It’s December, and with the battle of the Christmas ads well underway, our (questionable) Christmas jumpers making their annual re-appearance and The Fairytale of New York on its 25th play already, we give you the low down on all the exciting happenings to take place here at Cogent this November.

We’ve been out and about this month. First up, we headed to MADFest where we heard from lots of great brands including Greggs and Paddy Power – a really insightful couple of days. Next up we made our way to Digital Women Live where we attended talks hosted by the likes of Facebook and Instagram. We also went along to this month’s SheSays Leadership event where life coach Alison Green and Susan McLean from Vodafone shared their top tips on working in the creative industries. The IPA came back to Birmingham this November – we headed to Digbeth to join the discussion on ‘creativity in crisis’ (before eating our body weight in rather delicious Thai street food). Our learning culture is really important to us here at Cogent; the more knowledge we can soak up, share and spread – the better!

Congratulations are in order as our Finance Director, Jules, has been shortlisted for FD of the year (we’ve got our fingers crossed). Plus, our very own Growth Director, Gareth, made The Drum’s BD100 *applauds*.

Oh, and talking of The Drum… we were delighted to discover Cogent made it onto The Drum’s Top 100 Independent Agency census for 2019. That’s not all, we also placed in the top ten for The Drum’s Client Polls! The census took into consideration the service levels of agencies across the country, while looking at effectiveness, creativity and innovation. Thanks to all our clients for giving us such great ratings and leaving heartwarming testimonials (proud moment). 

Our client Open Study College had their new office launch this month. Our PR & Social team attended to celebrate the opening and support with the photography and PR comms. Plus, we launched a piece of research for OSC too. Our findings received lots of great coverage in the Metro, The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express and Star! Samantha Rutter, their CEO, also appeared on BBC Radio Leeds to discuss the findings from our research.

Our PR team have been busy this month. Jack and Dave made their way to Maastricht in The Netherlands with our client Sandvik to attend the Stainless Steel World conference. The team supported with PR, social media and content creation. A great trip all round!

We also headed to the annual Ronald McDonald charity gala dinner. Our clients npower Business Solutions were the main event sponsor, and kindly invited us along! Needless to say, we had a blast!

There’s more… Lucy and Kieran made their way to Birmingham City University to host a lecture for the Marketing, Advertising and PR students. They spilt the beans on Cogent, agency life and some of the recent creative and strategic work we’ve done for our clients.

On the topic of recent work… November also saw us create the Black Friday campaign for BioCare…

…And an integrated Black Friday campaign for Kwik Fit which ran across print, display, social and their website.

We’ve also been busy creating digital promo campaigns for Martson’s this month, all while getting in the festive spirit as we created a selection of digital assets for their festive menu launch (yum!). 

And that’s all from us this month. We’ll catch you in a few weeks time for the final Beekeeping of 2019. Until then, wrap up warm, make the most of mulled wine season and most importantly… don’t put your empty wrappers back in the Celebrations box! Merry Christmas everyone.