StickupMedia!, an independent Out of Home (OOH) marketing specialist based in Manchester, is celebrating record-breaking growth in the year marking the 25th anniversary of the business with 22% growth in turnover reported.
The business, founded in 1999 by managing directors Lee Donnelly and Stef Loukes, marked its quarter century year in the strongest trading position in the company’s history.
StickupMedia!’s continued expansion has seen the Manchester-based business go national in recent years, providing clients with OOH campaign planning, production & media buying right across the UK.
StickupMedia! now employs a team of 20 plus. Together they provide a completely unique and tailored range of OOH promotional services including multi-format outdoor campaigns across all environments around the UK as well as A3 poster distribution and targeted leaflet & brochure distribution.
Long-standing clients include concert promoters, venue operators and live event giants including Live Nation, AEG Presents, SJM Concerts, Kilimanjaro Live, Senbla, Cuffe & Taylor and Festival Republic. As well as managing multi-city, multi-format campaigns, StickupMedia! offer a bespoke service to smaller independent clients, venues and promoters too.
With even more new relationships forged with media owners, StickupMedia! has access to an extensive UK OOH inventory. Their business model has enabled them to offer a specialist, agile service to promoters providing flexible high value advertising sites.
Led by industry specialists with a background of operating as concert & club promoters in the 1990s & 2000s, StickupMedia! is unique in the breadth of marketing services and expertise that they provide. The company is built on a unique foundation of experience & knowledge, and the implicit understanding of the commercial importance of selling tickets.
Donnelly said: “We’re really pleased to be marking 25 years in such a positive place. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see the company grow to this level, a position I’m not sure we’d have envisaged when we started out back in 1999.
“We take a unique approach to our business… It’s the personal service, experience & knowledge of the live sector and breadth of what we offer that is different. We can be planning five figure national campaigns one minute and booking a local A3 poster campaign for a smaller, independent venue or promoter the next. It sounds like a cliche but it’s true – no job is too small, or too big – and I don’t think many people are able to offer that. Over the years we have built up first hand experience of virtually every aspect of the industry, and that’s why we are able to offer this breadth of service to our clients.”
Loukes added: “We started out as concert promoters and we know what it’s like to put your money where your mouth is, we understand what’s at stake. And that financial principle applies at all levels, whether it’s a local unsigned band night or an international artist on a stadium tour – different scales, but same principle. We get it – and we can provide the expertise not to just book space but make media planning suggestions based on the best possible fit for your budget and on our knowledge of genres, audiences and locality. And we do it all from our Manchester-based HQ.”
The pair, who met at primary school in South Manchester, started out promoting gigs in Manchester in the 90s. After making a name for themselves promoting nights at Canal Bar next door to the Hacienda, they then started booking bands for the famous Boardwalk club. They promoted gigs and club nights for more than a decade before hanging up their promoter boots and focusing on the wider promotions space.
Their promotional network has been built from the ground up, well before the digital age took over. Now, Donnelly says, they complement today’s digital marketing offering: “In a digital age people sometimes say print will die out – but that will never happen. It’s the passive nature of OOH and print that is special. To engage with digital and social media advertising you have to be looking for it. Whereas when you’re getting the tram, waiting for a sandwich outside your local butty shop, walking up the stairs in Afflecks Palace or driving on the Mancunian Way, our campaigns reach people whether they like it or not! And with live events, it’s a market people want to stay informed about. As long as people are going out there’ll be OOH advertising.”
