The Right Time for Tide
- 19th August
- 3 minute read
Launching Tide Marketing: Why Modern Agencies Must Evolve
Creating Tide Marketing was never about starting ‘just another agency.’ It was about building one that reflects the way modern marketing has to work: faster, more connected, more accountable, and importantly, more human. We designed and built a brand new website for Alpro in WordPress, enabling their team to take full control of the platform moving forward. The result is a slick, responsive and content-rich site that supports their internal workflows and reflects the professionally, engineered precision of their product line.
The marketing agency world I entered 30 years ago looked nothing like it does today. Back then, campaigns were planned months in advance, expensive, marked-up media buys were the key to most strategies, and success was often measured weeks, sometimes months after delivery. Deadlines were long, production was slower, and channels were limited.
The model worked for the era. But in today’s environment, it wouldn’t last five minutes.
Now, marketing is an always-on, multi-channel requirement. Campaigns need to be able to evolve in real time and be shaped by live data and changing audience behaviour and patterns. Opportunities can appear and disappear in hours, not months. That said, the best creative ideas are still hugely important, but they must now work effectively alongside speed, adaptability, and clear measurement.
For agencies, this means rethinking the old rules. The role is no longer just to ‘deliver a campaign,' but to act with agility. We must be able to respond quickly, test and learn continuously, and seamlessly integrate creativity with technology from day one.
What Makes an Agency Work Today
The days of the ‘one-size-fits-all’ agency are over. Businesses now expect their selected marketing partner to:
- Adapt quickly - moving from initial idea to execution fast, and without any loss of quality.
- Work seamlessly across multiple channels - ensuring design, content, and strategy connect and are fully aligned.
- Make decisions informed by data - blending analytics with human intuition to guide creative choices.
- Be fully transparent - showing what’s working, what isn’t, and why, in real time.
All of this isn’t just about using new tools; it’s about a new way of thinking. It means planning for flexibility, so campaigns can ‘pivot’ as trends, algorithms, and customer expectations change. It means recognising that marketing now moves in continuous cycles rather than set ‘start and end’ dates, as it once did, all those years ago!.
One thing that I’m glad hasn’t changed at all is the need for strong client-agency relationships. The need for building deeper partnerships with clients, because the speed and complexity of modern marketing make trust and collaboration more important than ever. When an agency feels like an extension of the client’s marketing team, decision-making becomes faster, risks are easier and more comfortable to take, there’s a deep sense of trust, and creativity can flourish without any unnecessary friction.
AI: A Creative Partner - Not a Creative Replacement
Without doubt, artificial Intelligence is the biggest game-changer that I have seen in my marketing career, and we’re still only at the start of its impact. I find it sad that these days, conversations often focus on AI as a replacement for creative work. Whereas, in reality, we should see the opportunity that lies in using AI to ‘enhance’ what we human beings do best: insight, empathy, and creative problem solving.
Having taken the time to do our research, we see the major AI benefits in three main areas:
- AI for research & insight; Tools that can help us process huge amounts of information quickly, therefore helping us to understand audiences, spot trends, and find inspiration that we might have otherwise missed.
- AI for production efficiency; Image generation, editing, and automation tools that can handle repetitive or technical tasks for us (such as those embedded in the Adobe Creative Suite), giving us more time for strategic and creative thinking.
- AI for optimisation; Systems that can help us test variations of ads, emails, or landing pages on a larger scale, and help us learn in real time which performs best.
Having assessed the benefits, we know that what AI can’t do is understand the tones of a brand voice, feel the emotional weight of a story, or instinctively know when something ‘just works.’ Those are human judgments that we must make, informed by our own experience and also guided by our strong client relationships, to help us get the best out of any idea or concept.
To put it into an image, as we like to do, we see AI as a lens, in the same way a photographer uses a better lens to capture a sharper image. It can help us sharpen our view, but it doesn’t completely dictate the direction. By putting together the speed and scale of AI, with our creativity and judgement, we can believe that we can move faster, explore further, and deliver work that’s both supported by data and emotionally driven at the same time.
Creativity Still Matters
We can talk about speed, data, and technology all day long, but I’m pleased to say that at its core, marketing is still about connecting with people. We need to know how to tell a story visually and verbally. And that still requires us to be disciplined in refining an idea until it feels right, whilst pressing into the curiosity and creativity to keep exploring new approaches.
Yes, the tools have changed dramatically in 30 years, but the goal remains the same: to create something that resonates, earns attention, and leaves an impression. That’s what excites us most about working in marketing today - the opportunity to combine creativity with the exciting capabilities of the modern toolkit.
We know that the landscape will be ever-changing. New platforms will appear, algorithms will change, and AI will become even more sophisticated. But the agencies that thrive will be those that can adapt without losing their creative soul.