There was some big news in the UK event agency world this week as brand experiences and live events agency TBA Group took a majority stake in in creative communications agency Top Banana.

Top Banana will now sit within TBA Group’s Brands division, which works across corporate and consumer projects through its specialist agencies TBA, Optimum and LGA with Top Banana’s Founder and CEO Richard Bridge becoming managing director of the TBA Brands Division.

So we wasted no time in catching up with Bridge, and TBA Group CEO Guy Horner to get the lowdown…

How long has this been on the cards? And why now?  How much, if at all, has the pandemic influenced this move?

Guy: “I have had an eye on Top Banana for a few years now where we’ve come up against each other in pitches and looking at Top Banana’s work, the great team and culture, and the client projects they deliver. It feels like we have known each other longer than we actually have. We’ve been in discussions for a few months, and it was a very easy and exciting discussion because both businesses are in a great place and growing. We are making this move now to ensure we have got that specialist expertise for our clients and brand partners as we come out of the pandemic into this exciting new hybrid world.

“For both of us, it’s not something that we needed to do but it’s something that we wanted to do to unlock growth and really take a leading role in the hybrid world of experiences moving forward. It’s very clear looking at the great year Top Banana have had with virtual, doing some amazing projects and leading the field, combined with the work that TBA has been involved in, including holding the largest live public event in December at Silverstone with LAP LAND with 60,000 cars and 200,000 people going through that experience, that it’s a partnership that makes sense. The combination of the two agencies and the work we have been delivering gets us very excited and will hopefully be of great benefit to our clients.”

I’m sure Top Banana has had many other acquisition approaches over the years – why did you feel this was the right time and the right partner?

Richard: “We have been looking for some time to move more into the experiential consumer side because we’re finding the line between internal and external is blurring. What this partnership does is gives us that opportunity to accelerate it far better and far quicker than we could have ever  imagined.

“I have been approached many times over the years, and it’s very flattering to be approached. I think the team here do an incredible job and deliver an amazing quality of work and we are quite well-known in the industry. And that’s not by accident. It’s through a lot of hard work. What attracted me the most is that I still have a large stake in the business and I still get to do the job I love with the people I love, and I get to grow and develop myself as well by being the MD of the brands division. It was a win-win all round really. It was a win-win for TBA in terms of tapping into our internal comms expertise, and it’s a win for my team.

“This is not a deal that is based around asset stripping and redundancies. This is a deal about growth and potential and that was really attractive to me. As you look into the eyes of the people you lead, you have got to be able to honestly say that you have their best interests at heart as well as the best interests of the business. That is really important and has always been part of our culture.

“TBA have delivered some amazing projects. You look at some of the legacy projects they have delivered and some of the work they have in the pipeline, it’s massive and we would never have been able to step into that world, whereas now we have the opportunity to be involved in some of that and play a small part in growing the business event further.

What are the key skillsets that TBA is acquiring here? 

Guy: “From a TBA Group perspective, we are organised into three specialist divisions. We’ve got Brands at the core, B2B and B2C, which was what the business was founded on. Then we’ve got the Sports Division that includes Velocity motorsport agency working with brands like Formula One and Extreme E of which David Coulthard is a director, and there is also the entertainment side that delivers large scale events and arena shows. That blend of those three specialist areas gives our clients the ability to tap into that expertise.

“Wherever we are in the group, it’s all about creating experiences and entertainment. Whether it’s about engaging an internal audience with a TV-style show virtually or whether that’s engaging fans at a sports event or staging festivals – it all comes down to entertaining audiences.

“The depth of experience we have now in the group, with the expanded strategy and creative team, the real expertise around content and film that Top Banana brings, and the in-house resources with studios and edit suites, plus the strategic comms angle, it gives us some really specialist areas of expertise. We think this sets us up well for the hybrid world as brands really try to get their heads around how do we maximise going back to live and how do we also not lose that virtual audience and reach.”

And vice versa, how does TBA enhance Top Banana?

Richard: “As I touched on earlier, experiential has always been a world we want to step into. Our clients do it and we don’t do it for them. We have expanded our product over the past few years with our incentive division and venue sourcing, alongside the design and live events side. So experiential was the easy fit into our product offering for our customers. TBA are very experienced at it and have delivered some amazing projects over the last few years, and I think that is something we are now able to offer to our customers.

“It’s also making sure that we can help support TBA’s clients now with their content strategy around delivering those messages to their customer and expand what they offer currently.” 

Give us a sense of the benefits your corporate clients will derive from the partnership…

Guy: “As other business have joined the group previously, we’ve seen the benefits of being part of that group umbrella, dipping into that creative resource, the broader expertise and the experiences to be able to share and contribute to client briefs. There’s a two-way street with Top Banana. There’s group resource and scale – we have an office over in Tokyo for example – we work a lot globally with clients. We have crossover with a number of clients, and certainly within different industry segments.

“There is lots of knowledge sharing and slightly different ways of thinking about things, which is complementary, but also helps us to challenge the norm as we are always looking to come up with new solutions for clients.

“What struck me is the joint shared vision and aspiration of a great group of people. It’s very motivating for both teams, as well as for our clients. It’s two groups of people who have the same values of wanting to have some fun, wanting to do a brilliant job, and being creative and entrepreneurial in coming up with some solutions. It was a very easy fit from that point of view. We are being bold, and we are looking to the future. It’s about positioning yourselves for the opportunities ahead.”

Richard: “The knowledge and experience of a live concert from an entertainment division perspective, or a live sporting event from the sporting division perspective, and those feelings that you get when you deliver those amazing events, that’s only got to be brilliant for our corporate audiences. We all want to put goosebumps on the back of people’s necks when they are watching our events, and that’s what makes it memorable. Whether it’s a corporate strategy or a consumer experience, we are all trying to create memories for the audiences we touch.”

“The potential is massive. We are coming into an era of pent-up demand and we are probably better placed than most other agencies to deliver for our clients. Let’s not forget the pandemic has been devastating and hugely costly for the events industry.

“This deal is a beacon of light and opportunity as the industry starts coming back, and we will be at the forefront and leading the charge and grabbing every opportunity that we can to delight our audiences around the world.”

What will Richard’s new role involve?

Richard: “It’s an easy job for me in many ways because we have got a great team in place already. Its more about just making them all aware of the different product offerings and making sure we go with a combined offer to our clients – both the client list that TBA has got and the client list that we have. It’s also making sure we upskill the teams on both sides to be consistent in terms of our offering and delivering some  amazing stuff going forward.

“The next few months for me is going to be about getting to know everything within the TBA world. I have been hugely welcomed and it’s so nice to meet like-minded passionate individuals who are open to embrace it and that has been really powerful. No-one is being protective of their patch. Let’s not forget I still have responsibility for Top Banana to deliver but as Jemma (Peers) takes more responsibility I will step more into TBA Group. I am also fascinated by what the other divisions – Sport and Entertainment – deliver from a consumer engagement perspective, so I am looking forward to stepping into that world a little bit and learning from it.”

How is this likely to impact hotels and DMC’s relationship with both Top Banana and TBA?

Richard: “It can only mean more work for suppliers and venues if I’m honest. All of a sudden, it opens more doors for our venue sourcing and our incentive teams. We are not taking our foot of the gas in terms of incentives. We are starting to see quite a few bookings for early 2022, and we are also seeing venue bookings starting to come back. For us and our partners, being part of TBA opens up new opportunities to maybe tap into the sports side, particularly for incentives, where we could potentially offer more enhanced packages as part of the work TBA does around sporting events.”

Guy: “I think the size and scale of the group definitely opens up opportunities for suppliers. The TBA team have already started tapping into the Top Banana venues team and expertise. We look forward to continuing to work closely with the existing partners and new partners as we continue to grow.”

Where do you think the key opportunities for growth will be over the next couple of years?

Guy: “Moving forward, agencies will need to adapt and evolve, as we are doing as a group. We see a great opportunity in hybrid with skillsets around virtual and live to really support our brand partners and clients. They have had to get their heads around virtual and how to make that work and then now going back to live, with this hybrid approach so not losing the reach of the virtual audience but also making sure the live experience is perfect for the live audience. That hybrid blend is going to be very important.”