Inside Rocket’s Rise to Best Small Agency
Find out how Rocket became Best Small Agency at the International Content Marketing Awards by blending fearless ideas with strategic discipline. From building global campaigns to redefining client relationships, their approach offers big lessons for ambitious teams.
In this series spotlighting the winners of the 2024 International Content Marketing Awards, we’re sharing the stories behind the standout work and the people and agencies driving it forward.
After exploring the journey of Rising Star winner, Anna Olssen, we’ve turned our attention to the agencies. This time, we spoke to the team at Rocket, who won the Grand Prix Award for Best Small Content Marketing Agency.
As content marketing specialists, Rocket creates and distributes content in-house for brands seeking to engage youth and parent audiences better. With a growing international footprint and a long-standing client base that includes global brands like Penguin Random House and Inspired Education, this small award-winning content marketing agency proves that agility, creativity and honesty can fuel lasting success.
We spoke to James Erskine, CEO, and Sophie Musson, Managing Partner, to find out how they’ve built a small content marketing agency that delivers big results, and what’s coming next.
Sophie Musson
James Erskine
Rocket has been built on transparency and clear leadership. How has this shaped the agency’s growth and client relationships?
Sophie: “Clear leadership, to us, feels like having the conversations that need to happen at the right time with the right people. We have always tried to be open with the wider team about our successes and failures regarding what’s working and what isn’t, what’s profitable and not making us money. This helps us align our focus as a team. Our quarterly meetings allow us to reflect on our successes and what we could do better.”
James: “For clients, we are very keen to outline what success looks like at the earliest opportunity. In the past, I have seen businesses get distracted by vanity metrics – I think open communication with the brands we work with means we can identify how we can help and exactly what value we can offer any campaign.
I actually think I have not been quick enough to have tough conversations in the past. One thing I would change over the past 8 years I have been running the business is that I haven’t had conversations quickly enough. I can’t think of many examples where, if I had had a difficult conversation or made a difficult decision relating to the team or a supplier in a quicker manner, it would not have benefited the business.”
Your team has a strong mix of long-standing talent and new leadership. How do you maintain a balance between fresh perspectives and company values?
James: “I know that the next big idea to revolutionise our business offering to our existing and new clients is unlikely to come from me. What I have to do is create an environment where positive ideas can come from anywhere in the business and then we, the leadership team, put scaffolding around those concepts and ideas.”
Sophie: “Where, I think we, Rocket, have done well is empowering people with more responsibility at just the right time. Just the right time to give them more autonomy and take them out of their comfort zone.
We have also sought to recruit people with new skill sets at just the right time for the development of the business. Recruiting Denise from Ogilvy was really important for us - someone with big agency experience who could look at the way we were offering value for our customers.
Chelsea and Jake are also two shining stars in our business and have both offered new service offerings to our business, in many ways future-proofing our offering and making it more social media relevant.
We also identified a gap in the way we were reporting on our social media campaigns and optimising our paid-social activity, which is why tasking Olwyn to create reporting that was more relevant to our client’s goals and using better social media targeting has resulted in our social media offering becoming more useful to our client base.”
James: “Our offering is, ostensibly, an old-fashioned one: a beginning-to-end content and marketing business where we deliver everything from creation to distribution, so we also have to listen to our clients to know how to offer things that will add value to their business.
We are now international in our scope – with an office in Dubai and delivering campaigns across APAC and EMEA, as well as the USA. We also now offer paid search and SEO. Both of these developments were led by the team identifying opportunities in what we could be offering.”
Rocket works with a high percentage of campaign-based clients. How do you build long-term relationships and expand services with them?
Sophie: “By listening to them and by open communication. We also tend to start with smaller campaigns in the first instance. That allows us to prove ourselves and prove our ability to make a difference.
We also regularly end up offering wider and different services as we deliver more and more campaigns. A prime example is our relationship with Inspired Education, a global education business. We first worked with them on a relatively small influencer marketing campaign.
Over the past few years, we have expanded what we do for them to include work for multiple schools, across content, creative, global influencer marketing activity, podcast and audio, sponsorships, and media partnerships and we consult on organic and paid-social. By handling additional elements of the activity, it allows us to optimise and combine different combinations to analyse effectiveness.”
James: “Sophie and I are lucky to have been with Rocket for a long time. Together we have seen most client relationships prosper over a long period. Some have naturally waxed and waned over the years, but we have worked with Penguin Random House since 2012 and Harper Collins since 2011, so despite being campaign by campaign, we do like to sit with the individual imprints and discuss how we can strategise over a long period.”
You prioritise innovation with a test-and-learn approach. Can you share an example where this led to a breakthrough strategy or unexpected success?
Sophie: “We try to take 10% of every campaign budget and put that into something innovative, something that allows us to test something new. This could be something like an additional platform or medium, and this sometimes allows us to build different attribution models and showcase how we can use that to enhance a client's business and campaign objectives.”
James: “We also encourage the team to challenge our clients where appropriate to trial new techniques and new thinking.
We have pioneered an approach of not finishing media plans – I know this sounds lazy and counterintuitive, but we try to build as much flexibility as possible. This allows us to be responsive and dynamic throughout the campaign window, optimising activity into the most successful medium, type of creator or ad creative, literally testing and learning as we progress a campaign. Remember that every time you are looking to innovate, there might be someone in a position that is invested in keeping to what has previously been done to achieve results – sometimes it is worth identifying who is most invested in keeping the status quo.”
Your agency has worked on everything from influencer marketing to paid social and audio campaigns. How do you decide which services to expand into next?
James: “By listening and monitoring the wider media and marketing landscape, staying abreast of trends and developments. Being honest and transparent, we have made mistakes. We have pivoted before in too harsh a way: at one stage, in around 2015, we put too much emphasis on paid-social and our campaigns were not holistic enough in their scope.
Before that, in around 2013, our content studio was very skilled at creating TV ads and outdoor ads, but not adept at creating multiple creatives for social media. So, we have learnt to react to market trends and not go with the latest shiny toy.”
Sophie: “I would say that data underpins everything we do. During COVID, we created something called The Family Collective. These are a network of, now, around 450 families, the length and breadth of the country.
We use these families for research, insight, focus grouping, product testing, content creation, events and influencer activity. So, in addition to all the media, social and purchase data we have at our disposal, we can ask our Family Collective for thoughts on the next developments.”
Marketing trends shift constantly. How do you stay ahead of the curve and anticipate what’s next for your clients?
James: “We have either been very lucky or been ahead of the curve. We were one of the first businesses to deliver YouTube ads for clients (a long time ago!), we ran podcast live reads for Audible as part of their first podcast campaign and digital out-of-home came very early to us. Because of our specialism in youth and family audiences, we need to stay ahead of audiences so that’s what drives us.”
Sophie Musson: “I would echo that and add that when clients want to move into new areas, we do so gradually. Testing and refining as we go.”
You’ve played a major role in influencer marketing, even pioneering trends like #BookTok. How has this expertise helped you shape campaigns for brands?
James Erskine: “Having one foot in the culture of our target audiences has been essential. I was lucky enough to be involved in the very genesis of influencer marketing as it took off in the UK.
The first deals we put together were for Amazon and some of our publishing clients and I was working with a former radio media person, Dom Smales, the guy that set up Gleam. In the contracting, we used thinking from a more traditional media channel to ensure all parties were protected and the deals worked for everyone. That was essential because it gave surety to the clients we were working with.”
Sophie: “#BookTok was a gift to the publishing industry but it had to be harnessed in the right way. In a similar way to how James was talking to brands about YouTubers in 2012, we had to alert the publishing industry that there was an opportunity, but social media had advanced and there was data to support that #BookTok was a thing and was going to get bigger and more powerful.
Listening to audiences and learning from customer behaviour was key to staying ahead of these trends.”
What are some of the biggest misconceptions brands have about working with a content marketing agency?
James: “This isn’t necessarily a problem with brands – sometimes it is the agencies themselves – but I do get frustrated by brands trialling a channel, for a month, and then deciding it doesn’t work. For example, influencer marketing for one month, with a small test budget and not seeing immediate results – sometimes these things take time to build momentum. Or, if they create a branded podcast, don’t get many listeners, then write off the entire podcast channel.”
Sophie: “I think that establishing the backbone of a business relationship and a service level agreement is key to ensuring that brands know what to expect from a content marketing agency. I also think that an understanding of the capabilities of the content marketing agency is key – know what the agency can do well and, if the agency is good, they will tell you what they can’t do.”
You offer masterclasses and strategic insight to clients. How does this educational approach enhance partnerships?
James: “I have always felt that our team are a naturally curious and entrepreneurial bunch and they want to learn.
I think most people are like that and those that we are lucky enough to work with at brands are no different. There is a lot of experience in our business encompassing creative, content, media, research and experiential events.
By sharing this knowledge and thinking, we not only benefit our business, but the wider industry driving best practice.”
Sophie: “Our masterclasses have always proved popular and we have been doing them for a number of years. The subject matter changes quarterly and over the years they have covered new waves of our patented research into youth audiences and families, trends, developments and data relating to specific media such as audio, outdoor and social, as well as specific techniques such as in-game advertising and social filters.
The approach allows us to take an authoritative and impartial approach when talking to brands and is a good way to meet new people too.”
What’s next for Rocket? Any upcoming projects or initiatives you’re excited about?
James: “We are increasingly asked to comment on wider issues pertaining to social media and the usage of it by youth audiences and I am always happy to support initiatives to aid education in that. I love our work in the education space and new work for brands in the toy space. I am also enjoying working with new brands working to detoxify screen time – educational apps have been a big area for growth for us.”
Sophie: “Our Dubai business has become a big area of growth for us and that is a focus for me and the wider business.”
Your Launchpad to Global Recognition Starts with the International Content Marketing Awards
Follow in Rocket’s footsteps and take your agency to the next level at the International Content Marketing Awards. This is the perfect opportunity to showcase the incredible work your agency has produced and set new standards in content marketing.
Whether you’re a solo creative, part of an in-house team or running an agency, now is the time to highlight your achievements on a global platform.
Join a community of forward-thinkers, boundary-breakers and strategic visionaries who are shaping the future of content marketing. This is your moment to show the world what exceptional, award-winning content really looks like. Get involved today.
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