Text 100

Text 100, prweek.com, 02 January 2009, 12:04PM

Ranked fourth in the Technology Top 40 after a stable year, Text 100 scored some notable new wins in 2008, including AMD, Skype and SanDisk. Led by MD Nick Giles, the agency also organised its business to focus on priority market segments such as 'Digital Lifestyle', and continued to benefit from its obvious expertise in social media.

More sharing options

Name: Text 100

Address: : The Triangle, Level 5, 5-15 Hammersmith Grove, London, W6 0LG

Telephone: +44 20 8846 0700

Email: nick.giles@text100.co.uk

Website: N/A

Ranking in Tech Top 40: 4

Ranking in Top 150: 61

Total fee income 2008: £3,719,000

Total staff 2008: 50

Who is in the hotseat: Nick Giles, Managing Director, UK

Sum up your agency's 2008 in three words: International, Online, 'Best Companies'

Three best tech client or campaign wins:

AMD (pan-European win with sister agency Bite – Text 100 handling UK, France and Germany)
Skype (pan-European win in UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany)
SanDisk (pan-European win in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway)

Tech highlights of 2008:
Skype is five years old
Twitter going mainstream

iPhone – Apple opens app store

Significant hires in the tech team in 2008:
No significant hires in 2008 – core team remained stable

Staffing overall 2008:
Flat for the year

Plans and predictions for tech PR in 2009:
An exciting year as social media continues to change the way businesses and consumers communicate and further consolidation in the PR agency business as the effects of the poor economy continue to take hold.

Tech business or brand to watch in 2009 and why:
Spotify – we’re big fans here at Text 100

Describe your agency’s digital offering:
We’ve organized our business to focus on a number of priority market segments where we see significant growth potential, one of those being ‘Digital Lifestyle’. The combination of our deep-rooted technology PR expertise, global footprint and strong consumer PR capabilities has helped us secure major assignments with exciting digital lifestyle brands such as Skype and SanDisk (led from London); MTV and Fujifilm (led from New York), Nokia and PayPal (led from Asia).

How are you keeping up to date with social media:
We’re keeping up by being immersed in social media. We have 500 people worldwide that are collaborating with many of our largest clients – IBM, Cisco and Skype amongst others – on a wide range of social media projects so there are a lot of ideas and new approaches being shared around the world. One simple tool is our weekly social media bulletin – called SMS – which is neat way for our worldwide team to share campaign ideas, best practice and the latest creative ideas from around the world. Our clients are finding it incredibly useful too.

We’re also driving industry discussions worldwide about social media and its impact on the PR business. This month we’ve hosted a panel discussion with Robert Scoble and other ‘social’ luminaries on the changing media landscape; launched new findings from our research arm Context Analytics on the impact of social media on corporate reputation; and won the SABRE Award for Best New & Digital Media campaign in EMEA. Over the next few weeks we’re lined up to present a case study at the London social media networking group Measurement Camp on our work for IBM’s ‘Virtual Forbidden City’ project this year. You could say we’re making it our business to be plugged in to what’s happening and innovating in this arena.

One thing you won’t know about the agency:
That we were ranked #29 in this year’s Sunday Times Best UK Companies Award at our first attempt.

This article was first published on prweek.com