Why Bray Leino and krow Chose to Come Together

When Bray Leino was founded in North Devon more than 50 years ago, it was an unusual locale from which to build an advertising agency. Long before remote working or even the internet, the business had to work out how to create the capabilities it needed from outside the industry's traditional London centre.

Half a century later, that instinct for doing things slightly differently is informing its next chapter.

This week, Bray Leino officially joined forces with fellow MISSION Group business krow Group, creating an agency of roughly 350 people operating under the Bray Leino name. But for CEO Kate Cox and CCO Wayne Deakin, the more interesting question is why bringing the businesses together makes sense now.

“The main reason is we're relentlessly always looking for how we can be better,” says Kate. “Clients' problems are becoming more complicated. They're becoming broader.”

The merger gives the agency greater depth across strategy, creative, media, digital, data, analytics and production, but Kate argues the appeal is not scale for scale's sake.

“It meant that we were big enough now to go for the big stuff, but still small enough to be really agile,” she tells LBB.

For Bray Leino, that distinction matters. As client problems become more complicated, brands have often responded by assembling increasingly large rosters of specialist partners. Bray Leino's proposition is that a broader agency can instead assemble those specialisms around the problem itself.

“We don't have a set way,” says Kate. “We build the team that's right for the client problem.”

It echoes something Wayne told LBB shortly after joining Bray Leino earlier this year: agencies can become too organised around their own departments rather than the thing a client actually needs solving.

His ambition now is to create one fluid creative team across the enlarged business, drawing on different skills and locations depending on the brief.

“What's the best jigsaw puzzle of people and talent to put on this brief?” he says. “It's less about where you are, and more about your attitude.”

An Agency with No HQ

That geographic point is perhaps the most distinctive part of Bray Leino's pitch. While London remains important, the enlarged agency has teams across the UK, including North Devon, Bristol, Leicester and Norwich. Kate is adamant that none should operate as a satellite of a dominant head office.

“There is no site or region that is less important than any other,” she says. “It is not London's head office. Every single office has got great talent, great people and they're all on equal footing.”

The argument is partly about access to talent, but also about understanding audiences beyond the industry's London bubble. Research can provide data about different communities; Kate believes there is an additional value in having people who actually live within them.

“The teams actually live and breathe it,” she says. “They feel it as well as analytically know it.”

For Wayne, an Australian who has worked across several international markets, the UK's concentration of advertising talent in London has always been striking. “Sometimes being a little bit more of an outsider gives you a wider view on the world,” he notes.

That philosophy has also shaped the agency operationally. Bray Leino has long maintained capabilities such as media planning, buying and production internally, partly because its origins outside London demanded a degree of self-sufficiency.

“If we haven't got that capability, we'll just build it,” Wayne says.

Putting the Merger in the Logo

The more difficult part of any merger is cultural. Kate is conscious that employees can easily feel a merger is something being done to them, rather than something they are part of.

“This was never about Bray Leino taking over,” she explains. “This was about two businesses coming together to form something completely new, that is called Bray Leino.”

That thinking is unusually visible in the agency's new identity, which Wayne and his team created entirely in-house. Its typeface traces back to Bray Leino's ‘70s heritage, while individual letterforms have been redrawn with references to the agency's different locations: Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge, architectural details from Norwich and influences drawn from Leicester and elsewhere.

The black-and-white elements also preserve something of krow's previous visual identity.

“It's built up over these different locations,” says Wayne. “The equity of those locations and the people is reflected back in the master identity.”

For Kate, that detail carries more weight internally than a conventional rebrand might.

“Every time any single individual in our business sees that logo, they know that where they're from is part of it.”

Ultimately, the merger is a bet that Bray Leino can gain breadth without acquiring the cumbersome structure often associated with bigger agencies. And, according to Wayne, the crucial difference is that these were two businesses that actually wanted to come together.

“We had shared values, a shared business ethos, and it just worked,” he says. “You're starting because you want to be together and you want to do something great.”

For a business that has spent more than 50 years proving an agency does not have to follow the industry’s conventional map, the next challenge is proving it does not have to follow the conventional rules of scale either.