PRWeek has unveiled a league table of the industry’s best agency employers, based on results of the Best Places to Work Awards over several years, and Dynamo ranks sixth overall, but ranking main category wins ranks second!
It’s nice to see this ranking! Of course Dynamo is now part of the amazing Clarity group, so if you’re looking for a new place to work come check out the jobs page – we’re hiring!
Since being acquired by Clarity at the end of last year, we’ve been working over the last few months within Clarity to crystallize what Dynamo will do as part of the Clarity group of companies. Today we’re relaunching to focus with these three key considerations:
We’ve had some of the best campaigns and successes with early stage founders and CEOs, helping them decide their direction, and achieve fast growth. So we’re focusing on companies that are at seed or Series A stage.
We’ve worked with companies that have started off with small single figure budgets, helping them grow into $40M+ revenue companies. Also, Silicon valley companies that have become giants; consumer tech companies that have successfully exited; and b2b tech companies that continue to break the mold of what’s possible. And a whole host of other startups that are at various stages along this path.
Using all of this experience, we’re best poised to help companies that are at the earlier stages of development and progress and need to ramp up fast.
We know from experience of working with many startups that you need a fast, flexible and media neutral approach. You may need to test early technology, teach media facing capabilities to your staff, build websites and social channels, put out content and offerings to attract early customers — but all are pointing to fast and sustainable growth.
You may need all at once, or just one channel, and we can be your outsourced marketing function to help you decide what to do, as well as delivering. And in these isolated times, you may just need to buy one service to get going – for instance message development or media relations. We can do this piecemeal for you to help you put together your entire marketing offering.
As well as our core knowledge, we’re able to call on expertise with the Clarity group, and with outside partners around the globe, to deliver what you need. Whatever it takes, our goal here is to work with you to take the fastest, and safest, route to growth. As you move into Series B funding and beyond, we have the backing of Clarity and its close links with other agencies (such as the Brewery network and Freuds, Shoosmiths and Grant Thornton) to help you in your next steps.
If this sounds good to you, reach out to us and see how we can help.
Dynamo has some amazing news today. We’ve joined Clarity to help build one of the best independent consumer and B2B tech PR agencies.
We started Dynamo at the start of this decade, in 2011, to offer a top team to service areas we saw being missed – as the world moved towards innovation in consumer and business technology many agencies just couldn’t keep up and service those needs.
Since launching, Dynamo itself has become recognized as an industry leader: being the first agency to give staff unlimited holiday, launching unique personalized ‘Don Draper’ clauses in contracts and a blind recruitment campaign that quickly became a benchmark in the industry.
We’ve been recognized as PRWeek’s Best Small Agency, PRmoment’s Best Tech Agency (multiple times) and the CIPR’s Mid-sized agency of the year. The question we asked ourselves at the start of 2019 was ‘where next?’
At the same time, Clarity came on our radar through some significant industry hires, bringing onboard Rachel Gilley as UK MD, from Bite PR and Alex MacLaverty as Clarity’s Chief Operations Officer, from Hotwire. Via our Hotwire alumni connections we spoke to Alex and Sami McCabe, Clarity’s inspirational founder, and started to realize together we could be much stronger together.
What drew us to Clarity is absolute alignment on our goals – that together we can create one of the best agencies in the world and, at the same time, create the best place to work. That together we can service those brands that want innovative PR partners, not stuck in the old way of doing things.
Behind the scenes, this has been months of work and we want to thank everyone involved in making this happen. Our staff at Dynamo have embraced this new challenge with gusto. The Clarity team have been very welcoming already, even bringing in Winston, an 11-week old puppy, to the office this week for extra hugs. Team members have all played key roles in making sure the move has been as seamless as possible and thousands (!) of due diligence documents later, we’ve found our new home.
For our clients, partners and suppliers this marks a key moment for our team, moving us to the next level. We look forward to taking everyone forwards as we change the story together.
CES 2020 is approaching and it’s not long until over 100,000 industry attendees, 67,00 exhibitors and 7,000 press descend on Las Vegas. Throughout the conference centres, hotels and even bars and casinos, companies are poised to show off their latest products and gadgets.
Despite the number of press at CES, it can be extremely hard to get their attention. Here are a few of our tips to help get you in front of the press:
Eureka Park
Many of the big tech companies will have pre-briefed journalists before the show on their announcements. This means that journalists don’t need to head to their stands in the Convention Centres to get their news. Instead, they head to Eureka Park to find out out what the start up companies are doing and to find all the innovative products.
Press events
There are several press events at CES including CES Unveiled and Pepcom which are both on Monday 6th, and Showstoppers on Tuesday 7th. These events are designed for startups to showcase their products to media. Top tier media outlets attend including CNET, Engadget and TechCrunch.
A stand out booth
There are rows upon rows of booths, and all are the exact same design. Avoid having a boring white booth, use color to catch the eye and make sure you’re showing off your product in the best way.
Media list
You can access the list of attending journalists before the show in your online portal. Make sure you download it and look at who is attending. You can create your own target list and reach out to them before the show to let them know where you’ll be.
Practice your pitch
You only have seconds to hook a journalist’s or potential partner’s attention. Practice how you describe it and its key features. If you can succinctly say what’s interesting and how it’s different then a journalist will stick around longer to hear, and see more.
If you are going to be at CES in January, do get in touch if you’d like to meet up!
Blockchain has become a buzzword over the past year, with more and more major companies discovering what it is and how they can use this new technology to their benefit. Our team has always encouraged clients to experiment with new and innovative technology, which is why we’re proud to announce the team are working with Heritage, a project created within A3, the Silicon Valley outpost of Airbus.
When the A3 team approached us with the Heritage project, a blockchain-enabled donation platform, we were more than excited! Our team members have investments in cryptocurrency like Ethereum and Bitcoin, as we sincerely believe blockchain has the potential to impact the world through decentralization, smart-contracts, security and transparency. Heritage is just the beginning of the ways blockchain can be used for social good.
The Heritage project is focused on assisting charities and nonprofits onboarding blockchain to allow for a more secure, efficient, and transparent donation process. Dynamo was brought on to support the Heritage team with media relations, event support, and partnership development. The account is being managed by Dynamo’s San Francisco team, which has experience leading projects related to robotics, wearables, AI and has a keen interest in blockchain technology.
Naresh Shah, COO of A3, commented: “We’re looking forward to working with Dynamo as A3 enters this new space. We rely on great partnerships and Dynamo’s expertise in emerging industries will be a great asset as we continue to push boundaries in the blockchain industry and tech industry overall.”
What excites us about Heritage is the potential it has to make an impact. Our team believes in the potential of blockchain technology, and we are eager to apply our expertise in guiding the project to success.
The team will also help support Heritage on collaborations with other projects within the blockchain space as they continue to develop the donation platform. We’re very excited about the great work the Heritage team is doing and look forward to continuing to support as they use this nascent technology for good!
Are we living in the Matrix? Elon Musk, pre-Twitter libel and SEC fines, pondered this question earlier this year. “The chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation is one in billions” he explained. So if we are living in a simulated reality, which company would have made it so? Step in Improbable and their SpatialOS technology – so convincing that Wired claimed: “If we’re living in a simulation, this company probably created it.”
There are few hotter companies in London or the UK, or in fact Europe. Make that The World. Indeed, Improbable recently won the Evening Standard’s ‘Tech Company of the Year’ for their work on simulation with SpatialOS, their cloud-based platform for game development. So we’re genuinely ‘thrilled’ (in a real way, not a press release hyperbole or simulation-based way) to announce Improbable as a client.
Dynamo is assisting Improbable on strategic communications and news announcements to promote their SpatialOS platform for game developers. Using SpatialOS, game designers are able to go beyond the design limitations of traditional server architectures to build the next generation of online games. Building new kinds of gaming experiences with massive worlds, limitless players and rich simulation game mechanics.
Daniel Griffiths, Head of Communications, Improbable, explains:
“Dynamo impressed us with their understanding of our vision for video games and our mission. We are looking forward to working with them as we communicate the value of SpatialOS as the natural choice for developers building the next generation of online multiplayer games.”
Paul Cockerton, co-CEO, Dynamo PR:
“We’re delighted to be working with Improbable, one of the most exciting British technology companies out there. Our experience in, and love for, gaming, platform OS and community management industries provides us with the perfect base to assist Improbable with the promotion of SpatialOS.”
The team will also help with events, having worked with the Improbable PR team to support events including GDC, E3 and GamesCom. It’s a very exciting win for Dynamo which brings in our team’s gaming and tech experience… whether this is real life or if we’re living in a PR simulation!
If you haven’t heard yet, there’s a brand new reality tv show called The Circle that aired on UK’s Channel 4 last week and lo and behold, people are already outraged by it. Welcome to television programming in 2018.
The Circle’s premise is a game show where being liked is everything, with a bunch of players holed up in a housing complex making friendships, flirting and bitching it out to be the winner of a £50,000 prize. It’s essentially the Big Brother format, but there’s a modern-day societal twist because the contestants are all housed in separate apartments and will never meet face-to-face during the show.
Instead, their interactions will only exist on a specially designed social media platform where they’re encouraged to shape, bluff or completely distort their persona in a desperate bid to be ‘liked’ by their fellow contestants, the player who is ‘liked’ most wins this nightmarish popularity contest. Sound familiar?
It should do. Not only is it a jazzed up and plugged-in version of Big Brother for the Snapchat generation, but the concept is also conspicuously indebted to Charlie Brooker’s Emmy award-winning Black Mirror series. Particularly the fantastic episode Nosedive, in which people live in a world where social interactions are constantly being rated (that dreaded down-rating tone!) and every individual has an overall rating which has a real-life influence on their socioeconomic standing.
The common ground these shows share is an exploration of the very real consequences of social media and how us Humans are so easily beguiled by its capacity to curate an idealised version of ourselves, or you know, create a completely different persona altogether.
The Circle immediately ignited controversy by featuring a player who’s gambit is fabricating an online identity in which she presents herself as an oncologist that treats cancer. This is, for obvious reasons, a despicable and manipulative tactic to win internet brownie points on the show and, let’s be honest, probably the very reason why Channel 4 picked such person in auditions. Controversy is their currency, after all.
The thing is, in reality, there’s little to nothing preventing someone from doing the same sort of thing on LinkedIn or Facebook either, which may also be the poignant comment C4 producers wanted to make on our digital society. Maybe.
The question is, where does the responsibility in keeping check on this online activity lie for our real social networks? Do the tech companies need to police it better? Do we need to take a closer look at home to why people create fake online personas? Or perhaps we just rely on the discerning Nev & Max from MTV’s Catfish to oust these online charlatans for the delight of the viewers at home. It’s certainly a tricky topic and judging the people behind fake or augmented online profiles is a moral minefield.
However, one intriguing development we’ve seen in recent months is that the tech giants behind our real-life social media platforms, which over 3 billion of us use, have started to implement features specifically designed to curb usage of the very applications they created.
Which is sort of bizarre when they look to gain so much advertising money from our mindless scrolling, albeit it comes across as a solid PR move. Facebook-owned Instagram launched a ‘Time Well Spent’ tool which allows users to see just how long they’ve spent scrolling through doggy snaps and memes, but also self-manage daily limits on how long they can spend in the app.
The two leading mobile operating systems, iOS and Android, have also baked similar tools into their latest updates, giving users to ability to self-police their time on their devices. It’s encouraging to see the tech companies feeling an obligation to help us better understand our relationship with social media – it’s a start at least.
So yes, The Circle is a sensational take on the issue of social media and sure, it offers a cheap hit of reality entertainment in the gap that Big Brother left. But the producers came up with the idea for reason, and that’s because it’s something almost all of us find relatable. The jury’s still out on how the balance of our digital lives will affect our IRL lives, but the needle seems to be tilting ever further towards our virtual selves.
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Ruckus Retreat is an interdisciplinary creative event co-founded by myself (Krish Jeyakumar, Account Executive at Dynamo PR). Before the event, Dynamo sponsored one residential place at the event so my colleague Izzy Hathaway, Dynamo’s Senior Media Executive, could attend.
Co-founded by myself and Rowan Ellis, the idea for Ruckus was born from conversations with other young creatives wanting an event that was community-driven, interactive, and non-hierarchical.
Ruckus was not about sitting silently in front of panels taking notes in a row – it was about creating, sharing, learning from each other, and making noise. Set in a 4* Welsh Manor house, Ruckus found the perfect home in Buckland Hall, within the hills.
Ruckus had four key elements, being:
What was surprising about Ruckus is the amount of people who discovered new talents and a new lease of confidence. People who didn’t feel comfortable speaking out on the first day ended up performing in the Open Mic on the last evening. People who were die-hard writers ended up spending time in the portraiture classes. Being in a non-hierarchical, supportive environment meant that people felt comfortable enough to explore.
When browsing #RuckusRetreat on Twitter and Instagram, it almost feels surreal that something dreamt up by a duo of 20-somethings actually did something to change lives. Seeing folks saying that one of the turning points in their lives was ‘a wonderfully healing poetry workshop’ at Ruckus, and ‘[they’ve] come out of #RuckusRetreat with a plan for a play, confidence in pursuing projects and useful life info’ is unbelievable, and it really does push that whole ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ stuff.
The workshop leaders that presented at Ruckus covered a range of creative disciplines ;
Sanne Vliegenthart works in the world of books and publishing – from her popular YouTube channel to her work at Penguin Publishing. Sanne speaks both online and in person about productivity, literature, and creative careers.
Bridget Minamore is an award-winning poet and performer, who has shown her work internationally at festivals in Italy, Poland and Canada. She has been chosen as one of the 40 Stars of Black British Literature and was the first woman to be a lead tutor for the Roundhouse Poetry Collective.
Leena Norms is queen of the side hustle – with a popular YouTube channel, two brilliant podcasts, and a full time job in publishing. Leena ran workshops on topics such as imposter syndrome, self-employment and time management to help find the creative balance in your life.
Sammy Paul is a director and writer whose short films including ‘Blue Sushi’ and ‘Playground’ have been watched over a million times online. His films have been screened at international festivals in the UK, USA, and Canada.
Soof Andry is an Art Lecturer at Ravensbourne and Artist-in-Residence at Camden Arts Centre. Soof’s art, publications and work have been showcased at institutions globally including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and the Parsons School of Design.
Olivia Dolphin, a writer, poet, and event organiser, will be running our open mic on the final night of the retreat. Olivia is the Editor of the Wizards in Space literary magazine and will also be running a pre-open mic workshop in confidence coaching and overcoming stage anxiety.
