Last year we merged our London office with an agency called Farm and rebranded the merged operation under the Farm name.
This means that the Leith "brand" is a wholly Edinburgh (EH6) thing again, which makes it much easier to manage. It means that we can really work the Leith connection in our marketing in ways that we just couldn't when there was a thing called Leith in London as well. This is evident in the design of our website, but it runs deeper than that.
We've started to do more things with the local Leith community. This includes an involvement with the Leith Festival during which we ran a couple of events last year.
It also includes free marketing clinics for small local businesses. These businesses send us a one page summary of what they do, what they're looking to achieve and what marketing issues they face. We then run an hour long consultancy session on a weekday evening.
Last night we talked to Jason Baxter who is a photographer specialising in the panoramic format.
We also spoke to Jenifer Paterson about her All or Nothing aerial dance company. Jenifer is looking to grow her corporate events business.
Both are nice, passionate people and it was a pleasure to be able to help them, if only in a small way. It's also good experience for us to talk to businesses of all shapes and sizes about their commercial issues.
Doing the talking from Leith last night were Babs (marketing), Claire W (planning), Gail L (account management), Gerry (creative director), John S (creative) and myself.