While everybody asks them to explain the name ‘Jellyfish’ and how it ties into digital marketing, Lombard says, “Truth is, it was just a name that popped up during a rebranding discussion and it stuck. Simple as that, really.”
Elaborating on those early beginnings, Lombard shares that Jellyfish was born in the UK at the same time as PPC advertising back in 1999, making them almost as old as Google. In their early years, they concentrated exclusively on paid search and got pretty good at it. As a result, they focused their efforts on perfecting paid search in publishing, and by 2005 were dominating the sector with a turnover of R90m. Fast-forward to 2011 and their turnover had increased to over R450m, with over 80 staff members employed across three continents. Their service offering was then expanded as a response to clients' needs and the ever-changing digital landscape.
Jellyfish started in South Africa then in 2007 as a resource centre for PPC, and in 2014 kicked off as a fully-fledged full service agency.
Today Jellyfish has over 320 staff globally. With Lombard confirming their success at the forefront of digital marketing, pushing boundaries and getting results is down to “great people, innovative ideas and lots of hard work.” This approach of putting clients and their needs at the heart of everything they do is why Jellyfish calls itself the ‘world’s biggest boutique agency’, as they deliver handmade solutions, with care and attention, at a global scale. As they employ local resource who report in to service division heads across the globe, local clients may well have an experienced SEO manager working on their project who sits in the US if it ties in with their industry experience. Lombard explains that they’re very careful to ensure they employ only the right people in their SA office as they have an extremely high standard to adhere to, to ensure they’re in line with their global reputation.
As an example of this, they did some complicated SEO work for Jaguar LandRover, auditing and implementing technical SEO changes for over 70 local African dealer sites, and are doing some complex acquisition work for KweséSports, a new African sports channel, targeting 18 African countries. Globally, they’ve just won the Samsung account out of the US office to build all their digital properties, a massive project with tight timelines and challenging deliverables. The UK agency is currently working on a web build for global energy provider Engie while delivering the creative for Toyota’s full aftersales programme to include on and offline design, as well as email design and build. Little wonder they’ve jumped seven places in the Econsultancy Digital top 100, from #34 to #27, while maintaining poll position of the fifth independent full-service marketing agency this year, and also climbed two places from 7th to 5th of the independents in the overall Top 100, as well as scooping the RAR award for Analytics as voted for by clients, as well as Best Marketing Partner at this year’s Dotties awards ceremony from email partner Dotmailer. Lombard says this proves their commitment to developing this service offering.
Global Jellyfish CEO Rob Pierre explains more of what it means to be the world's biggest boutique agency in the video embedded below, from their new London office at The Shard:
“We fill the void and overcome the frustrations felt by clients who work with large network agencies. As an independent, Jellyfish has the flexibility and autonomy to respond to the needs of our clients, and we commit to do this with care. This is all part of the boutique mantra,” adds Lombard.
That doesn’t mean it’s been easy bringing international learnings to the local market. Lombard says it’s been an “interesting challenge”, based on the old cliché that clients don’t know what they don’t know. “So explaining, for example, our approach to PPC campaigns, how we structure, optimise and report is quite different to what they are used to, and this takes some adjusting and initially some convincing.” But as a performance agency, once Jellyfish starts working with clients, improving return on investment and efficiencies, it makes the journey smoother, and they’re certainly gaining momentum, picking up new clients every month.
One such way of gaining momentum is through acknowledging that innovation is a key component to any agency. At Jellyfish, they do so by working very closely with Google, getting involved in alpha and beta programmes with them. So from a search perspective, they're integrating innovations that will be the future of search, such as:
Jellyfish has integrated these into some clients’ websites through a process of experimentation and has found success in SERP conversions and an increase in traffic as a result.
But the innovation doesn’t end there.
Jellyfish is about to open offices in San Francisco, Reston and New York too, while Barcelona is in planning stage in Europe, and Jellyfish is outgrowing its current offices so looking for something new and exciting but staying in Durban. Lombard quite likes the sound of “London, New York, Barcelona and Durban.”
While that global grouping sounds good, we still have a way to go here in South Africa when it comes to digital marketing work, with Lombard saying his UK and US counterparts are seeing their clients spend close to 50% of marketing budgets on digital channels, while we’re struggling to hit 10% in South Africa, there’s hope as we are catching up.
Lastly, honing that focus to digital trends, if Lombard had to put his money on any one thing, he’d say programmatic, specifically mobile programmatic, is the biggest digital marketing trend still on the horizon. “If we take our cue from the US, mobile programmatic has increased from 40% to 70% of total programmatic spend in the space of 18 months,” he concludes.
That’s certainly convincing. Visit the new Jellyfish website and follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn for further innovative digital business insights.
