Last year, we celebrated our 15-year anniversary! Since we began in 2006, our agency has grown from a small mobile marketing agency with just 3 people, to a full-service performance media agency, with over 200 employees, across 7 offices globally. Our founder and CEO, James Hilton, has been featured in Mobile Marketing Magazine, discussing how our agency has evolved alongside the digital industry over our brief history.
Reflecting on when he first entered the digital industry back in 1996, James discusses how to many, the rumoured potential for the digital world seemed far-fetched. With a digitally unaware audience and high prices, the marketspace was a novelty only few could afford and it failed to take off. Following the collapse of the dot-com bubble, funding for the industry dried up and there weren’t many left who believed in its recovery. James, accompanied by a handful of faithful others within the industry who viewed this period as a complete reset for the digital space, and were ready to rebuild.
By 2006, James began to see many of the same trends emerging with mobile as he’d seen with the internet over a decade before. While many considered mobile phones to only be good for 10p texts, downloading wallpapers, and playing ‘Snake’, James saw the potential of what a world carrying a handheld digital device could have for brands. With this in mind, James founded ‘Inside Mobile’ with his friend and business partner Dusan Hamlin. An agency that grew from a focus on mobile, to positioning campaigns as mobile-first, to a performance media agency that we now know as M&C Saatchi Performance.
James, commenting on the success and growth of the agency within the industry over the past 15 years stated: “We succeeded because we had the appetite to do brilliant mobile-first work for brilliant brands who, like us, believed in mobile as a communication channel.
However, the growth of the industry was accompanied by complications: ‘Over time, everything became mobile, so we adapted our buying and planning capabilities to continue reaching our clients’ audience in the most effective way possible. Now as M&C Saatchi Performance, we have evolved alongside the consumer and have become a performance media agency focused on optimising to every action a user takes online.’
James Hilton, Founder & CEO
‘You have a choice in business, whether you’re going to lie down and settle or get up and fight. I am proud to say our agency is full of fighters who don’t hold their punches. I can’t wait to see where they’ll take this agency and the industry over the next 15 years.’
You can read the full conversation with James Hilton here.
If you’d like to hear more about what we’ve learnt over the past 15 years ?
