SMG's TIMELINE
THE BEGINNING
With over 14 years of invaluable experience between them, our founding directors Matthew Lee & Joel Hopwood created our first agency Capture.
VERY MEDIA GROUP
Capture began a partnership with Shop Direct (now The Very Group), developing their media estate from scratch and managing it to this very date.
CO-OP MEDIA GROUP
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.
THREEFOLD
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.
LOBSTER
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.
SMG
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.
LLOYDS BANK MID-MARKET BUSINESS OF THE YEAR
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.
NEXT 15
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.
BOOTS MEDIA GROUP
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.
MORRISONS MEDIA GROUP
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.
PLAN-APPS
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.
THE BIG APPLE
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.
LSELEVEN
At the start of 2024, SMG announced that they have been appointed as Asda's new Retail Media Network Partner. SMG now manages the retail media planning and retail media operations functions of Asda, combining precision end-to-end planning, creative thinking and unparalleled media measurement capabilities to craft targeted, insight-driven, omnichannel campaigns for our clients.
NOW...
We now control over 40% of the retail media market operating out of 6 major cities in the UK and 1 in North America. We have over 350 employees and with our continued growth, we are on the lookout for hungry, ambitious people to join our teams.