Core, Ireland’s largest marketing communications group, has invested €7.5m in a restructuring of the group and a relocation of its headquarters to a new 24,000 sq ft office development at 1 Windmill Lane.
The move to new offices is part of a five year plan which the group announced earlier this year. The plan revolves around a transformation of the group’s proposition as a business and the wider industry in which it operates.
Speaking at the launch of its new offices earlier this week, Core’s CEO Alan Cox said that its new strategy has collaboration at its heart and that this will enhance the creativity of work developed by Core, across all disciplines, and provide a seamless structure that will meet the global trend of clients demanding full solution services.
“For the last thirty years, the advertising industry has been obsessed with specialisation, necessitating clients to hire a number of different agencies to produce one marketing campaign. Working in silos stifles creativity and results, no matter how talented the individual teams are. Research has consistently shown that collaboration produces better results. Bringing people together from different disciplines to work on a problem produces a higher level of creativity and innovation,” says Cox.
“Core is not moving away from specialisation – far from it. Collaboration is a powerful and essential element of world-class marketing campaigns. Marketing is a complex business and deep specialism is crucial. By demolishing our walls, both figuratively and physically, to become one company. We are advocating that specialists must be brought together and not kept apart. Core’s purpose is to expand the possibilities of what brands can achieve. We are really excited about our new strategy and new integrated model and where it will take our business,” he adds.
Core currently employs a team of 310 people and, until recently, operated as a group of nine separate companies. As part of this restructuring, the business has been transformed into one company with nine specialist practices. These include Core Creative, Core Data, Core Investment, Core Recruitment, Core Research, Core Sponsorship, Core Strategy, Core Learning and Core Media, which in turn is made up of four media agency brands Mediaworks, Spark Foundry, Starcom and Zenith.
Earlier this week, the group officially launched its new offices on Windmill Lane to an industry gathering made up of clients, media owners and other agencies. The keynote speaker was music producer Steve Lillywhite who was interviewed by RTÉ’s Dave Fanning. Lillywhite has worked with a number of bands over the last 30 years, some of which recorded their albums in the old Windmill Lane Studios, including U2.
Consisting of 24,000 sq. ft across one floor, the location has been custom built to foster innovation and collaboration, and includes a special CoLab space, where teams come together to ideate and solve problems for clients. As part of the restructure, the company also invested in specialists to train employees in how to collaborate more effectively, establishing new ways of working together.
According to Geoff McGrath, Director of Transformation with Core: “Everything in our new space offers a tangible statement of our intent to create a better way to create better work. Clients need better built solutions with a more simplified, seamless agency structure. Our unique scale, organisational structure and now our new working environment ensures that Core is the only brand capable of providing clients with such a proposition in the Irish market.”
Core has been voted Agency Network of the Year for the last six years at the Media Awards and the company was also recently voted one of the top workplaces in Ireland by the Great Place to Work Institute for the ninth year running.
