Hello Year Three: it's our Birthday

It’s our birthday. Creative Salon is two years old this week and rocking.

So we thought we’d take the opportunity to say thank you for getting us this far and remind you why we’re here.

Creative Salon is here to help the best people and the best businesses in our industry thrive. We only work with companies we admire and leaders we respect and we choose our agency members thoughtfully. Membership of Creative Salon has to be a kitemark of quality because we want our CMO community to engage with businesses they can trust to deliver excellence. (It’s felt good to gently decline a few would-be members because our values don’t align).

We’re so proud to have the support of so many fantastic agencies, so indulge us while we roll-call you all: Accenture Song; Adam&Eve DDB; AMV BBDO; Atomic; BBH; BMB; Dentsu; Digitas; Droga5; EssenceMediacom; EssenceMediacom X; FCB Inferno; Frog; Goodstuff; Gravity Road; Grey London; Havas; Leo Burnett; McCann; Mother; MSQ; Mullen Lowe; New Commercial Arts; Ogilvy; Pablo; Publicis Groupe; Publicis.Poke; Revolt; Saatchi&Saatchi; St Luke’s; TBWA; The&Partnership; Total Media; VCCP; VML Y&R; Weber Shandwick; Wunderman Thompson. Thank you for getting behind us, taking us into your confidence, sharing your ambitions with us, helping us to promote the very best of commercial creativity and enabling us to pay our good fortune forward to the next generation of talent.

And in shaping our mission we’ve also had the support and encouragement of some of the very finest marketers around, including particularly Unilever’s Aline Santos; Boots’ Pete Markey; Dove’s Alessandro Manfredi; Tesco’s Alessandra Bellini; David Wheldon; Google’s Nishma Robb; Skoda’s Kirsten Stagg; and Xbox’s Michael Flatt. Our friends at intermediaries such as the AAR and Oystercatchers have also been wonderful advocates of our business. Huge thanks too to Laurence Parkes at Frog for his relentless input and support to ensure we have the most elegant, usable platform in the business. A big thank you also to Jim Moffat, the former CEO of Engine and now a senior director at Apple, whose support at the very start of our journey helped us reach this point.

When we launched we had four core aims and everything is in service of these:

• to help the finest agencies and marketers in our industry succeed, providing strategic support to elevate their growth ambitions and showcasing and celebrating their work; if you’re part of our gang we’re here to help in any way we can

• to relentlessly promote the power of commercial creativity to drive growth

• to help nurture a new generation of diverse talent into the industry – providing financial support, knowledge and inspiration for young people who want to work in commercial creativity; we want to ensure there’s a diverse pipeline of exceptional individuals to pick up the baton

• to be a source of positivity and joy in the industry we love

So two years in, we have 37 member agencies and more than 100 of the UK’s most creative CMOs as part of our community. Audiences to our content are up over 200 per cent year-on-year. Our team is growing, with two new full time senior writers starting in the next few weeks and another joining in the summer. And, crucially, we’ve just made our first donation to the Brixton Finishing School, becoming a partner in their Change Making Alliance as part of our determination to build a more equitable industry (click here to find out more about this important programme). Oh, and we’re proudly a female-owned and led business.

But of course we’re only really just getting going.