Good Brothers wins award for digital ad drive
TWO best friends who set up a super-tiny PR company from a bedroom in Cardiff after being made redundant have just won an award for the best digital ad campaign in the world.
Martyn John and Dan Cook are the two-man band behind Good Brothers, an agency that works with some of the biggest brands in the UK including Broadbandchoices, MoneySupermarket and Money.co.uk.
The pair, who met at a Cardiff bus stop on their way to a music festival, started Good Brothers from Mart’s spare room at his home in Canton in 2019. The duo had worked together at insurance giant GoCompare for several years before they were both made redundant just a few weeks before Christmas in 2018.
Determined to keep their brotherly bond and refusing “to grow up properly”, they created Good Brothers.
“It’s a very DIY kind of set-up,” said Mart, 30. “We are both punk rock fans and that’s the approach we’ve gone with Good Brothers.”
Neither imagined they’d end up working with the likes of MoneySupermarket and they’ve grown year on year, with more than four-fifths of their business coming from London, despite working in Mart’s spare room. They decamp to nearby Italian café Calabrisella for important meetings and creative brainstorming: “Salvatore and the team are like family to us,” said Mart.
While their set-up might be humble, the campaign that won them global recognition had even more humble beginnings – Mart was sitting at home on the sofa with his now-wife (who he married last weekend) watching a scary movie. His wife wondered aloud what her heart rate might be as they watched the scary bits.
“I said this would be really cool, to see if there’s a way of scientifically finding out the scariest movie of all time,” explained Mart, and so ‘The Science of Scare’ PR campaign for client broadbandchoices.co.uk was born. Launched in October 2020, the campaign, which took less than five weeks to produce, fitted test audiences with heart rate monitors to find out the scariest movie ever made, according to science.
Last Wednesday it was awarded the best digital PR campaign in the world for 2020/2021, ahead of some of the world’s biggest and most established global PR agencies.
Mart has a background in PR, while Dan, 31, is more of a scientist in training, having taken a physics degree before arriving at GoCompare.
“We couldn’t imagine not working together, we’d been friends for so long,” said Mart.
The two have been best friends since meeting at a bus stop in the Welsh capital on the way to the Download music festival 10 years ago. At the time, Mart, then just 20, had just split up with his girlfriend and was mortified at the prospect of travelling on the same coach to the festival he was supposed to be going to with her.
He latched on to Dan and his mates and ended up camping with them instead. They’ve never looked back and ended up working together at GoCompare before starting Good Brothers.
“We kind of knew how to do PR but we’d never run a business,” said Mart.
Undeterred, they designed their own logo and built their website from scratch over one weekend. Little did their first clients know, but it was Mart writing the contracts with next to zero knowledge of how an ad agency actually worked.
In those early days, he would consult a Thesaurus to make those contracts “more legal sounding” and they set up two separate emails for enquiries and accounts to make it seem as though they had a bigger team than they actually did, even though it was Mart and Dan answering both.
Nevertheless, impressed by their infectious energy and enthusiasm, their first clients soon rolled in – first Migrate Energy and then the Cardiffbased Hodge Bank. They made an impression – partly because of their very Welsh approach to client entertaining and partly because they knew exactly what they were about, Mart said.
“We started Good Brothers to disrupt the way agencies worked – we’re the agency for people who hate agencies,” he added.
Mart already had a profile within the industry because of his GoCompare experience and they leveraged that a little bit. But they were “anti-agency”, said Mart, and prospective clients were treated to pubs and bars rather than the more traditional and staid business lunches. They did “a huge amount of damage” to some cocktail menus before taking on some prospective clients, added Mart.
“We don’t do the stuff we’re meant to do,” said Mart.
“How the digital PR business works is rapidly changing and we don’t pretend we’re anything other than us two and Calabrisella.”
Going for business retention, rather than aggressive acquisition, the duo have developed a niche in the digital PR world globally, all the while not moving out of Mart’s spare room. Mart was named Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2020 Wales Start-Up Awards.
Good Brothers won the “Best Use of PR in a Search Campaign” category at the 2021 Global Search Awards, which focuses on the fast-growing digital PR industry.