Two startups, two acquisitions

The context

"Agency of record" is one of those phrases that sounds more formal than it is useful. In practice it describes a simple arrangement: one team, trusted with the whole of a brand's marketing, accountable for all of it, for as long as the partnership lasts.

For a startup that arrangement can be the difference between building a company and building a collection of vendors. Two of our partnerships show what it looks like from the first day to the last: Litra, a professional lighting brand acquired by Logitech, and Lumenlabs, a biotech company acquired by R-Zero. Different industries, different timelines, the same pattern.

Litra: five years, one team

When we began with Litra there was virtually no operational plan and no digital plan. The company had one flagship product, an e-commerce website that could not complete a purchase, and a Facebook page with fewer than 700 followers.

The first work was infrastructure. We moved the site from a broken WordPress install to Shopify and redesigned it, set up the IT suite, the accounting platform for business-to-business invoicing, the help desk, and the integrations that let those systems share data. Only then did the campaigns begin.

Over the following years the same team ran advertising across five-plus accounts, built the email program from zero to more than 150,000 contacts, grew social media to more than 25,000 followers, shot the product photography, designed the packaging and the tradeshow booths, wrote more than 75 blog posts, and ran a crowdfunding campaign that met its goal in under two hours and closed at 7.5 times its revenue target.

The measures that mattered to the business moved with it. E-commerce went from 0% to roughly 20% of total brand revenue. Newsletters contributed 11.32% of direct-to-consumer revenue from the first send to the acquisition. Over the last three years before the acquisition, advertising returned an average of 3.11 times its spend; when Litra tested a well-known agency against us, our campaigns returned about three times theirs.

Five years after its launch to consumers, Litra was acquired by Logitech.

Drive, passion, experience, creativity, flexibility. i9media supported Litra on a strategic and tactical level to achieve huge growth and to become one of the top brands in our industry.

Scott Gant, former President and Co-Founder, Litra

Lumenlabs: a little over a year

Lumenlabs moved faster, and started from even less. When we began, the company did not have a logo. It had one product, a Far-UVC technology in a highly technical and heavily regulated industry, and a brief: build a brand with the gravitas of the top biotech companies.

The brand, its slogan, "Lighting the Way to a Healthier Life", and the style guide came first. The website followed on a two-week deadline that several other vendors had failed to meet. Then came the operation: a social handle architecture designed for global and regional scale, copy kept scientifically, technically and legally compliant across China, Sweden, South Africa, Singapore and beyond, a digital asset library that worked in every one of those regions, and press releases picked up by publications including Benzinga and ChinaDaily.

In its first ten months the website and campaigns generated more than 700 high-quality leads, more than 370 of them from advertising on a conservative budget, and the YouTube channel passed 49,000 views. A little over a year after launch, Lumenlabs was acquired by R-Zero.

The magic of i9 was their flexibility and scalability to adapt to our needs. In a short 18 months, i9 helped establish Lumenlabs as a global leader in our industry and positioned us well for VC investors, ultimately leading to a very attractive acquisition.

Scott Gant, President and Co-Founder, Lumenlabs

The principle

Three things repeat across both stories.

First, infrastructure before campaigns. In each case the earliest work was the least visible: platforms, integrations, protocols, the asset library. It is also the work that let every later campaign be measured, and it is what made the hand-off to an acquirer seamless rather than a scramble.

Second, one team across disciplines. The same people who designed the packaging wrote the ads and read the analytics. Nothing was lost between vendors because there were no gaps between them to lose it in.

Third, an acquirer buys a system, not only a sales line. Revenue made both companies interesting. The brand, the channels, the data and the documented way of running them made both companies ready.

What to do next

If you are building a company from its first product, the useful question is not which channel to start with. It is who will own the whole of it, and whether that owner can build the foundations before the campaigns that depend on them.

That is the role we take as an agency of record. We would be glad to talk about what it could look like for you.

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