US and Canada

The US remains the most important market for the Group generating 48% of total revenue in this financial year. Since the year end the Group has added New York-based consumer PR agency, M Booth & Associates to its US interests as well as increasing its investment in policy communication company, 463 Communications to 70%. This demonstrates its commitment to, and confidence in, the US market. The Group now has 13 offices in the US and Canada and employs over 300 members of staff .

This year was the most difficult for the US market since 2001. Unsurprisingly our businesses in North America were not immune to the challenges that the global economic crisis created, which were first felt in this region. Many clients cut budgets in the face of the uncertain sales outlook, some clients withdrew their agency spend completely and others moved more of their spend to a project basis rather than monthly retainer. The Group responded with headcount reductions and the closure of the Seattle office. Although this office had reduced in significance in recent years, it was the first Next Fifteen office in the US, opened in 1995, and so it was disappointing to see it close.

Despite these challenges the region responded extremely positively on a number of fronts.

OutCast celebrated its tenth year working with cloud computing leader salesforce.com and achieved a major milestone with Mozilla with the launch of Firefox 3.5, which brought Firefox over the one billion user downloads mark. OutCast also had a successful year with Amazon, which launched the best-selling Kindle 2 and Kindle DX. OutCast worked with fellow Next Fifteen agency Text 100 on Amazon and brought 463 Communications in to Foundation Capital, Yahoo! and Facebook. Text 100 achieved great coverage for the re-branding of Macrovision as Rovi, and also for MTV with the global announcement around the launch of the Beatles Rock Band game.

On the research side, Context Analytics produced a study on the most influential blogs in North America and another on the relationship between brand value and media coverage, which found that PR was more important than advertising for generating brand value for companies that sell feature-rich or complicated products, such as consumer electronics and financial services.

In tough economic times the focus is rightly on keeping existing clients happy. However, to grow their businesses, the Next Fifteen brands were also busy pitching and winning some exciting new clients. OutCast won work from AdMob, Autodesk, LiveOps, Hara, MeLLmo, RedPoint, Intuit and VMware. Text 100 won new mandates from CNN, Mindjet, OboPay, iRex, Intralinks and Cognizant. It was also successful in extending its global footprint with Boston-based The Mathworks and now represents them in 14 countries, adding India, Australia and Denmark this year. Bite was successful with Hitachi Data Systems, Lonely Planet and Vonage. The biggest challenge for Bite came towards the end of the year when its largest client, Sun Microsystems, was acquired by Oracle. Bite responded in typically confident style by winning a corporate brief for HP, focusing on innovation and sustainability.

The Group’s businesses have continued to drive innovation in the field of social media communications. This gives them an opportunity to win more business and gain access to client budgets held outside traditional PR. Demonstrating their social media expertise also leads to opportunities in sectors beyond the ones they normally work in and helps them remain relevant as communications continues to shift online and away from traditional media relations activity. OutCast’s work with Facebook continues to give them unique insights; amongst other tasks they helped launch Facebook Connect and the new Facebook home page.

Intuit hired OutCast to lead their social media efforts for Quicken Online, and its iPhone application became the New York Times application of the week. Text 100’s project with new client CNN was specifically around a revamp of its online profile.

It’s not all about client work though, and the Group’s businesses are proud to give something back to the communities they work in. For example Bite’s people helped in the community kitchens of New York and with beach-cleaning in San Francisco. Text 100 partnered with TechnoServe and provided employees on secondment to work in Peru and Tanzania providing PR support to local entrepreneurs.

Doing great work is important for clients and rewarding when recognised by others. Bite won the AMA Award for Green Marketing and the 2009 PRSourceCode Top Tech Communicators award for its work for AMD.

The US market, having been first into the downturn, seems to be climbing out as we head towards the end of 2009. The technology-focused brands are partnering with many of the most interesting and important technology companies in the world and can be justifiably excited about recovery prospects in 2010. With the recent acquisition of M Booth, the Group has a strong partner in the consumer field and opportunity to transfer skills between the two sectors for the benefit of the clients of each.