“It’s lovely to be constantly surprised by what we can do”: Rob Shaw on why he’s shunned “semi-retirement” for a new home at HUB

But what also appealed to Shaw was the degree to which HUB is the physical embodiment of an integrated agency. 

For over the years, the Hudsons have quietly built the kind of sprawling footprint that city centre agencies could only dream of. 

Our tour starts in the main hangar-like office where different divisions – such as data analysis, digital marketing, media buying and planning – operate from, on a three-day-a-week hybrid work basis. 

Take a right out of the main entrance and you head up to the agency’s real USP, a collection of photographic studios which are primed to produce client content at a moment’s notice, particularly convenient in the age of fast-turnaround e-commerce projects. 

“Having everything on-site creates good relationships with clients,” said Shaw. 

“Clients like to be here when you’re producing content for them, whether you’re filming or photographing, and it means we can do all the content for a campaign here without having to outsource any part of it.

“It also means that if you’re running a PPC campaign for boiler taps for example, the PPC team can walk next door and actually play with the tap. There’s normally a massive disconnect between your creative and digital teams and the actual product, so it just makes it a lot more real.” 

He added: “The amount of tools in the kit bag here was a big draw for me – it’s lovely to be in an organisation where you’re constantly surprised to know we can do that ourselves.” 

Chris Hudson said the decision to produce everything in-house stems from the earliest days of the agency in 2007, three years after meeting Helen at an agency called Four90. 

“We realised the value in having in-house asset creation,” he said. “It won us lots of pitches over the years because we took pictures of the client’s brand and got them excited, rather than just using Shutterstock. 

“The other thing that we absolutely wanted was offline media buying and planning because I’d got a pedigree in that. So we bought lots of press ads back in the day and used to go to all the industry events at the Mail, Telegraph and Conde Nast.” 

Having a buying and planning unit has come into its own given the amount of TV campaigns that HUB is involved with. 

“We’re really quite good at taking somebody that doesn’t have the confidence and thinks that TV is going to cost them a fortune,” Chris added. 

“We help them to break through that glass ceiling and our understanding of the offline media landscape and the relationships we’ve got with the likes of ITV puts us in a very good position to hold their hands through that.”

HUB grew rapidly in the early days, from three in that first year to 30 by the end of year two. 

It’s now at over 40 with a client roster that includes CareCo, La Redoute, Booker, Ted Baker, Racing Green and Kingswood Corporation. 

“We just worked really hard and came up with some really good ideas,” explained Chris. 

“And that’s a good philosophy to get you through that early period and get you established. Just work harder than everybody else and come up with better ideas than everybody else.” 

“Back in 2007/8 lots of people in marketing positions really felt the pain of not being able to grasp the digital world as quickly as they needed to,” added Helen Hudson, co-founder and managing director of HUB. 

“We found that lots of our clients leant on us to build them a website or come up with a solution to a digital problem that they couldn’t solve themselves. 

“So timing was actually quite an important part of our growth because we were part of that change in terms of what clients could do with content, imagery and video.” 

The digital era requires a much greater level of sophistication nowadays of course, and Shaw points to HUB’s data capabilities as one reason behind its current annual growth rate of 20%.

“We had a client in here who was doing well and wanted to know where they could push more marketing budget – digital channels, above the line, below the line or out of home.

“They ended up focusing on a new TV sponsorship but the decision was made by getting a data analyst to show them exactly what the demographics were and who they could target through this sponsorship. 

“It wasn’t a case of just what felt right. We got the detailed sales data from the client, looked into it, understood what conversion rates were like by region, and could then confidently advise the client that this messaging would work in that region and so they should spend more money there.” 

Staying under the radar has always been something of a tactic for HUB, but now Shaw is on board, that’s no longer the case. 

“There are a huge amount of talented people here and this agency deserves to be recognised for what it can do,” he said. 

The agency is about to unveil a bold rebrand that saw the whole agency involved. 

“We’ve run the entire thing as a project internally and loads of people submitted ideas. We presented all of them to the agency at the end of last year and announced the chosen brand in January. 

“It was incredibly difficult to choose the one we went for but what I absolutely love about it is that it’s so distinctive.” 

HUB is confident that growth will continue organically but feel the time is right to spread its wings and shout a bit more about what it does. 

“One of the lines that really resonated with me when I first met Chris and Helen was that success for clients is success for HUB,” added Shaw. “Being happy for your clients to succeed is how HUB has got to the size it has, and now we want to continue that growth.”