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LATEST NEWS
Here’s what’s been happening at the Aduro office recently. Check back soon for more exciting new developments.
LIZZIE FEE JOINS US AS HEAD OF TALENT AND LEADS ADURO’S EXPANSION INTO THE NORTH
Say hello to the very talented Lizzie Fee who will head up our newly formed Talent team and put our mark on the map in the North, our first expansion outside of London.
Yorkshire-based Lizzie joins us with two decades of experience, most notably spending over a decade leading the BBC Children in Need Artist Liaison team, and will lead the expansion of the agency to service brands across the UK. Bringing with her an enviable black book having worked at multiple businesses and charities, Lizzie will continue to grow and solidify the work we currently we do by bringing together the best in talent and content across influencers and celebrities.
To let the North know we’ve arrived, we’ve launched an exclusive package for Northern businesses and charities called Aduro Accelerate. This is a unique services package available to 10 x Northern based businesses & charitable organisations. Those signing up will get access to three months of value-packed PR, talent and social services delivered by Lizzie and other senior experts. If that sounds good, get in touch!
Lizzie says: “I can’t wait to get stuck in with leading the new formalised service and put Aduro’s name firmly on the map in the North”
Welcome to the Aduro family Lizzie!
OH, WHAT A NIGHT! ADURO SCOOPS HIGHLY COMMENDED BOUTIQUE AGENCY OF THE YEAR AT PR WEEK UK AWARDS.
There’s been so much already to celebrate in 2024. We’ve had our best year ever in terms of numbers. We’ve welcomed fantastic new clients, delivered perception-changing work and continued to build our culture with exciting new talent, so being recognised at the PR Week Awards is the cherry on the cake!
Our priority has always been about delivering Reliably Brilliant work for our clients and this award is truly testament to the creativity, dedication and passion of the team, but also a big thank you to our long-standing client partners for supporting us along the way.
It didn’t go unnoticed by the Judges that while our first decade was focussed on client satisfaction and delivery, the last 12 months have seen us transform with our new positioning ‘Reliably Brilliant’, which has given us momentum and focus to launch new products and services as well as attracting new talent. We’ve been proudly owning our position as mainstream experts which has led to great results both for our clients and for team culture & direction.
Huge congratulations to all the winners. See you in 2025!
TRENDING AT ADURO
Team Aduro have been busy this month – our Creative Director Poppy Lewis recently published an opinion piece in industry bible PR Week studying the ‘Marvellous Mainstream’ appeal of Taylor Swift, and the synergies with our recent trend reports of the same name. In her piece, Poppy explores the factors that launched Swift to the pinnacle of her career and studies the relevant lessons that can be taken away by agencies and clients. You can read the article here. Meanwhile, Jasmine Botchey, one of our Social Media & Content Managers, recently contributed to PR Week’s Creative Hits and Misses, and has been out and about this month, speaking at both a ‘People Like Us’ and Taylor Bennet events, giving inspiration and advice to help make the industry more inclusive and accessible for people of all backgrounds.
And it doesn’t stop there - our recent work with Homebase, has been covered in industry title PRovoke, which spotlighted our 58% audience growth, 127% engagement increase. Read all about it here!
HOMEBASE’S SOARING SOCIALS
Our comms challenge for this new client was to nail our tone of voice, connect with consumers and build back that brand love via social media. We developed a ‘scroll-stopping’ strategy to tap into culturally relatable and trending moments, whilst keeping key product categories at the heart, and overall driving outstanding YOY results across all key channels
Garnering an impressive 89.1m impressions and increased 217% reach hitting 15.1m consumer, plus… we even went viral with our Gary Barlow content, delivering column inches as well as social share of voice.
BIOGLAN BALANCE: SERIES THREE
As the third installment in our #InBioglanBalanceSeries, we teamed up with three legendary athletes to chat about all things holistic health and uncover what gives them balance in life. We challenged cricket champion Ollie Pope, legendary Lioness Kelly Smith, and swimming superstar Ellie Simmonds, to carve some time in their schedules to try out pottery throwing, a popular activity in the wellness world, whilst chatting to us about why balance is so important, especially in the world of elite sport. Our In Bioglan Balance campaign encourages everyone to recognise their whole person, and to consider a more well-rounded and balanced approach to wellbeing. Check out the new series here, for some top tips as to how to find balance in your own life – why not give pottery throwing a spin?
IN KIND DIRECT GETS ROYAL TREATMENT
In Kind Direct, a King Charles patron charity and an Aduro client for five years now, was honoured to be part of the ‘Wash Bags Project’, hosted by Her Majesty The Queen at Buckingham Palace. This recognises organisations that support sexual assault survivors, providing them with personal care items as a small gesture of comfort during a highly distressing time for people using the service. We are incredibly proud to be able to support the partnership which has seen In Kind Direct distribute 5,000 washbags to 58 SARCs across the UK.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF TEAPIGS
Bringing a bucket load of big, bold, and beautiful to premium tea brand teapigs, we held the party of the year at Peggy Porschen on Kings Road. As part of our campaign to inject a little life and colour into teapigs we held a tea party hosted by the iconic Victoria Scone and invited fabulously bright and bold influencers who live life BIG – reaching and engaging our target audience of a new, younger demographic of 30+ health-conscious women. Hosting a tea blending session guests were able to get hands on and blend their own teapigs teas to take home, alongside a bag of branded goodies and oodles of inspo!
THE MARVELLOUS MAINSTREAM: IN TIMES OF LESS THINK MORE
It’s clear for everyone that the challenging times we are living in right now are not going away anytime soon. With this second Marvellous Mainstream report, we explore the complexity of how to market effectively to consumers right now, offer our expert view on how we can influence and impact buying behaviour through a commercial and cultural lens, and provide you with a step-by-step plan of how you can ensure marketing is still effective.
To download the full report, click here.
IN KIND DIRECT: NOT A CHOICE
Our ongoing work supporting In Kind Direct, one of King Charles’ patron charities, has seen huge impact for the charity raising awareness of the very real issue of hygiene poverty and driving more donations and new partner sign ups. With the cost-of-living crisis pushing more of the country into hygiene poverty this is a client we are incredibly proud to support on its mission to make essential products accessible to everyone. Through our hard-hitting, headline-generating report on hygiene poverty, we reached over 127 million consumers, signed up over 300 new charity partners, and saw a 15% increase in Justgiving donations. However, most importantly, by raising awareness, we ensured products got to those most in need.
Dementia UK – ‘I Live With Dementia’
There is a staggering number of people currently living with dementia in the UK, including all of the individuals affected through being close to someone with the diagnosis. The impact on these individuals is not often talked about, and therefore we wanted to open that conversation and raise awareness of the resources available at Dementia UK. This gave us the idea to champion Dementia UK ambassadors and the Admiral Nurses through hosting virtual events to have an open and honest discussion about the realities of living with dementia and how the charity can support those in need.
ADURO GROWS LIST OF BIG BRAND PORTFOLIO BUSINESS WITH LATEST SIX-FIGURE WIN
Aduro kicked off 2023 with a bang – and a six-figure win. Brand giant TATA Consumer Products has hired Aduro to deliver Reliably Brilliant campaigns for two of its tea brands, Tetley and teapigs, alongside a top-secret new product launch set to shake up a category of Goliaths.
Joining Aduro’s client list of mainstream brands, the Tetley brief was to reposition this cupboard stalwart with a purpose-led campaign that stands for something different within the category. Aduro will be brewing up an engaging content series, steeped with top tier talent alongside a splash of local community engagement. For premium tea brand teapigs, Aduro’s creative platform will extend across all channels, with bold and flavour-packed execution across influencers, press and social media.
THE MARVELLOUS MAINSTREAM REPORT
Mainstream mass audiences are under pressure in 2023 - how should brands react? Following our epic report launch event in February, we are excited to share our Marvellous Mainstream report which answers just that. At Aduro we work with brands that respect and serve mass mainstream audiences in so many ways, every day. We’re relied on by our clients for our creativity, but also for our insight. 2023 is set to be a big year for anyone charged with leading a mass mainstream brand. A challenging year, no doubt, but hopefully also a year of hope and optimism. We hope you find some useful perspective in this report. Download here.
WE ARE CELEBRATING OUR 10th ANNIVERSARY AND IT’S OUR BIGGEST YEAR YET
Having hit double digits in 2022, we are proudly celebrating a string of business wins, huge growth in our social division, two new hires, and a wealth of success for client campaigns.
Welcome to the roster… Dementia UK becomes the latest charity sector win as we work hard to raise awareness of the effects of dementia while myth-busting misconceptions about the condition via a social and media programme. This will run alongside the charity’s OOH activity. We have expanded our leisure portfolio with the UK consumer launch for The Park Playground. This unforgettable VR experience first arrived in Belgium in 2018, followed by the Netherlands, and it will have three initial UK sites - Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester.
Soaring social success… Since January 2022, we’ve seen a 67% uplift in income for our Social Division. Existing accounts including Pharmacare’s Sambucol, Hartley’s 10Cal and Jelly Pots, have all been expanded to cover social in the remit. This will include asset creation, social strategy, content creation, social management, and community management. We have also won the social business for global wine producer Concho Y Toro.
Transforming the talented team…With such healthy growth comes the need for new starters. Kezia Blake joins team director Hayley Ainscow to bolster the company’s social offering – bringing experience from Jaeger and Marks & Spencer. Eloïse Selwood has joined the account delivery team from Grayling Southampton, with experience managing numerous stakeholders and clients within the charity and sports sectors.
Aduro Trend Report
The latest Aduro Trend Report delves into something of a PR Unicorn, the unique prospect of a winter World Cup. There are myriad options available to brands - jump straight in and go big on patriotism, be brave and challenge the Qatar status quo, or ignore it all together and focus on something else entirely. Read the full report here and decide which side you’re on. PRWeek just asked our Creative Director Poppy all about it too. Read her verdict here.
New Campaign Launch: In Bioglan Balance
In Bioglan Balance has seen the top sporting talent in the UK tell us how they find balance. Viewed by over 200k people so far, the four-part content series has seen us stretch with rugby legend Ugo Monye, shimmy with TikTok sensation Leonie Joyce and pump iron with England rugby star Joe Marler (spoiler alert: he’s stronger than us). Our quest for outstanding content even saw us pop round to two-time Olympic rowing champion Helen Glover’s place for a go on her paddle board. Overall, In Bioglan Balance is the kind of campaign that ticks all the boxes; sales spikes? Check. Over 190 earned media features? Check. All kinds of fun to deliver? Triple check. See the series for yourself here.
