Tales from the Bike Shed

Bicycle shortlisted by Campaign Magazine for Agency Startup of the Year

We're were blown away to hear that we've been shortlisted by the iconic ad-industry bible Campaign Magazine for Startup of the Year. This is a truly prestigious award, and we're in some exalted company. We find out the results in March.

We won Tate & Lyle!

We're going to try and avoid the 'sweet' puns, but this is just a brilliant start to the new year. We're chuffed to welcome Tate & Lyle to the bike shed - hot on the heels of our recent carwow win. Brilliant news all round, and just in time for pancake day too...

Welcome Simone!

Please join us in saying a huge hello to our new Head of Digital, Simone Gayle.

Simone's an inspirational digital leader with over a decade's worth of experience. She joins us from Merkle where she was Client Director, tasked with driving digital strategy and integrating mulit-channel delivery across the agency's major clients.

We're over the moon she's here. Welcome Simone!

Bicycle wins Carwow

Some more brilliant new biz news.

We’ve only gone and won the multimillion-pound carwow business!

After a highly competitive pitch process against a number of agencies, we’ve been appointed to run the account effective immediately. carwow is a remarkable company and we’re excited to get into it.

What a way to end the year.

Bicycle wins Global Startup of the Year

We're ecstatic to announce we've just won the Global Startup of the Year Award at The Drum Awards!

This is a huge, huge achievement for everyone in the business, and we'd like to say thanks to everyone that's been on the ride so far: team, partners and clients.

We've only just started! #thedrumawards

Start measuring the person and not the media

The biggest change that needs to happen to media measurement is to go back measuring the person, rather than the media, or brands risk missing out on key audiences.

Henry Daglish, co-founder of Bicycle, stressed the lack of “human intelligence” and logic between the measurement, data, the brand and the consumer in advertising campaigns is leading to short-term thinking and risk-averse media planning.

On the technology side, Ronny Golan, co-founder of ViewersLogic highlighted the reliance on claimed last-click data over single-source observed data, and media measurement operating in silos, as challenges facing advertisers looking at how and what to measure in campaigns.

They both gave an example of these issues in action with an erectile dysfunction brand campaign. Using single-source observed data found that the main target audience of the campaign should be women on average 10 years younger than the anticipated male audience.

Henry Daglish, co-founder and CEO of media agency Bicycle, and Ronny Golan, co-founder and CEO of ViewersLogic, speak to The Media Leader reporter Ella Sagar.

Watch the full interview here: https://the-media-leader.com/start-measuring-the-person-and-not-the-media/

The scent of Musk at Twitter

CSO Graeme wrote some thoughts on Twitter for Mediahotz:

Mass firings. Sleeping in the office. Expectations of eighty hour working weeks. No it’s not a network ad agency (ouch!), but former champion of #lovewhereyouwork and now billionaire’s plaything, Twitter.

Full disclosure. I bloody love (loved) Twitter. I joined in 2006 and was user number 11,649. I was the first person to mention my beloved ‘Leeds United’ on Twitter, anywhere in the world.

I have a lovely blue tick (god knows why) which will disappear soon as I refuse to pay my eight quid.

My wife and I wouldn’t have got together had it not been for Twitter. I owe it loads. So, seeing what’s happening now is difficult to take.

It’s always been a place of conflict. Remember the days of Trump? His penchant for stirring up argument (and worse) was depressingly remarkable.

But used smartly, this could be mitigated. Content moderation was good (if not perfect) and the platform invested consistently and meaningfully in making the experience safer. Dickheads were often silenced, and ultimately, banned.

Now it’s a free-for-all, a place fundamentally being built on disagreement and disillusionment.

It’s less Musk’s vision of the internet’s town square, instead more the internet’s fight club – and most depressingly, it’s all by design. It’s turned ugly.

Free speech

Musk wangs on about being a ‘free speech absolutist’ (except when he’s being parodied, of course), partly out of philosophical belief but also out of, I’m sure, a desire for attention that can be monetised.

But this simply leads to polarisation and, if you’re an advertiser, it’s now a pretty unattractive place to be regardless of eyeballs.

twitter-trump-suspended.jpg
Banned: No sign of Donald Trump yet on Twitter, but for how long?
The hellsite seems to be finally delivering against its reputation.

For example, as reported elsewhere, the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate revealed that posts using the N-word were triple the 2022 average in his first week as owner. This isn’t free speech. It’s hate.

Must have or ‘Musk’ not

Unlike Meta or Google, Twitter isn’t a ‘must have’ on anyone’s media plans. It has always occupied a vague “nice to have” space, which doesn’t make it very resilient to any sort of headwinds, let alone self-created ones.

Mainstream brands don’t want risk or conflict from their media buys.

Unless there’s a very, very specific cause, there are dwindling reasons as to why you wouldn’t simply drop the platform from your plans.

There’s very little potential upside to its inclusion and very significant potential downside (including the recent wheeze of ‘verified imitation’ sweeping the platform). Who wants to advertise in a warzone?

I’m not sure Musk really cares, or at least, he hasn’t thought about it properly (Remember he’s not a huge advertising advocate anyway – see his comments at Tesla – and he’s gone on the record saying the platform needs to significantly drop its ‘over reliance’ on ad revenue) and he’s already shown pretty wanton disregard for advertisers – although in his characteristic manner he partially backtracked quite swiftly.

However, he’s paid $44bn for Twitter, a decent slug of which is his own cash. Whilst he doesn’t need the money personally (I’m convinced he did it for other reasons: if I’m being generous, it’s a strategic play to create his ‘Western WeChat’ and if I’m not… well, absolute power corrupts absolutely) he needs to make it a going concern.

I would humbly suggest alienating both core users and advertisers isn’t the way to go.

The hellsite is on fire. It’s going to take an awful lot of time, effort and action to win back the trust of advertisers that have fled and even then, with the explosion of opportunities elsewhere and in the face of rapidly decreasing consumer confidence, will it simply be too little, too late?

See you on Mastodon?

Movember 2022 starts here

We're thrilled to be working with Movember again this year on their UK & Ireland fundraising campaign. The campaign kicks off on Monday 3rd October with an exciting UK first-to-market combined anamorphic & AR screen activation in Kings Cross powered by 3rockAR. TV launches on the 7th October with a spot in the Lionesses v USA match on ITV.

Movember also continues their longstanding partnership with talkSPORT, bringing back the Movember & talkSPORT “Shavedown Day”, driving buzz and excitement for the event with an outside broadcast in a city centre London location.

Peter Crouch is also supporting Movember again as we sponsor his infamous Podcast "Back Stronger", working with Acast to produce a branded segment around his involvement in the cause and helping Crouchy to raise money on his own Mo Space.

Finally, a strong OOH campaign with Global including bus t-sides, rears, 6 sheets and large format digital to support the campaign across October ahead of the big fundraising month. This will all be underpinned by digital activity across Video & Social.

Bicycle announces industry-leading partnership with ViewersLogic

Today we're announcing our partnership with ViewersLogic, the innovative, leading consumer behaviour data company. From October, Bicycle will have access to the ViewersLogic platform’s single-source panel data, allowing its clients, for the first time, to analyse shopper and media insight from a single point.

ViewersLogic is the only company that provides passively collected single-source data which measures actual consumer behaviour from media consumption to purchase, across TV, online and the real-world. This unique data-set enables marketers to understand how their TV and online campaigns directly influence consumer behaviour on and offline. To date the panel has worked exclusively within the digital ecosystem, however the recent addition of Nielsen IQ's shopper data now allows for direct, single-source, measurement of media exposure on grocery purchases.

The integration between Bicycle’s in-house MX planning process and ViewersLogic will allow advertisers to optimise cross-media campaigns quickly through rapid design and simulation cycles in real-time.

Single-source data has been a ‘holy-grail’ in media planning for more than a generation. Advances in technology have now started to make this a reality and ViewersLogic’s systems are at the forefront of bringing this to market.

The use of observed data (or ‘real’ data) is still largely overlooked by media planners in favour of ‘claimed’ data (for example, Target Group Index Data) and Bicycle is working hard to bring it back to the centre of the process. ViewersLogic will play an important role in this.

For advertisers searching for the next level of growth, moving from claimed to observed data and concurrent efforts helps to improve cross-media planning. The integration of ViewersLogic with Bicycle MX allows the easy digestion of Nielsen IQ data and design simulation to run in parallel.

Reema promoted to Partner

We're delighted to announce that our Finance Director, Reema Patel, has been promoted to a full Partner and Shareholder of the agency, with immediate effect.

Reema's been with us since the very start and we wouldn't be where we are without her. Her talent, attitude and skill are remarkable and we're extremely fortunate to have her with us.

Congratulations, Reema!

Bicycle is shortlisted for The Drum's 'Start-up of the Year'

We've only gone and been shortlisted for Startup of the Year at The Drum Agency Business Awards (which is a global award). It's really exciting to see that our growth is starting to get recognised at this level.