Independent PR and creative agency Keep Left has launched a new brand positioning, aimed at stemming the leaking impact caused by ineffective communications with a strategy to put the audience first, and earn their attention.
Ideas People Choose represents Keep Left’s approach to communications across the increasingly blurred disciplines of PR, design, content and advertising. It recognises that reduced marketing budgets and fragmented attention leaves marketers looking for new, different, and creative ways to cut through the noise and drive impact.
Says Caroline Catterall (pictured below), CEO, Keep Left: “We know paid media can no longer guarantee results like it used to – even your paid media needs to earn its attention these days. This is where Ideas People Choose comes in – to add an earned sensibility to marketing and deliver a multiplier effect to the work and, ultimately, the bottom line.
“It’s a simple philosophy and stems from a desire to do effective work for clients, and by effective we mean work the audience will choose. We’ve created an agency model that genuinely puts the audience first and breaks down silos. The world doesn’t exist in earned, owned and paid and neither do we.”
The new agency positioning comes on the back of Keep Left evolving its offering over the past two years, building capability across strategy, creative and account management, alongside PR and content marketing. New senior hires in this time have included Blair Kimber as ECD and Mike Doman as executive strategy director, helping shape Keep Left’s broader offering and vision.
Says Catterall: “While our PR services will still be a core offering, this brand evolution is about going beyond our PR roots and media relations, to earn the audience’s attention using whatever channels make the most sense.”
The whole brain, creative trios and new shoes
The launch of Ideas People Choose is supported by a host of new brand initiatives at Keep Left, which have been rolled out over the past six months fusing the agency as ‘one-org’.
Key to this has been the introduction of Whole Brain Thinking, a new way of working that democratises ideation by bringing together Lefties with a diverse range of skills and perspectives to tackle client briefs and solve business problems.
Within these whole brain teams sits Keep Left’s ‘creative trios’ – the pairing of an art director and copywriter with a PR specialist – challenging the status quo of where ideas come from and giving earned a seat at the creative table from the get-go.
Says Catterall: “Our whole brain sessions have been a really unifying experience internally, building a lot of respect between the crafts. Most importantly our clients are noticing the level up, and are excited by the ideas we’re producing.”
A further brand initiative has been the introduction of New Shoes Days where each Leftie can carve out time to walk in the shoes of someone they want to understand better – some are spending the day working as a tradie, visiting residential aged care homes or volunteering with grassroots initiatives that involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Says Catterall: “We don’t want to be an agency that makes work for ourselves, so we immerse ourselves in the audience to bust our biases and embrace unlike-minded – a key value of the agency. These initiatives are intrinsically linked to Ideas People Choose.”
Keep Left will celebrate its 21st birthday on 1 November 2022 and will mark the milestone with the launch of a new content series (and a long lunch). Key clients include ANZ, Open Universities Australia, Guide Dogs Australia and Melbourne & Olympic Parks.
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