As ever in early January we wanted to give you a quick look back over the year gone by, and highlight some of the continued successes and developments during 2015 that saw the www.creativebrief.com community thrive. We’re heading into 2016 with real, genuine excitement for what lies ahead.

The year in summary:

During 2015 the business took further strides forward in our stated mission not to behave like, be categorised as or even judged against what the industry defines as a traditional ‘intermediary’. We broke yet more new ground.

For agencies we consolidated our position as a channel through which to market themselves more effectively and to build their own brand – leading to a variety of benefits bundled into one package that include improved visibility, SEO, PR and new business. We’re now the only organisation to offer this winning combination to agencies through a single service.

For brands we drove even further into the territory of becoming a daily market intelligence provider. This was accelerated by the growing phenomenon that saw an ever-greater number of the world’s top brands establishing internal ‘marketing academies’ for their teams and putting Creativebrief and BITE at the heart.

Ultimately we became a catalyst to better marketing output for clients, with the content from our channels sparking a cycle we have come to describe as:

Knowledge. Inspiration. Action.

This is best encapsulated by a quote from our Future Market Leader event this year when Henry Windridge, Head of Marketing for Global Radio (owner of brands like Capital, Heart, Smooth and many more) said:

This growing behaviour of new generation marketers with a seemingly perpetual thirst for knowledge about the market around them, saw us dial-up the call to brand teams to have greater confidence in contacting agencies direct through Creativebrief.

To shake-up the frustratingly archaic manner in which our industry still insists on bringing together buyers and sellers of marketing, and to adopt a more modern, contemporary and self-sufficient approach. At our Future Market Leader event, Laurence Green (Founder, 101) also said:

Some of the key numbers from www.creativebrief.com in 2015:

Brand user base:

• We ended the year with 4,294 client password holders (from 2,249 brands)
• Of the above 2,823 individuals (66%) are registered to receive regular alerts containing bespoke agency work
• This saw our client:agency ratio extend to 20:1
• We now estimate the annual budget controlled by our brand marketer base to exceed £7bn

Website stats:

• 5.2 million agency profile page views in 2015 (increase of 65%)
• 18% growth in ‘users’ in 2015 (uniques)
• 21% growth in ‘sessions’ during 2015 (visits)

Full client marketing teams subscribe to Creativebrief:

Continuing with the theme of brands placing our marketing intelligence at the heart of their departments, we now have more clients than ever providing multiple users with daily access to our channels.

BITE:

In 2015 BITE came of age, delivering valuable knowledge, insight and inspiration to brands around key trends and themes in the industry – covering the UK alongside multiple global markets.

Curated from work on Creativebrief, during 2015 we produced 11 monthly issues of BITE, held two LIVE events and ran a series of INSPIRE sessions for brands at their marketing away days.

Topics ranged from the inescapable rise of celebrity, to partnerships and collaborations, influencers and vloggers, the micro-moment phenomenon and bridging the physical/digital divide. We also covered trends from Cannes Lions with a ‘Special’ edition of BITE in July.

Speakers at BITE LIVE (in partnership with Marketing Week) were from Mother/Elle, Sunshine/Skype, Gravity Road/Bacardi, Mr President/Unilever, Grey/Volvo Life Paint and Saatchi & Saatchi/Mumsnet.

The quality, scope and breadth continues to develop fast. We have also further developed our media partnership with Marketing Week, so keep an eye out for how this manifests in 2016.

Developments to Creativebrief:

We invested heavily throughout 2015 in developing the website and will continue to do so even further through the course of 2016.

Whilst many developments from the past 12 months were focused on the back-end and not instantly visible, the key (and major) one was a fundamental over-haul of the agency showcase editor to produce an ultra-slick and simple to use system.

We also took some major forward leaps with the behind-the-scenes stats engine that will enable us to be even more transparent with agencies this year. Plus we updated the briefcase in a way that lent more importance to quality feedback from clients and the ability to centralise this for agencies.

In 2016 developments will be front-end weighted. Keep watch for the integration of BITE into the heart of Creativebrief, for a thought-leadership space for agencies, for improvements to the search and for numerous elements that support our growing international coverage.

International growth:

In 2015 we continued on our journey to become an ever-more international platform for our increasingly globalised client-base. With particular focus on the USA and key European markets we saw client traffic to the website increase by 20% from N America, by 12.5% from Europe and by 9% from the ‘rest of the world’.

This saw our agency base continue to grow with the likes of ACNE and North Kingdom from Stockholm, Sid Lee and BSUR from Amsterdam, Mekanism and Big Spaceship from New York amongst many more.

Brand sign-ups from locations all across the globe continued apace with General Motors, adidas, Pernod Ricard, United Airlines, Apple, Red Bull, Mastercard, MAC, PepsiCo to name just a few. Again it was noticeable that we continued to attract forward-thinking, ambitious, content-centred brands striving to behave in a challenging and contemporary manner.

The team will also be speaking on stage at events in the UK, Europe and N America this year; we hope to see you at some of those.

The year ahead in 2016:

We’re gearing up for a big year. We’ll be making our website content more relevant and accessible on a daily basis for all across the industry. Stay in touch, and we hope you’ll remain a core part of this fast-growing community as it’s each and every one of you that makes it what it is.

Thanks, 

Charlie