Atomic Unveils Dedicated Performance Marketing Division 'Altitude'

(left to right: Jon Goulding, CEO Atomic, James Shepherd, Co-Founder & MD of Atomic Altitude)

Independent creative agency Atomic today announces the launch of a specialist media division, Atomic Altitude, in response to marketers wanting radical improvements in their digital media performance. By putting creativity as the most significant lever for effectiveness, it will combine real-time insights, media-agnostic planning and value-based measurement to transform clients’ media performance.

The agency will be led by co-founder and managing director James Shepherd, previously managing director EMEA at M&C Saatchi Performance, and under the guidance of Atomic CEO Jon Goulding. 

James Shepherd, co-founder and managing director, says, “There has been a race to the bottom in terms of media tactics over the last ten years, where obsession with price, short-termism and bad practices has become the norm. With monumental changes in data privacy and consumer behaviour changing fundamentally post-COVID, brands need new, innovative ways to help grow their brands & businesses faster, more effectively and more efficiently. Creativity, one of the most undervalued and underused components in paid media, is now the single biggest lever for media performance, which is why we’re putting it front and centre of our offering. “

The launch of Altitude is yet another clear sign of Atomic’s ambition to create a new agency model that builds brands in the age of performance. It complements Supernova, the new social creator business, that Atomic launched last month.

Jon Goulding, Atomic CEO, says, “The latest WARC and Kantar research underlines what a terrible state the digital media landscape is in when it comes to the quality of creativity showing up in people’s lives. Its contribution to media effectiveness has been massively undervalued, with brands carpet-bombing consumers with creative that is often lazy, disconnected, and irrelevant. Now more than ever, brands need to take ‘what they put out there’ as seriously as ‘where they put it’, so building a digital media agency at the heart of a creative agency is fundamental to that being possible.”

“James has a brilliant track record building one of the biggest and most profitable parts of the M&C Saatchi group, and his vision for what a truly modern performance media business needs to look like is an exciting one. Despite big agency groups having media divisions, most struggle to integrate them into their solutions for clients. That’s why we believe Atomic’s unified creative agency offering is the ideal environment to build out his vision from the ground up.”