You have probably seen our work.
You just haven't seen our faces.
A full circle agency run by two founders who are, for the moment, keeping their names off the internet. Everything else on this page is true and checkable.
The short version
Why we did this, and why it's called Uprisal
There is a specific hour, somewhere around eleven at night, when the house has gone quiet and the phone has finally stopped, and you get to think about the actual work. The two of us had been meeting each other at that hour for years without ever really discussing it, and when we eventually did, the conversation lasted about four minutes and ended with both of us agreeing that it was a slightly ridiculous way to run a life.
So we built somewhere that eleven o'clock at night could happen at eleven o'clock in the morning, and we called it Uprisal, because calling it a revolution felt a bit much when nobody is shooting at anybody.
What we are rising against is not a company, a building or anybody's job title. It is beige. It is the slow and entirely well meaning process by which an idea that made a room sit up gets sanded down over four rounds of feedback until it is smooth, safe, agreeable to everyone and capable of moving nobody. Every one of us has watched it happen. Most of us have signed off on it at least once, told ourselves it was just a Tuesday, and gone home.
Between us there are more than four decades of this, which is a polite way of saying we have seen most of it. We have written the brief and we have received the brief. We have presented the idea, and we have also been the person in the room asking whether it could be a bit more blue. We know exactly how a good idea dies, largely because we have attended the funeral, and once or twice we were the one holding the knife.
What we want out of Uprisal is fairly unglamorous. More of the week spent making things and less of it in a meeting about a meeting. Fewer people standing between the idea and the person who has to put their name to it. The freedom to say yes to a project because it is interesting, rather than because it fits a target somebody invented in another time zone.
The uprising, such as it is, is small and well mannered:
craft ahead of process,
fewer hands, closer to the work,
nothing sanded down that shouldn't be,
and the good stuff done in daylight.
The two of us. Currently unnamed for reasons that are boring and legal. Names to follow.
What we do
Full circle, so you only have to brief once
Strategy
Brand positioning, comms planning, and the unfashionable business of working out what you actually stand for, written plainly enough that a media planner can act on it.
Creative and campaigns
Ideas built to survive a conversation with the P&L.
Content and social
A calendar that isn't forty-five quote cards wearing a trench coat.
Performance and media
Numbers that go up, accompanied by an honest account of why they went up.
Production
Film, stills, design, and the AI assisted sort when the budget insists and the craft still agrees.
Advisory
Some of the time you don't need an agency at all. You need two hours with somebody who has already made the mistake you are about to make.
One team from the first question to the final export, so nothing gets handed to another floor and quietly lost.
Pedigree
The receipts
Decades of advertising and marketing between the two of us, and eighty odd years across everybody who works here.
Brands, across consumer, retail, tech, media, education and one or two categories we had to look up first.
Industry awards, several of which we would love to be more specific about and currently cannot.
Of us all told, spread across Asia, MENA and the Americas, which means somebody is always awake.
Before you write to us
Two lists, written honestly
This works
- If you want senior people doing the work rather than supervising somebody junior doing the work.
- If you would rather have three ideas that are right than thirty that are merely available.
- If you like the idea of one team across strategy, creative and production instead of three vendors and a group chat nobody reads.
This probably doesn't
- If the cheapest quote wins.
- If you need forty people sitting in your office.
- If you would like us to pitch for free. We have done our time on that one.
Say hello