Approaching the end of our first year at Entropy and we are giving 10% of our profits to good causes

entropy is a purpose-driven company. Last year we stated our purpose as ‘putting trust back into marketing communications’, and that certainly seems to have been on topic: the last 11 months have been the most rewarding of my career to date. You can read more about that here, and also some thoughts in my last column in The Drum on practical actions brands can take to strengthen trust, here.

We’d like to think we are walking the walk. We’ve had a dual focus on engaging with the industry around related issues, and on maximising the effectiveness and efficiency of our clients’ investments. Two industry examples are the viewability trading guidelines we developed with ISBA, and also the work we’ve done with trade bodies around GDPR. Nick Stringer has been a pleasure to work with on the GDPR practice we set up to run to the deadline of the GDPR coming into force in the next few months too.

On the other hand we maintain an absolute P&L focus to drive growth for our clients, and we’ve worked hard to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of our clients’ media, content and digital investments. We’ve worked with some fantastic household brand names across such sectors as FMCG, Finance and Media, and with smaller companies. We’d like to give you a huge thank you too: you know who you are!

Our focus for the year ahead is to further develop areas we’ve delivered on for our clients in these first 12 months, maximising the P&L impact from our engagements. This covers areas that complement our purpose, from ad verification to zero based budgeting, from marketing ecosystem design (in-housing, resourcing, tech stack) to marketing communications process development, from measurement optimisation to digital transformation. We are also launching a mentoring service across digital, media and wider marcomms.

One of the striking things I wasn’t particularly expecting is the number of highly talented people who have expressed interest in working with us, several of whom we’ve ended up working with. These have mainly been people I’ve worked with previously, either directly or through the industry.

Our associate model is something else we are doing differently, and I firmly believe it is the future of consulting. To solve our clients’ problems we supplement our core team with a bespoke team of experts for the duration of a project. The associate model is a “win-win” for both clients and consultants, giving access to some of the best talent on the market for our clients, and also enabling more flexible working for those of our consultants who want it (of whom there are many).

Our consultants have backgrounds in every aspect of media, content, data and technology and we call our approach to how they work with us “people-based consulting”. Our aspiration is to deliver real excellence to our clients and the best work / life balance of any of our competitors to our consultants. Currently we are aiming to deliver this by measures that include agile working and providing bespoke arrangements for working parents, including talented people looking to come back to work after maternity leave. To find out more about our vision for this please contact me here. We are a young business and will further develop this over time. If you join us we’ll be listening to your feedback.

Finally, I’m really pleased to announce that we are donating 10% of our profits from our first 12 months to good causes. This is something we intend to carry forward to future years and reflects my belief in the importance of social responsibility in modern business. Right now we’re working with the team on who exactly we’ll donate to: watch this space.

Bring on the next 12 months.

@astait

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