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The Wired Agency rebrands to ‘youthful’ WiredCo. to reflect growth in numbers and offering

Independent agency, The Wired Agency has rebranded to WiredCo. which the company told Mumbrella signals a new era, prompted by a period of significant growth.

“We’ve been working together for about two years, so much has changed in that time, not just for us the business, but for our clients as well. We’ve got an awesome roster of clients, global brands challenging in their markets and we’re really, really proud of that, and we just needed something to wrap that up.

New name and branding for WiredCo.

“Also, we’re just so proud of our people. We were 10 people two years ago and we’re now plus 30 and we feel so lucky to have attracted the people we’ve got on the team in what has been tricky circumstances with the talent shortage.

“So we kind of went well, everything has changed so much, it’s time to put a marker in the road that kind of celebrates that, and the deliberate kind of inclusion of ‘Co’ is suggesting that we are not just three people, it’s a company of people, like a cast,” Kennedy-Cosgrove continued. “So yeah, that was the main reason, but it also gives a chance to freshen up a little bit, relook at color schemes and relook at the logo and make something that felt of its time, global facing, and fun.”

Former managing partner of VCCP and group head at McCann, Kennedy-Cosgrove joined the agency two years ago, before investing and becoming a partner in the business last year alongside founder Angela and her twin, Michelle Hampton, who was also founder and until recently chairperson at Magnum & Co.

Co-owners, Michelle Hampton, Angela Hampton, and David Kennedy-Cosgrove

Michelle Hampton, managing partner added that the new branding is reflective of the agency’s growth to having creativity as the “centerpiece of what we do”, as a performance first agency.

“So we wanted to be creative with our own brand, and quite often agencies don’t have the time or the capacity to really focus on their own brand.”

“I think our old brand was fine,” founder and managing director Angela Hampton said: “But the new brand is so fun and vibrant and the team internally are just loving it, like there’s this new found energy and like what [Michelle] said, it’s easy to apply to different applications as well. So it’s kind of just given everyone a bit of a boost.”

M. Hampton said that often agencies are “the worst at marketing themselves”, but that in a way, they’re proud of putting out clients first.

Agencies are the worst at marketing themselves, but in a way, I reckon that we’re quite proud of that because we wanna put our clients first.

WiredCo. say their team has grown from 10 to 30 in two years

“I think now, every agency is facing pressure when it comes to talent, and so having a new brand and a new image that appeals to youth is pretty important. And I do think our new brand is pretty youthful.”

Part of WiredCo.’s talent drive also includes a “recruit your mates” program, offering up $10,000 per role for anyone who recommends successful placements, totaling $40,000, a hefty incentive to get its staff involved in the recruiting process.

Angela Hampton said becoming more creatively focused was a “bit of an evolution”, with its heritage in digital performance, starting off with paid search and SEO.

“Then we expanded into social, but we were still very focused on social from a digital performance and advertising point of view. Then what we found was our clients really needed that creative side, and we started moving into more of the organic on page activity.”

“We are here to have the best service we can for our clients, so we really felt like we couldn’t rely so much on digital performance in terms of artificial intelligence and programmatic, like we really needed to still listen and have that creative angle on things.”

“When we look at the performance of all our social and our digital media, it’s only as good as the content you put in it, and clients were looking for that, but they would generally be going somewhere else to get it.”

“That’s where Ange, Micky and I were working together originally and we went, ‘actually, why don’t we just formalize this and make this a proper partnership?’, because we all have our different skills, mines in strategy and creative, Ange’s is in performance, and Mickeys in PR.”

“There’s very few agencies that managed to pull that off and we wanted to give it a go, and I think we’re having some pretty good success.”

Michelle Hampton said now the focus is to buckle down on the growth strategy, which has been “fewer, bigger, better”. “I know heaps of agencies throw that around, but I think we’re at that size where we wanna focus on really good quality work with a small pool of clients, that being said, we’ve turned down $1.5 million worth of work last financial year alone, because of that focus.”

The agency said a marker of this success has been not only winning global clients, including Tourism Italy and Tourism Korea, but being asked by existing clients to work in other regions around the world.

Old logo

“George Jenson is the perfect example. They’ve got a global agency that used to operate across all markets when we started working with them about four years ago. They’ve now asked us to look at Japan, so we’re now doing digital for Japan, and then there’s a couple of other markets that – watch his space – we’re looking at, but it does seem like these global brands are really starting to come to us for multiple markets, not just Australia, which is awesome,” said Angela Hampton.

While growth and a fresh reset seem to be coming at a good time for the independent, if anything, a shorter email address was a “happy by-product” according to Kennedy-Cosgrove.

Key clients at WiredCo. include Pizza Hut, Assembly Label, Indeed, Chatime, Maurie & Eve, Visit Korea, Viking Cruises, Georg Jensen, and TEDx.

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