Fancy a look at what a top ’emerging agency’ looks like? Want to have a peek at what your competition is doing? Whatever your reasoning, today in our Showcase series of B&T Awards finalists, we’re bringing you the wonderful work of three of the finalists in the Emerging Agency of the Year awards.

Of the five overall finalists, we’ve got samples from History Will Be Kind, Emotive, The Artistry and The Woolshed Group.

The B&T Awards is set to be an enormous celebration of talented folk in the industry, with 800+ of you getting all dolled up for the evening, and Twitter as the principal sponsor. You can still get tickets here (although we’ve nearly run out) and get your votes in for People’s Choice right here.

History Will Be Kind

History Will Be Kind is a new breed of communications consultancy, operating at the crossroads of PR, social media and digital with a truly integrated approach. We pride ourselves on the creation of high impact, content driven communications programmes that harness the power of storytelling across platforms and devices.

Being a startup gives us freedom to create new ways of doing things and challenge traditional models – we embrace industry shifts and are audience centric, channel agnostic and data driven. We celebrate integrated thinking and diversity, with the team being a mix of PRs, designers, writers, photographers, social media and analytics gurus. It’s a dynamic combination of characters with a shared goal – to create great work.

2016 has been a brilliant year and seen us collaborate with great brands and inspiring people across sectors – from property, health, entertainment and technology, to travel, food, Government and beyond.

We’ve done everything from driving tickets sales for Merlin Entertainments attractions, and positioning International Convention Centre Sydney as a world leading events destination, to elevating coding within the national agenda by launching Code Like A Girl.

Our unique approach in a new communications landscape has driven an 83 per cent increase in client base and 94 per cent net revenue growth.

Business success is one thing, but what sets an agency apart are the people and the passion. We are heavily focused on team development, innovation, and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

Our clearly defined vision, market position and growth focused model ensure that our business strategy has momentum at its heart. We have set ambitious targets for growth and disruptive product and service development. Over the next year, we are on track to double in size again, and cannot wait to make more moments in history for our business, industry and clients in 2017.

Emotive

When Simon Joyce founded Emotive 19 months ago, he was sure of three things; the bar for branded content is speedily being pushed upwards, data can help us give people exactly what they are looking for and the market needs some brave thinkers to make it happen.

Emotive was born with the driving forces of ‘fearless creativity’ and ‘unrivalled amplification’ at the heart. Power descriptors like these are too often used in vain. Not ours.

Our social video content model applies the science of emotion and behavior to every piece of content we create, because human nature dictates that when people feel something, they’re likely to act on it, and communication that can cause action is powerful.

Since launch, we’ve worked with some of the country’s strongest brands including Optus, Virgin Mobile, Student Flights, Subway, Universal Pictures, Uber, Xero, Danone and more. We’ve enlisted world class talent in the Ricky Gervais Series, The Relentless Series with Usain Bolt and iHeartRadio’s Live gig #BieberIsland.

These campaigns have not only seen excellent business results, but in all cases, unrivalled reach and engagement.

See some of Emotive’s work here or cruise the videos below.

None of this would be possible without our people, and although our home at the Beach Haus keeps us happy, our success comes down to our values.

Respect and courage are at the heart of who we are. Add to this a brave client set, a flexible, flat, multi-skilled structure and it’s no surprise that the agency has retained 77 per cent of staff and 100 per cent of client relationships since inception.

We’ve created 30 campaigns, and won eight awards including a Cannes Lion. While this makes us proud, we’ll never let success go to our heads. We obsess over innovation and staying intravenously connected to entertainment culture in our determination to raise the bar and set the standard globally in social video content marketing.

The Artistry

The Artistry’s brand essence is that it “connects and communicates with the power and beauty of art”.

This is the core element of our unique position in the marketplace and the point from which we begin a dialogue with new clients.

It simply means that, where possible, every piece of work that leaves The Artistry is either a piece of art in its own right or has been created with an “artisanal” approach. This approach is supported by our body of proven, effective work.

Our proposition is the more beautiful and unique a piece of work, the more engaging it is, and therefore more likely to be shared to tell a clients’ brand story.

Our Case Studies for B&T Awards / Emerging Agency of the Year were …

1. Identifying and alignment of strategy between The Galeries and Art Month Sydney, which resulted in an exhibition of 18 street artists throughout the retail space. The exhibition generated significant a measurable increase in foot traffic and sales.

2. Winning the creative development and production of VAEFNO 2016 in Sydney and Melbourne.

Our submission argues The Artistry can claim unique marketplace territory, occupying the space where production, creative and brand intersect. We showcased market positioning and credentials to demonstrate the cost-efficiency of our “consult, create, make” approach.

Under Impact and Momentum we demonstrated how we are responding to the increasing migration of total marketing budgets online, and how our content approach is designed to engage digital eyeballs.

Our curated instagram account @the_artistry and newsletter, EVOKE, are key elements in supporting The Artistry’s brand proposition.

Our Commercial Success as a result of our approach generated revenue growth of 117 per cent from 2015, doubling of employees and increase of client base by 136 per cent.

The video above showcases The Artistry’s “Urban Vineyard” project with Destination Queenstown, to bring the food and wine of New Zealand to life in Sydney.

The Woolshed Group

Body Of Work:

The Woolshed Co. is a young, ambitious full service production studio that’s dedicated to creating premium visual entertainment.

We’ve proven our ability across briefs from 3K to 100K. Our body of work to date spans nearly all genres of content, from films to documentaries; studio and news programs; TVCs and viral content.

Film:

Sport:

Fashion:

Education:

The Viral Experiment:

The Viral Experiment was a two year-long journey into the belly of the viral content beast. Lightning strikes, sharks, bears and storm troopers, we used them all to entertain a global audience and create a media storm.

Agency Culture:

Our full-time staff structure defies the conventional reliance on freelancers. By giving our team a full-time job, we like to think we’re creating a supportive and stress-free environment that nurtures creativity.

This structure also allows us to keep costs down, maximising profits and delivering exceptional quality content to our clients on a tighter budget.

Impact and Momentum:

Post Production Facilities:

Rather than rely on external post-production facilities, we bucked established industry thinking and built our own facilities in-house.

This means our own facility, which we’ve dubbed ‘Fine Cuts’ has all the high-end luxuries at a fraction of the normal price. We’ve also diversified our income stream by offering the fine-cuts space for hire, both to our clients and our industry peers.

Internal, Full-time Staff:

We’ve gone against the grain of a typical production house and built up a team of core members who are full-time staff. We
believe passion needs a stable foundation to continue growing.

Our core
team is always available to handle small-to-medium production jobs, avoiding the need for freelancers. This means we can keep costs down, maintain closer control over quality and efficiencies, and still make a profit on small jobs.

Cheers to our gorgeous sponsors for all their help getting this incredible evening up and running!