Hello August….. July you rocked

August is here and it brings us the realisation that the year is vastly disappearing at mega speed. Honestly where the hell did July go? Most meetings right now seem to start with planning/launching winter projects but it also means the creeping in of the C-word in said meetings, and we don’t mean covid this time but 🎄😜

The great news though and rightly so we should be shouting about what we do. July was our busiest Chapter 81 month ever. A couple of big projects were launched, Leeds International Festival of Ideas (LIFI) and the Jurassic Trail 2 (part of Welcome to Leeds). LIFI is a huge project for us as we look to establish it as an ideas festival. In July we were busy planning the return of our TV magazine show with a LIFI version, the LIFIcast podcast as well as an exciting notes section to the website that will link speakers and local voices to the festival. Never underestimate the amount of time and effort that goes into ideas and idea generation.

For the Jurassic trail, we were out grabbing the installation footage and helped on launch day (the project got some amazing PR coverage – Graham Poucher). Leeds really is a different beast at night and we got to see some interesting sights on the streets but can leave these thoughts for another time.

We evaluated the Welcome Back to Leeds campaign with a special landing page launching soon. We were taken aback at everything that happened on this campaign and especially one that was designed for three months and ended up being well over a year. When you are in the moment it’s hard to appreciate everything you are trying to do and it’s only when you get to sit down that you realise what was achieved. Under a different type pressure, under lots of rule changes, under different working conditions and more importantly trying to hear so many stories.

We have been working super hard on a couple of other bigger projects behind the scenes for Visit Leeds and First Bus, which we hope all goes into the wild very soon. Another two projects that have had some serious planning and teamwork on.

I often get criticised for taking on too much (interestingly we have passed on work this month) but after the last 16 months, we shall be taking more risks and trying to do more good and I am hugely proud of what we are trying to achieve right now, this almost feels like a fresh start for the business and one where we are more confident in everything we do.

IMAGE: Alix Fox appears at Leeds International Festival of Ideas. 

Some big snippets of what we achieved in just one month:

• Brown & Blond announced that they raised over £2K + in June with a percentage of online sales going to Angels of Freedom.

• CORA announced evening service will be starting August 20th. We are booked in for afternoon tea soon and can’t wait!

• Bundobust celebrated its 7th Birthday, they grow up so fast don’t they? Eyes peeled on more news on beers and things.

• Chow Down announced it is a permanent fixture in Leeds’ hospitality scene AND a new cocktail bar named tipple and new sundaes from Scoop.

• We launched the OPEN gift card brand video, which gained an incredible reaction.

• Leeds Indie Food organised a huge corporate order of hampers, helping indies reach new people. We also costed out many new hampers!

• The Tetley Bar and Kitchen revealed the new Head Chef and menu with so much more to come from this great team.

• We helped Visit Bradford on their Food and Drink Weekender with a huge paid social campaign with some incredible results. It is often hard to believe some stats but the ROI on social media was well over £6K and brand awareness up 3500% (in just two weeks).

• We did 15 days of photography, 12 days of filming this month and had our equipment rented out up 50% more than last month. We really are a busy studio and we love it for that.

• We also saw most of our social media clients have record months of engagement. We are seeing a real interesting mix of paid v stories v reels formula taking off now.

What next? We have started writing a couple of guest columns too, the first one is out next month, we want to showcase Leeds (and not just our clients as we genuinely love our city). We have signed up some exciting new clients this month as we head to a really interesting period of growth, and why we need to bring in new digital talent to help us on the journey. We will also launch a project that was started over 3 years ago and one that we are quite proud of.

If you want to chat about what we can do for you then please get in touch 🤙📲