Manchester-based, Campfire, has marked its transition from social media and TikTok specialists to social-first digital performance agency with two senior hires and the launch of its proprietary keyword mining and trend monitoring tool, Spark.
Vic McKevitt-Smith joins as Managing Partner, from Dentsu X where she was Performance MD. She will head-up Campfire’s performance arm, driving new business, developing market-leading insight tools, and establishing its social-first performance methodology.
Kate Roberts joins from Beauty Bay as Account Director and will take charge of key accounts including The INKEY List, St.Tropez and Revolution Beauty.
CEO Joe Gradwell said: “These two appointments represent a huge milestone for Campfire. Since we formed in 2019 we’ve made sure our clients succeeded on TikTok and across the social media mix. But we’ve also understood the power of harnessing emerging trends and what this can do for wider performance channels. With Vic and Kate on board, we’re now in a position to deliver on our vision for the next stage of Campfire.”
Vic brings with her 14 years of network agency experience. She started her career at MediaVest, before heading up SEO at Carat and leading iProspect’s performance channels across Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Dublin. She joins Campfire after 10 months as Performance MD at Dentsu X.
CCO Alex Brown said: “Vic’s experience means she’s the ideal person to enable our clients to understand the value of our approach to performance marketing. But she isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty too. She immediately started with the development of Spark – our proprietary keyword mining and trend monitoring tool.”
As well as defining incredible keyword strategies, Spark delivers emerging trends to enable Campfire’s clients to be the first to the table across the suite of performance channels.
Vic McKevitt-Smith, Campfire’s newly appointed Managing Partner said: “There are 3.5 billion searches a day in the UK, which is about 40,000 per second. Each search is a thought that is provoked or prompted by the need to answer a question. To find out which box set to start next, to check the news or buy that coord two piece for the big night out at the weekend. Everything we search for has been nudged by an idea. By a spark.
“Looking for trends in search is important but a search trend is already well established and highly competitive. Trends are born on social media and emerge on social platforms an average of 4-8 weeks before they build up significant search volume in Google. So, by integrating data from social – which is a mix of human insights and data gleaned from the platforms – we give our clients an edge. They can get there first. And by helping them to step ahead of the competition, we can offer better, tailored and more strategic digital PR, SEO and PPC services – that are more cost-effective and high-performing.”
Kate joins Campfire after four years as a Key Account Manager at Beauty Bay. Coming from previous roles in digital marketing, she worked alongside Vic at iProspect for two years, where she led the Social Media department after her time at ao.com leading the growth and strategy of the Social team. She takes over from Sophie Angell who has been promoted to Business Director.
Alex said: “Due to our expansion across beauty, we knew that Kate would be the ideal person to lead the accounts team at Campfire. Her experience at Beauty Bay means she’s well versed in dealing with multiple brands and relationships simultaneously.
“From our very first meeting we knew instantly she would fit with our culture too, which is always a key component for us. Kate is the next evolution of the Account Director role. She’ll be tasked with making the accounts team even more robust and adding that rigour that you only get from a decade in the industry.”
Kate said: “It’s incredibly exciting to come into a business that inherently understands how important social is. That understands trends and the importance of getting ahead of them. Right now, there’s a huge buzz around getting on things first. All businesses want to do it, but they don’t know how. This agency knows how.
“I was really attracted by the culture and the ethos at Campfire. Coming back to the agency world, I had the desire to break away from the traditional corporate agency style and come into a place that nurtures the right people to create great content. This is it.”
