5 Minutes with… Rosie Holden
In March 2022 Rosie Holden was appointed as CEO at Cake, the Havas-owned creative agency specialising in sport, entertainment and culture, following three years as managing director. Her promotion was well deserved, having overseen the agency’s transformation from a PR and sport sponsorship agency into a full-service creative agency spanning comms, social, influencer and culture marketing, partnerships, sponsorship strategy and activation, live and digital experience and production.
She did this while maintaining a 100% client retention rate, including Cake’s long-term partnership with blue chip clients BT and EE, activating their partnerships with some of the UK’s most iconic sport and entertainment properties including the Home Nations, BAFTA, Glastonbury and Wembley Stadium. In that time the agency also doubled its headcount – achieving an 80%+ staff retention rate in each of those three years.
And if you look carefully at the date range 2019-2022, you might also notice that it wasn’t the smoothest patch of history to achieve this.
Looking ahead to her role as CEO into 2023 and beyond, LBB’s Alex Reeves caught up with Rosie to hear about her journey here, her priorities and passions in both life and business.
LBB> What’s most exciting about Cake right now?
Rosie> The most exciting thing for me is that Cake is about 23 years old now as an agency. I'm into my fourth year. And if you speak to anyone here, including longtime staffers, they'd say that now is the time that it's producing some of its most exciting work. It has suddenly found its creative groove.
When I joined, I think there was still a bit of "Who are we? What are we doing? Are we a PR agency? Are we Havas Sport and Entertainment, a pure sponsorship, activation agency with little bits of work that didn't fit into either of those?" What's most exciting is now we're an integrated marketing agency. We make adverts, we create content, we've delivered huge sports partnership activations. We do it all and for lots of clients. I think we're in a really good place. It's something I'm very proud of. But it's incredibly exciting for where we go next as well. I think we've hit on the right formula and that's pleasing for me.
LBB> It's so interesting when you describe Cake in the way that you just have because as the CEO it chimes so well with your background. You’ve got that PR experience, that sports and entertainment experience. You’ve been on the brand side and agency side.
Rosie> It's almost like I've created an agency in the image of my very self, when you put it like that. I never really thought about it that way. But yeah, it probably is actually. I'd love to say that when I got here, I had a mega five-year plan. Obviously, there were things that needed to be done and you want to get the agency in the right shape, keep making sure you're delivering brilliant work, all that stuff. But I feel that when I say I think we've hit on the right formula, the way we describe ourselves now is ‘a creative agency that specialises in sport, entertainment and culture’. But I think this is where we've landed, probably because it means it can encompass all of my passions in one one agency. So yeah, that's probably not too far off actually.
When I say a creative agency for sport, entertainment and culture – I feel it is important to say culture because we're harnessing culture to create brilliant work across sport and entertainment clients, but equally any brands that want to be in that space. And that is culture, really; sport and entertainment are part of culture. When you look at everything that we do, it's clear that the team knows what matters and the right things to do in terms of reflecting modern culture. I think that's super important.
LBB> So how did we get to this point? Where do you grow up and what were you into as a kid?
Rosie> Well, it probably was sport and entertainment. I grew up in the mighty Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. I loved music. Huddersfield is only about 40 minutes from Manchester, near enough as soon as people had passed their driving tests to get to in the early '90s. It was an incredibly exciting time. And I fully embraced all of that. In fact I found my Spike Island ticket [a legendary Stone Roses gig] the other day when I moved house. That was all going on. And you couldn't help but be excited by that time, being able to access that.
At the same time, I used to sell programmes at the Huddersfield Town Football Club on a Saturday because I used to get five pounds and see the match for free. I thought this was marvellous.
So music and anything creative. It wasn't a surprise that I moved into creative industries at all really.
It was a surprise that I went to university and studied politics, which I didn't do very well at all. But I had a brilliant time and I was in a ten-piece soul band for three years which paid my way through it, singing. It was a Commitments tribute band, or as I like to tell my team – the East Midlands' premier function band for at least three years.
LBB> That’s amazing. But was it PR that you first got into once you were in the creative world?
Rosie> Really my first ever job was at Vans for nine years. When I started there I was a PA and office manager. I got the job through [temp agency] Office Angels in Wimbledon in 1998.
We used to distribute Vans Eastpak and Sorel, which is an outdoor brand. Vans was the biggest, Eastpak was starting to grow and then it gradually got bought out by Vans, then the VF Corporation.
I was there for so many years. I did independent sales. I was working with the snowboard team and the skate teams. And I said to Dan [Le Vesconte] who was my boss then (he went to Dr. Martens to be president now he's at Abercrombie) I was getting a bit bored. He said, "You know what you should do? I think you'd be really good at PR." I was like, "Why is that?" He's like, "You could just talk for hours. You'll love it." I said I'll give it a go.
Then I had no idea what I was doing. I became a PR manager. Then I was PR and marketing. It was tiny then, Vans in the UK, so I was working across all of those disciplines. It was so much fun. Young and single working with a bunch of hot snowboarders. Three holidays in Chamonix. That's why no one ever leaves Vans. The general manager there was the snowboard technical guy when I was there, and that's like 25 years ago or something. It's such an amazing place to work.
LBB> But you obviously did leave. What prompted that?
Rosie> I did. In the end I thought I needed to get a 'proper job'. I went to M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment to work on Reebok's skate line. That was a career-changing point for me. I'd probably still be at Vans if I hadn't spied that ad looking for an account director on Reebok. Equally, I would probably have never got a job there had it not been specifically skate because I wasn't a typical hire for any agency, let alone M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment.
Going there was absolutely life changing for me and I'm still very tight with Jamie [Wynne-Morgan] and Steve [Martin], the two CEOs there. They were very supportive of me and I had a great time flying around the world working on Reebok. Thankfully, Reebok binned their skate line. I remember after three months telling them to just kill it. It was awful. And they did. Not because of my advice. I think because they hadn't sold any.
Luckily, then I started working across all the categories across women's fitness, moving away from the fashion side of businesses that I'd been used to and working much more across sport performance. Then it was actually my old Reebok global client that recommended me for the adidas job about a year later. I was going to and from the HQ in Germany for a little while, which was fun. So that helped me get more experience across a huge business. Vans was like a big family. It was amazing. But that was my first taste of pure agency world.
LBB> Were there any particular moments when you really learnt a lot about marketing and branding?
Rosie> Yeah, actually one of the last campaigns I worked on for Reebok global was for it the 20th anniversary of the Reebok InstaPump. They have like a pump on the tongue. Super techy, iconic sneakerheads' sneakers. That would have been 2009. Before that I think the stuff I was involved with was fairly standard but this client was an absolutely brilliant woman, Josie [Stevens]. She's amazing. She did all the 'This Girl Can' stuff a few years ago. I love her dearly. She said, "We really need to do something different. I hear there's this new exciting concept called 'content'. How about we create a content series? Why don't we make a big documentary? Let's get all kinds of sports stars, tastemakers who were really into InstaPumps. Let's get this story behind the shoe. Let's get the designers." (They used to work at NASA and now they made shoes – amazing.)
So we created that with the content arm of Crooked Tongues which was a really iconic sneaker site. And we basically made this huge content series.
That gave me experience of making visual content for the first time – landing it and getting out there not just for PR purposes, but for consumers to engage with. Although at that time we didn't have a paid social media campaign to bolster it, which you would now. It was just purely on the strength of the beauty, aesthetic and how interesting it was.
I loved it. I'd done a lot of big fashion shoots by then. A huge amount of six-page spreads for Dazed with multiple supermodels and brilliant photographers. This was flying around the world shooting content and making films. I was like, “I want to do more of that please." That probably coloured my view of what stuff I continue to be passionate about.
I still get a buzz out of that today, not that I'm ever invited to any shoots these days. But I still find that tremendously exciting. That type of work is the stuff that really makes me want to leap out of bed and get on set, right from the first production meeting.
LBB> What other work leading up to joining Cake gave you that excitement?
Rosie> At each brand or agency it's been doing something that felt new.
The Pump 20 documentary series was incredibly exciting. I was very proud of that.
Then I worked at Exposure for quite a short time but it was pretty impactful because I got to work with some amazing brands like Nike, Umbro, Rizla. We did a lot of Rizla music stages – that was a lot of fun. With Umbro, we did some really groundbreaking influencer work and that was in its nascency, really. We weren't even calling it that. We worked with a brilliant designer redesigning the England strip, thinking how we were going to make this feel exciting to a fashion audience as opposed to a sports sports audience.
adidas just gave me the legs to work on so many brilliant campaigns, you couldn't even count it. Not necessarily the ones with huge footballers in, much more the work that we did on Originals, refreshing and reinventing that franchise for adidas was amazing.
I think the commonality between them all is probably feeling like you're doing something that hasn't been done before. There's that excitement about being involved in something that has continually evolved to the point that you're getting involved in it. I'm quite a high-energy person naturally. My husband says to me I'm always like "what's next?" I'll be on the plane on the way back from holiday trying to book another one. I take that to my work and I expect that of my people. I think that's the creative energy that you need to drive you to do exciting work.
LBB> What work at Cake has felt like that?
Rosie> Some recent work for Cake that was obviously huge was the JD Sports Christmas TV ad. That was an absolute blast, filming in Manchester over four nights. Just being on set and seeing your vision come to reality, I think is the most exciting thing for anyone. I'm not the creative on it at all, obviously, but to have been at the pitch and then suddenly filming it and then seeing it on TV is a pretty good buzz, as we used to say.
That's huge. And it's a great, tangible piece of work that explains what Cake is now, what we can do and what we can make. But I think there's plenty of other work that we are involved with that I feel particularly proud of because it's really meaningful. One of our biggest clients is BT and the Home Nations partnership. That's all about driving engagement through women's grassroots and para football. I can't even tell you how humbling and truly moving a lot of the content we've made around that has been. We worked with the FA on a disability football campaign.
The JD Sports stuff is huge, it's on telly and on the Piccadilly Lights and you saw it everywhere. And I think it was a true reflection of what street culture is, and is easily the best Christmas TV ad ever made (sorry John Lewis). But then the other type of work that we do is truly meaningful and it's really making changes for communities that haven't previously had a voice. So I can't help but be immensely proud of this type of stuff as well, of course.
LBB> How did the pandemic affect the way you worked as an agency?
Rosie> At the end of 2019 I was being super smug like, "2020 is gonna be amazing!" And then obviously had to deal with clients pulling back or pausing and getting through that. Like everyone else, we had to make changes to adapt. But that said, we came through it incredibly well.
It was also a moment where people internally and externally suddenly realised Cake wasn't just about live events and sport. That couldn't be further than the truth. And it actually gave us the opportunity to talk to our longer-term clients like BT. The Home Nations partnership was literally just launching. And we'd had this huge amount of activity planned in terms of live events or consumer experience. We had to pivot straightaway to digital and content. That's why all the work that we're doing for them now is truly integrated.
LBB> As CEO you must be thinking a lot about the people in your business. And since you joined, you've massively expanded the number of people at the agency. What's been key to that, when it's not been the easiest time for holding onto and finding talent?
Then I think it's on the back of brilliant work. We've got a brilliant, passionate team and the work that they deliver is so good – clients really believe in it. Last year we had a phenomenal new business year – six out of six consecutive pitches all in the sport space. That drives your fortune.
It's down to the people. They all love Cake. They're real ‘Cakers’, as they call themselves. I've got a lot of long-term staff and a great retention rate. And I've got people that used to work for me in my past that have come back to work for me again, which I always love. It's like the Blues Brothers getting the band back together.
It's about them and their passions. They just love it. Who wouldn't? You've seen that client roster. From EE, we look after the partnerships with BAFTA, Glastonbury and Wembley. And all the football stuff. Equally MLB - Major League Baseball - the stuff we're doing for them is incredible. There's just no shit clients and no shit work. People love it.
LBB> It makes total sense. Sports, culture, entertainment – these are the things that we live for as humans. So working around that is has got to be fun.
Rosie> Completely. I always say to them, that's what it's all about. And if it isn't, tell me and I'll either advise you where you should go next or I'll try and make something exciting for you here. I'm very realistic about that.
The thing I'm most proud of is all the people that I’ve worked with and how brilliantly they've done. One of the girls that used to work for me at John Doe, who now works for me again, when I look at who she was when I hired her when she was about 22 to now, it's incredible. And it's life changing. It enables people to get mortgages, have babies, do everything they've ever wanted to do, learn and develop. I take that very seriously.
