2023 Wrapped

T’was the year of Barbenheimer, the infamous Meta Gala cockroach and Kourtney Kardashian’s iconic pregnancy announcement… It was also a pretty damn glam year for us too! We attended fancy balls, charity fundraisers, awards nights and so much more.

As we do year after year, this December we wanted to wrap up and reflect on all the great things that made 2023 one to remember! From client wins to website launches, personal achievements outside the Tank and big business plans for 2024… Let’s dive in!

Kicking off the year with a bang, we celebrated 15 years of Fishtank in the company of past, current and future clients at our Fishtank 15 event hosted at our home away from home – Capri, Mirfield. We reflected on past successes and looked ahead with those all-important 2023 goals and ambitions – and buoy were they exciting!

Our family of clients grew this year with some wonderful additions, and we had a blast diving into a range of projects that sparked our creativity in the best ways. We embarked on an exciting journey of innovation with PPL Group during their rebrand, worked hand-in-hand with CVS Carpets & Flooring to turn their viral social media aspirations into reality, made waves with the launch of Henshaws UK’s stunning new website, and crafted captivating new campaigns for cherished partners such as Wigan Warriors, SFL, and Hudl.

But that’s not all… As we navigate the dynamic currents of the ever-changing digital landscape, we’ve rolled out new service lines to stay in sync with our clients’ evolving needs. Delving into groundbreaking digital solutions for several clients, in 2023 our Digital team immersed themselves in conducting comprehensive digital landscape audits. These audits have not only expanded our clients’ perspectives but also unlocked doors to a realm of innovative technical and creative solutions tailored specifically to our clients’ KPIs.

Intrigued? Join us as we set sail into uncharted waters, always ready to meet and exceed your expectations! 🌊✨

Speaking of new services, 2023 has had us up and down the country, conducting customised brand workshops for clients across diverse industries. In these workshops, we delved into company characteristics, dissected competitors, pinpointed target audiences, explored superhero powers, and engaged in some honest conversations about existing brand perceptions (sounds juicy right?).
And although we wouldn’t necessarily call it a new service of ours, we have definitely re-strategised our delivery, reviewed our exercises to become more engaging and found new ways of extracting brand goodness to maximise impact and get the most of our clients time, helping us unveil their new brand identities.

Fostering trust and confidence from new clients is something we strive for each year, and 2023 has been no different! This year, we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming 20 new clients (woop). Our journey together has encompassed an array of creative solutions, spanning from the exciting launch of websites to the intricacies of microsites, brand development, social media management, digital audits, pay-per-click advertising, social media advertising, and captivating website design – just to name a few.

Our Top 5

If you couldn’t tell already, this year has been a year of growth for Fishtank and our drive for learning soared, expanding our skillset and services. To navigate the ever-evolving digital landscape, it’s crucial for us to continuously investigate new platforms and programs that can make your marketing more efficient and exciting. And although we don’t want to give ALL our secrets away, it wouldn’t be a true ‘wrapped’ without our top 5 of innovation. So here it goes:

Our top 5 new magic makers:

Figma – “Figma is an interface design tool that allows us to seamlessly design, prototype and present user interface designs. It has enabled us to streamline our workflow with live collaboration, next level prototyping and hand-off to our development team. Plus the variety of plugins available and its integrations with Monday.com are just the icing on the cake!” – Georgia, Mid-Weight UI/UX Designer

ChatGPT – “In this generation, everyone’s heard of Chatgpt if not used it. Paired with the right prompts and best practices, it can be a great tool to start us going or elevate existing ideas and is also a great learning assistant for new topics and niche questions”- Danielle, Social Media Content Creator

Adobe Dimension – “Adobe Dimension is a fantastic addition to our design team workflow. It allows the design team to take 3D objects (obj files) into a scene, adding lighting and materials allowing for faster renders for WIP or brand visuals prior to extensive Blender or Cinema 4D workflows.”- Joe, Head of Creative

Loom – “There’s been many instances where we’ve not been able to present our designs to our clients whether online or in person. And even sometimes we’ve presented on a call but unfortunately, a key stakeholder may not have been present… Presenting is such a vital stage of a project as it allows us to recap the client on the design process and thoroughly explain the specific creative and marketing decisions we’ve made. That’s where Loom comes in. Loom allows us to quickly record our screens and present our work clearly. Now we can send the client a straightforward uninterrupted video which they can watch and distribute around their team/business to ensure everyone gets the full picture.” – Liam, Mid-Weight Graphic Designer & Illustrator

JAWS – “When building Henshaws’ brand-new super-accessible website, we discovered a screen-reader software called JAWS. At first use, it highlighted just how difficult it can be for visually impaired users to navigate through the content on a website when things are not correctly labelled. I can see us using it a lot more on future projects as a testing tool to make sure that all the content on our sites is accessible, especially for elements such as navigations, carousels/sliders, accordions and any other elements that require user interaction” – Paul, Senior Front-End Developer

Tankmate Highlights

We’ve probably bragged enough so we’ll keep this short and sweet. We couldn’t wrap up without revealing some of our tankmates stand-out moments of 2023.

Here’s the highlights;

Damien Fisher – Believe in brand achievement

“It is a landmark year at Fishtank, and the future is bright with a combination of wonderful clients and, above all, employees who embrace our culture and values and are willing to be bold and brave in their decisions!” – Damien, Managing Director

Jacy Davis- Henshaws’ Go Live!

“We’re proud to be part of initiatives that contribute to a more inclusive digital experience. From the minute they swam into our tank, we were in awe of the work Henshaws were doing and were keen to help them catch bigger fish within the digital landscape. As a sight loss charity, you can imagine the website build was a lot more delicate than usual, as there were lots of technical aspects to consider to ensure it was as accessible as possible for all of their service users.”

Danielle Everson-Hough – The Proove is in the metrics

“Transforming Proove Pizza’s social media presence has been a personal highlight for me. Through the meticulous crafting of a tailored tone of voice, refining their existing brand, and conducting personalised content visits, we successfully achieved their 10k followers goal (and more!) and other noteworthy results such as +119% Instagram accounts engaged, +235% Facebook page engagements, and a whopping 591% increase in external link clicks! (That’s ‘link in bio’ for you and me).”

Ola Tambor – Central Technology’s ‘Cal the Calculator’

“The idea of Cal the calculator was inspired by the golden era of IT – the 90’s and 00’s – and a hint of Millennial nostalgia for the cutest Microsoft Word assistant ever, Clippy the paperclip. Cal reinforces CT’s culture of revolving around the client and their needs, and provides an intuitive, supportive mascot that instantly warms up the UX and user journey on the website. It allows CT to extend their brand beyond the obvious and softens their messaging.”

Chloe Arnett – Taking Henshaws’ to new heights!

“Managing Henshaws’ social media accounts has really opened my eyes to the world of online accessibility and has allowed me to hone and showcase my content writing abilities. One noteworthy achievement I’m so proud of is the uptick of +751% in Facebook engagements within the first few months of taking over their accounts, and there’s much more where that came from! I can’t wait to boost these stats even more throughout 2024.”

Georgina Kettle – Breaking boundaries for Britvic

“Following on from the success of the Fruit Shoot Breakfast with Santa Children’s lunch boxes we produced last Christmas, we had the pleasure of creating a new design for these boxes in line with an Easter theme earlier this year. The team loved working on this project, particularly creating some engaging Easter-related activities and puzzles for the children to enjoy! We look forward to working on more unique designs for various other campaigns in the future and seeing where we can take the lunch boxes concept to next!”

Wrap Up

Now for a little bit of honesty, we’ve kept it pretty tame in this blog – like any industry, agency life comes with its struggles (hello Comic Sans), head over to our socials to see a more cynical side to life in the tank and our top most heard of 2023 🤷🏻‍♂️We’re almost certain you’ll relate to some of our #agencylife excerpts!

Switching gears, it’s now time to look forward with equal parts anticipation and excitement as the new year means new opportunities. Let’s make 2024 a year where we can continue to follow the tide and go on to ride even bigger waves of success together 🐠