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The winners of The Drum Awards for Agency Business have been announced. This global competition recognizes the agencies that excel through strong workplace culture, effective management and excellence, and in 2021 received entries from Indonesia, Russia, Vietnam, South Africa, the United States and other countries.

The Drum is proud to present these awards with the support of its headline partner Scoro. With hundreds of agency, consulting, and professional service companies around the world, it has a unique insight into what makes an agency special.

This year’s jury consisted of agency leaders from around the world representing both small independent businesses and international consulting firms – you can find out more about them here.

Dan Roche, Vice President of Marketing at Scoro, joined The Drum Founder and Director of The Drum Network Holly Hall, Gordon Young, in a virtual ceremony to identify this year’s winning agencies. The show was streamed live from The Drum Labs, The Drum’s new event space and media center in Shoreditch. If you missed it, you can catch up on it below or check out a selection of this year’s top agencies.

The full list of this year’s winners can be found here.

The Liberty Guild: Redefining the way creativity is bought and sold

Grand Prix – presented in partnership with Scoro

Business Transformation Strategy of the Year

The Liberty Guild began with a bold premise: that advertising is a multi-billion dollar business. It believes that focusing on selling hours has made the industry lethargic and political, fueling marketers’ egos and marginalizing customers. “It’s no longer about creativity,” claims the team. “It’s about the money.”

By turning the traditional business model on its head, The Liberty Guild has fundamentally redefined what it means to be an agency. Instead of selling hours, they are selling ideas – a concept the industry has ventured into but rarely managed to fully embody. The team believes it is at the forefront of an “industry-wide shift in power, culture, motivation and values”.

The jury described this entry as “the present” and praised the company’s flexibility in terms of resources, pricing and structure. The freelance workers give the opportunity to integrate the right disciplines for different projects.

But what set the Grand Prix apart was its boldness, defying convention to build a successful corporate culture and innovative business model, with 300 employees in 27 countries and a 203% increase in sales over the previous year.

This new business model is one that the team believes will actually serve the customer better, defined by skills, capabilities, experience and results.

Media bonus

Chair price

Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy of the Year

In its own words, Media Bounty has “a mission to become the UK’s leading independent ethical creative and media agency by 2023”. This is their response to the much-needed changes in our consumer habits and a way to stay one step ahead of new sustainability and social justice laws.

The team believes that any interaction should make their values ​​clear, which is to be friendly, aware, honest, brave, and curious. The agency has put the idea of ​​corporate social responsibility in its essence – something the judges found in their pursuit of B-corp status, working with clients who are in line with their mission and other decisions.

Since opening, the founders of Media Bounty have set themselves the goal of running a sustainable, diverse and integrative agency. Today, it seeks to improve the industry beyond its walls and urges its colleagues to look beyond greenwashing or press-friendly PR stunts with the Conscious Advertising Network.

The jury praised the agency’s distinctive position, both in terms of the way they work and the dynamic culture they are working on. Christopher Kenna, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Brand Advance and chairman of this year’s jury, selected them for the Chair’s Award because “they show that advertising can be done responsibly and marketing can have a conscience”.

Channel Bakers: Celebrating the People Who Make the Dough Grow

HR team of the year

Though often overlooked or maligned, a great recruiting team is essential to the culture of a thriving agency that brings in the batter. The Channel Bakers leadership recognizes the recent surge in “investing in the acquisition, development and management” of talent, fueled by his HR team (and possibly his love of bread-based puns).

Known internally as the People and Culture Team, it led a global recruiting drive that helped Channel Bakers emerge from the Oven of 2020 with over 200 employees after starting out at just 60. They also steered the agency’s employees through a massive internal restructuring, the future-proofing of this diverse agency, so that they can continue to bring in dough in the years to come.

The judges admired the company’s focus on its people and recognized the efforts of the entire HR team and the difficulty of significantly increasing the number of employees in a year of a pandemic.

Learn more about Channel Bakers in the video below.

The Gate London: How to Walk Through Walls

Strategy and Planning Team of the Year

Even the best plans from agencies and clients went out of the window at the start of the pandemic, and companies were forced to revise their strategies. For this victorious agency, the crisis caused by Covid-19 was the much-needed catalyst for change.

The team thinks the pre-pandemic period is a rut: the agency’s industry rankings have stagnated and it hasn’t received major creative or strategic awards. The strategy team decided to shift gears and created a new manifesto that embodied the agency’s spirit – Walk Through Walls – and then embed it into the business through hands-on tools, models, learning and cultural experiences.

The result was transformative. New business increased 600% and an industry publication rated it as one of the best-improved agencies of 2020. This isn’t the only award The Gate has received this year. His contribution stood out for the jury of The Drum as “inspiring reading that presented a convincing strategic approach and delivered really impressive results”.

Brandfuel: Everything changes

Production team of the year

Best response to change

When Covid-19 stopped the world of events in its tracks, Brandfuel expected “its best results in its 15-year history”. The company’s response was to quickly set a series of goals, redefined for the era of the pandemic, related to existing customers, new customer acquisition, financial goals and employee wellbeing.

These clear goals meant that employees and managers could plan their lives and work beyond the pandemic rather than just adapting to the changes that were coming. In just a few weeks, Brandfuel had grown from a creative event agency to an online broadcast event company providing virtual and hybrid events for new and existing customers – and occupying a new, but suddenly vital, niche.

The production team is award-winning itself and claims the title of the best production team. It evolved from an eleven-person team with roots in physical event delivery – building large stage sets and exhibition stands – to eight experts in online events, virtual platforms and a variety of new software systems and production techniques.

This has resulted in the roles doubling: instead of just acting as managers overseeing outside contractors, everyone is now a platform builder, vision mixer, audio engineer or stream encoder who creates and manages all the technical aspects of events. They have grown to be experts in nearly 20 constantly evolving digital platforms to meet customer needs now and in the future and to support other Brandfuel employees.

It was the view beyond short-term needs that impressed the jury and won this year’s new category “Best reaction to change”. The judges felt that this popular category was full of inspiring and impressive contributions, but the winner proved a bold strategic proposal. Investing in learning a whole new set of skills and technologies demonstrated “commitment to your development as a company” that set it apart.

Would you like to know more about this year’s other winners? Attend the Drum Awards for Agency Business.