity and clever thinking. Our ideas have helped some companies get out of the starting blocks and others to become the biggest brands in the world; they’ve changed thinking and changed behaviours.
“That’s why we have established Smarts Labs. It will be part creative hothouse, part-testing ground, partdream-chaser and the ideas we incubate will change the way we work and think.”
The first idea to be born out of the hub is Tuunio – a social playlisting tool that connects people’s social media feeds to their music streaming services, allowing them to build genuinely collaborative playlists with people from all around the world.
Colin Corbridge, Global Strategy Director at Smarts Communicate and experimenter in chief at Smarts Labs said: “Tuunio is a great example of what clever thinking and proper collaboration can produce. We are always digging deep into consumer trends and Tuunio was born of the observation that despite the huge boom in music streaming, sharing music on social media was much more difficult than it should be. It’s really been a delight to have the space and time to work with friends to create something as intuitive and fundamentally useful as this.”