Emmet McCaughey, the former managing director of the S4 Captial-owned Media.Monks in Ireland has set up a new digital agency with some former colleagues.
McCaughey, together with Linda O’Connor and Brian Finucane, have set up Curious Orange which describes itself as a “digital marketing agency with a modern approach.” The new agency will focus on strategy, creative, project management and performance marketing.
McCaughey is a former managing director of Firewood Marketing, the American owned agency that was acquired by Martin Sorrel’s S4 Capital in 2019 and subsequently merged with Media.Monks. Prior to this he worked with the Publicis-owned Epsilon which acquired the multi award-winning Irish agency Acorn Marketing which he co-founded with his brother Frank McCaughey.
Linda O’Connor, who heads up client services for Curious Orange, also worked for Acorn Marketing, Epsilon and Firewood. For his part, Brian Finucane was previously group creative director with Media.Monks and is also a former creative director of Firewood.
McCaughey believes that the evolution of remote work, AI and automation have created a perfect storm which allows the new agency “to collaborate with the best talent from around the world, whilst creating efficiencies in execution to help them to focus on more nuanced projects.”
“Advances in AI and remote work means independents can genuinely compete with large networks when it comes to accessing talent and production at scale. Our combined agency experience has also allowed us to build strong connections and relationships over the years. The future’s bright and there’s huge opportunities for agencies like ours,” he says.
“There’s a need to deconstruct how we approach agency structure, location, how the work gets done and start afresh. And that’s what we’re doing here at Curious Orange,” adds Brian Finucane. Pointing out that clients are looking for agency partners that can offer “agility and flexibility”, Linda O’Connor adds that “in any agency-client relationship, in order to move fast, there has to be trust. That’s why it’s never transactional with us and partnership is at the heart of what we do.”
