Although Toucan wasn’t launched with awards in mind, even if the setting for the awards event, the Shard, has to be, literally, up there for receiving an award. However, this award process was done to be completely unique from other agencies in our field.
That necessity to distance ourselves from what the industry currently provides has been embedded in Toucan’s core values from the beginning and the Best Digital Agency award bolsters this.
We made the active decision to enter an awards process that was going to be judged by industry experts, not peers in the SEO and Digital PR industry.
We’ve all been part of award-winning nominations and awards ceremonies within our own industry, but as we’ve all sat client side, watching an agency we were paying collect a trophy for another account while missing the KPIs they’d agreed with us. Few things are more deflating. We refused to build Toucan that way.
Judging for the iGB Affiliate Awards was done around the results we’ve achieved for our clients and partners by an external panel, scored on evidence, with the results kept under wraps until the night.
A handful of people who understand the work delivered, the difficulty required to move the needle to boost commercial results, compared Toucan to a category full of agencies with years more history than us, and put an agency in its first full year at the top.
We won’t rerun the case studies here – we have highlighted them across our LinkedIn and laid all of that out when we were shortlisted. If you want the numbers behind the entry, Tipman, Footy Accumulators, FlashPicks, Pickswise, and the AI search work that started as an experiment and became a service line, that piece is here.
However, we kept a common thread for each of these brands, we took on the more difficult actions, like a digital transformation project or setting commercial benchmarks or ambitious Digital PR targets, rather than obsessing over the initial brief when it became clear that it wouldn’t move the needle enough.
In short: senior people on every account, overdelivering on work that goes past the brief, and results measured in revenue rather than rankings, for their own sake.
The award only shows a snapshot of how we successfully combined our client side and agency experience and doesn’t show the trajectory behind it.
Year one closed at 230% MRR growth. We’re forecasting a 30% increase on that in year two. We’ve held the six-client cap the whole way, no scaling by headcount, no diluting who actually works on your account. And we’re delivering this across a range of industries, the roster now runs across finance, healthcare, SaaS, e-Commerce and AI governance. The model travels.
The award caps off what has been an incredibly successful H1 of year two, and the success for the rest of the year is continuing heavily connected to what was crucial to the award win, Toucan’s lead on AI Search.
