Reports from our company leaders

Essence

Report by Christian Juhl
Global chief executive officer

A

dvertising Age was prophetic in naming us an ‘Agency to Watch’ last year. In 2015, we grew our existing clients by 30%, started new relationships with global brands like HP and Intuit, opened three new offices and hired 100+ teammates. To make it even more exciting, we culminated the year by joining GroupM, following 10 years of independence.

At Essence, our mission is to ‘make advertising more valuable to the world’. In 2015, we accomplished this more than ever before by solving some of the world’s toughest digital marketing challenges with the world’s very best talent. We continue to advance the industry in analytics, data science, technology and content – all leading to our vision of Essence being recognized as the world’s most advanced digital marketing agency.

We continue to advance the industry in analytics, data science, technology and content

On the financial front, this year marked our fifth sequential year of double-digit growth, with global revenue from business development up 240% year-on-year. In addition to the aforementioned new client wins, we won valuable assignments from GrubHub, Visa and Viber. And of course, our role as Google’s global digital media agency of record continues to thrive. Also, it was the first year our ad tech practice made a meaningful contribution to our total revenue. This enabled us to increase our investment in technology, bringing our engineering team to roughly 20% of our total staff.

We’ll continue to invent, analyze and experiment in 2016. We’re currently in the process of creating a new approach to talent acquisition and development. Our people are our greatest asset and at Essence we recruit, hire and retain only the very best. And it’s only by keeping them as our center that we can continue to lead and push the boundaries of digital media and marketing.