In the immortal words of our founder and CEO Philip Letts, “We launched the Creative Services Exchange intending to stop the debate about the future of advertising and start delivering that future.” And this year we’ve done just that. Here’s what you need to know about blur in 2011.

News in Briefs

• Our global reach means that 20% of our briefs are from the US and 30% of total brief values come from the Americas. With continued growth outside Europe, blur Group appointed a worldwide head of sales and is planning offices in new regions.
• This year, businesses in every continent briefed the Exchange.
• Average brief value tripled through the year with briefs ranging from $1,000 to $150,000.
• We saw a move towards mobile and digital campaigns and the life sciences sector was particularly active in both Europe and the US.
• A pleasantly surprising number of major brands have already adopted our new model, as well as small and medium enterprises.

Creative Growth

• 2011 saw the number of creatives double to over 13,250 from 130 countries around the world
• The majority of these new creatives were agencies who recognized that the Exchange removed all their new business overheads and gave them access to brands they’d never reach otherwise.

Time and Money

• We launched our proprietary trading technology which lowered the cost of marketing projects by an average of 30% and in many cases 50%.
• The technology also reduced the time from brief to pitch selection to less than 7 days on average.
• Using the Exchange is now a great experience. Customers have their own live dashboards and collaboration between creatives and customers is run online through to project completion.
• What’s more, all data is compiled to give an industry overview of key marketing trends.

The Agency Problem
Philip Letts, founder and CEO at blur Group says, “The overriding story we have heard from customers and the market is that the traditional model of finding creative does not reflect the web 2.0 world where agility, transparency and cost-effectiveness matter.” Marketers want to run multi-channel campaigns and pivot their plans in an instant. In this flexible new world, behemoth agencies just aren’t responsive enough.

2012
We expect to have over 1,000 customers in 2012, briefing what will be 25,000 creatives. We’re creating the new generation of b2b exchanges to benefit businesses of every size and in every sector. Excited? So are we.

You can be part of the future too when you brief the Exchange.