What we’re looking forward to in 2021

The biggest thing on the horizon for 2021 is, of course, Digital City Festival 2021. After making an enormous impact in 2020, bringing together digital professionals to collaborate across specialisms, 2021 is shaping up to be even more interesting. Due to the current circumstances, it will come to life as a truly digital event, hosted over two weeks starting on April 12th on the all-new Digital City Network.

We’ve already had the privilege of making some exciting announcements about the festival, including its headline partners, which will be tech leaders BJSS and international agency Dept. With its partners and supporters, Digital City Festival will be an unmissable event for those working in digital around the world.

We’re particularly excited about celebrating digital brilliance once again at the Digital City Awards on April 15th, which will recognise innovations, individuals and teams making a global impact. Entries are open now for the awards, which will be judged by some high-profile names from the industry.

We’re working with leading industry partners to shape our offering and support our network of professionals around the North. Having launched the Prolific Partnerships at the end of this year, we’re hosting our first roundtable for our specially selected Partners in February.

This will be where Partners can share their insights and drive new concepts with Prolific North. These meetings will recur throughout 2021, as well as our Partners benefitting from being able to continuously share their work and expertise with our audience.

Later in the year, we’re looking forward to the launch of the Global Reach 2021 Report and its accompanying summit – a revisiting of the landmark research we did seven years ago to learn more about the international influence of Northern companies. In the meantime, it’s fair to say a lot has changed, so we’re launching the project once again to find out more about what global impact our businesses have.

It’ll focus on companies with a physical presence in the North that have an overseas operation, or are owned by companies with operations outside of the UK, and culminate in a series of launch events in late 2021, before the full Global Reach 2021 Summit.

Research will be completed by our partners at Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Digital Arts, while we’ve also partnered with GC Business Growth Hub to make the programme a reality.

With our ever-popular Top 50 agency rankings coming around once again, we’ll be publishing the Northern Agency Guide 2021 following the success of this year’s edition. A wide range of opportunities to appear in the 2021 guide are open, while you can still get your hands on this year’s edition here. 

The guide collects together our Top 50 lists and puts it alongside agency profiles, thought leadership, unique research and more – acting as an annual roundup of all the most brilliant agencies in the region, for marketers of all stripes to rely upon and keep close to-hand.

And our first Top 50 of 2021 is, in fact, coming very soon. The Top 50 Integrated Agencies will be released online at the end of January. We’ll be ranking the most successful Northern integrated agencies once again, with the ranking collated by our partners, Mustard Research.

More exciting projects

And that’s not everything. We’ve got more exciting announcements about high-profile projects on their way, bringing more exciting opportunities for digital and creative businesses. 

Keep up-to-date by signing up to our newsletter if you aren’t already, or visit our Contact Us page to talk to a member of our team for more information about specific projects!