With over 14 years of invaluable experience between them, our founding directors Matthew Lee & Joel Hopwood created our first agency Capture.

Capture began a partnership with Shop Direct (now The Very Group), developing their media estate from scratch and managing it to this very date.

Growth continued and Capture formed a partnership with the Co-op, connecting their supplier brands with a large base of shoppers across over 2,500 stores.

2017 was a busy year for us with the creation of our retail partnership agency Threefold, helping us to build valuable media estates for our retailer partners.

Then came Lobster, formed to help us deliver and demonstrate an increasing return on shopper media investment by combining technology, data science and media buying with our large FMCG clients.

With a large client base and 3 award winning agencies, SMG was formed as the parent company to Capture, Lobster & Threefold with transforming shopper media at its heart.

Just 10 years after its inception, SMG were awarded the Lloyds Bank Mid-Market Business of the Year - as well as being featured in the 2019 Sunday Times Fast Track 100 of the UK's fastest-growing companies. 

Our growth continues! In 2020 we formed two brand new partnerships with retailers Deliveroo, and Signet.

In April 2021, SMG became part of the Next 15 family, joining a growing group of successful agencies to help take us into the next era of growth. 

Building upon Boots’ existing Partnership Marketing function, we established the Boots Media Group - a full-service advertising offering for supplier brands, rooted in insights and rich first-party.

In 2022 Threefold formed a partnership with Zapp Media Services. Helping brands to maximise returns on their advertising investment by combining creativity with valuable data, supported by our advanced media insight software, Plan-Apps.

In 2022, SMG announced a partnership with Morrisons to create the Morrisons Media Group - a full-service advertising agency team, enabling supplier brands to deliver high-performing marketing campaigns to Morrisons customers throughout the shopper journey.

We cut the crab! With over 4,000 users, £1.25B media spend evaluated & over £136M of media booked and planned it’s fair to say Plan-Apps officially became bigger than the shellfish itself. We're therefore officially cut the crab, and retired the Lobster agency brand, to take Lobster’s proprietary technology to the next level.

We opened an office in New York City in order to fully take our learnings to North America and offer increased, localised support to our North America clients, the natural next step for SMG and its agencies.

We are now in 5 major cities in the UK and 1 in North America and over 250 employees strong - with continued growth we are on the lookout for hungry, ambitious people to join our teams.