PR and creative agency Keep Left repositions with all-round offering
Independent PR and creative agency Keep Left has launched a new brand positioning, ‘Ideas People Choose’, aiming to adopt an audience-first strategy approach that focuses on earning the audience’s attention.
The reposition comes on the back of the agency building capability across strategy, creative and account management, alongside PR and content marketing.
Keep Left first repositioned to an integrated PR and creative agency in 2019. In the past two years, it made senior creative appointments including ex-Leo Burnett Blair Kimber as ECD and Mike Doman as executive strategy director.
Speaking to Mumbrella, Caroline Catterall, Keep Left CEO, said the reposition was prompted by Keep Left’s evolved offering.
“Our processes and capabilities have all seen dramatic growth over the last couple of years – thanks to new hires and investment in new tools. We aren’t ‘just’ a PR agency anymore and our growing roster of clients and projects reflects that.
“As we’ve worked through the re-brand, we’ve been conscious not to forget what we regard as our superpower, and that’s the ability to earn attention. This fundamentally underpins Ideas People Choose which is about applying an earned sensibility not just to PR, but the entire marketing mix.”
While PR service is still a part of the core offering, Keep Left will build on new initiatives that have been rolled on in the past six months, fusing the agency as ‘one-org’.
The agency has introduced the ‘creative trios’ – the pairing of an art director and copywriter with a PR specialist – challenging where ideas come from now and giving earned media a voice from the beginning of the creative process.
Caroline Catterall
Catterall said Keep Left wants to create an agency model that “breaks down silos” of earned, owned and paid media capabilities. When asked about whether there are risks of generalisation and if the agency will be left with no specialty, Catterall told Mumbrella that Keep Left’s reposition aims to reflect “the face of modern communications today and where it needs to be”.
“Our size and hiring strategy over the last 18 months has given us two powerful ingredients to make sure the quality of the work isn’t compromised: diversity and depth,” she said.
“With the lines between PR and advertising increasingly blurred, we think it’s a huge advantage to think more about the problem and ideal solution when a brief comes in, versus being limited by a narrow service offering that will lead us to think-channel-first.
“You’d be amazed how often a ‘straight’ PR brief turns into an owned-led content series or digital experience. The world doesn’t think in earned, owned and paid so neither do we.”
Keep Left will launch a new content series on 1 November on its 21st birthday.
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Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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