I’m excited to announce that MTM has a new look, alongside new positioning and a strapline that sums up why we come to work every day: We make things matter.
For me, and the rest of the team, MTM is about making work that we care about, whether that's a campaign that gets people thinking, helping a brand rediscover its place or supporting an organisation to tell its story in a way that truly connects.
We've always been passionate about creativity, but over the past year or so, we've had the chance to think carefully about the kind of agency we want to be, the work we want to do and where we can make the biggest difference for our client partners.
We deliver strategy and creative marketing for our client partners, and creativity shapes every part of the work. We will continue to put people first while using agentic AI to make our work more efficient.
What changed when we joined IDHL
A lot of this thinking started when we joined IDHL in February 2025. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, AI has played a growing part in the conversation too.
IDHL has a globally recognised web and commerce offering and industry leading earned and owned media teams. Since we joined the group, our own teams in those areas have worked alongside their colleagues across the wider group and both have come out of it stronger, with more specialist depth to draw on and more people to test ideas with. The recent acquisition of Vervaunt has further added to our strengths, bringing unrivalled expertise in paid channels which, again, our team is seeing the immediate benefit of collaboration and shared technology.
This has given MTM the chance to focus on what we do best.
We've always had a brilliant team of strategists, creatives and campaign specialists, and we've built some fantastic relationships with organisations that trust us to tackle the most complex challenges. Being part of IDHL means we can put even more energy into developing that side of the agency, pushing our strategic and creative thinking further and finding new ways to make a difference.
Our previous brand didn't really reflect where we'd got to or where we wanted to go. So, we decided it was time to do something about it.
What stays the same for our clients
If you already work with MTM, you'll be working with the same teams you know, and the relationships and ways of working you rely on carry on as before. The new brand describes the direction we're taking more accurately, and it builds on the experience those teams already bring to your work.
We also continue to see ourselves as specialists in the sectors where our experience runs deepest: membership, energy, maritime, sport and professional services among others. Working in these sectors has given us a unique understanding of how their audiences make decisions and the pressures the organisations face, which gives our strategy and creative work a strong starting point. Being creatively led adds to that knowledge, because an idea is far more likely to land when the people developing it already understand the sector it's for.
Creativity is everyone's business
One of the things we wanted to make much more prominent in our new positioning is our belief that creativity should run through everything an agency does. I've never really liked the idea that creativity belongs to one department, or that it's something you introduce once the research and strategy are finished.
Some of the most creative thinking happens when you're trying to understand a problem, questioning an assumption or finding something interesting in the data that everyone else has overlooked. So, for us, creativity is just as important in research and strategy as it is in design, film or advertising. It should influence how we approach a challenge, how we develop the strategy, which channels we use and ultimately how we connect with an audience.
Of course, great ideas still need to do something useful. We're working with organisations that have heady commercial objectives, reputations to protect, audiences to engage and often some rather complicated messages to communicate.
The challenge is finding the ideas that people actually care about and that help our client partners achieve what they've set out to do.
That's the kind of work we love.
Why we're putting people first
There's another part of our new positioning that I feel particularly strongly about, and that's the importance of people.
We're living through an extraordinary period of technological change. AI is already having a huge impact on our industry, and I think we're only scratching the surface of what's possible. But I also think we're heading towards a world where we're going to be surrounded by an awful lot of content that looks, sounds and feels remarkably similar. And, I suspect people are going to get pretty tired of it, if they’re not already (I’m looking at you LinkedIn).
There's already a wealth of research that supports the importance of human connection and authenticity. Edelman's 2025 brand trust research found that 80% of people trust the brands they use, more than they trust business, media or government, and 73% said they'd trust a brand more if it authentically reflected today's culture. Reflecting a culture well depends on people who understand it, listen to the audience and notice when something is shifting.
Audiences are also paying attention to who, or what, made the content in front of them. In a 2026 YouGov poll of US adults for Pangram, 69% of online users said they trust human-generated content more than AI-generated content, compared with 8% who trust AI content more, and 61% said they were unlikely to engage with content they believed was made by AI. A 2025 NP Digital survey of 600 US consumers found that only 14% fully trust AI content.
Philip Kotler and his co-authors make a related point in their work on human-to-human marketing, arguing that “brand meaning has to stick to a human problem and has to be co-created”. That resonates with how we've always liked to work. We want to get close to our clients, understand their businesses and spend time getting to know the people they're trying to reach.
Where agentic AI fits
I'm hugely excited about AI and what it can do for our clients and our industry, and we'd be doing our clients a disservice if we weren't exploring and leveraging it properly.
McKinsey estimates that organisations integrating AI effectively into marketing can achieve revenue growth of 4 to 7% and productivity improvements of two to three times. Those are significant numbers, and they give you an idea of the scale of the opportunity.
There's also evidence that AI can support creativity itself. A study published in Frontiers in Computer Science in 2025 found that human-AI collaboration helped junior designers generate more ideas and more experienced designers produce higher-quality work.
We already use agentic AI to handle operation efficiency, which gives our team more time for the thinking, conversations and creative judgement clients come to us for. People make the decisions about strategy, the central idea and anything that goes out under a client partner’s name, and our specialists review any work AI has contributed to before it reaches the client. Haris Pylarinos made a similar point in a Forbes Technology Council article in October 2026, arguing that as AI gets better and faster, organisations need people with deeper expertise, including the judgement to know when not to trust it.
We are still some way from AI being ‘good’ in terms of the high standards we hold ourselves to. The models that exist today are still, very much, prediction engines titled towards general averages based on the information they have been trained on. A great example is asking your favourite model to pick a random number between 1 and 10. Did it pick 7? It did this because this is ‘the most common answer’. If you imagine this for website copy, service differentiation or branding, the issues become clear.
Understand, create, deliver
We've also simplified the way we describe what we do, bringing everything together under three clear stages: Understand, Create and Deliver.
Understand
We start by making sense of the challenge, using research, audience insight, market analysis, stakeholder conversations, performance data and the wider commercial context. Before anyone decides what to produce, we want to agree what the organisation is trying to achieve, what's holding it back, who needs to think, feel or act differently and how success will be measured.
Create
This is where strategy and creativity meet. We develop the campaign proposition, central idea, messaging, channel approach and creative direction, which might then take shape as design, film, animation, digital experiences, editorial content, PR, social formats, advertising or live events. Each of those is a different expression of the same idea, so they work together when they reach the audience.
Deliver
We produce, publish, activate and manage the work across the channels relevant to the audience and objective, using performance and audience response to improve the campaign while it's running.
What makes this integrated is the way the stages connect. Research is shared across the team, every discipline works from the same strategic foundation and channel specialists help shape the campaign from the beginning, instead of receiving finished assets at the end. Measurement links back to the objective we agreed at the start, and the client has one accountable partner for the whole programme.
The work we want to do more of
We're at our best working with organisations that have a defined commercial, behavioural or reputational objective and need more than one channel or discipline to reach it.
That might be a client with a clear objective but no idea on how to achieve it, a brand with deep expertise that finds it hard to explain, or a marketing team whose activity is spread across several suppliers without one team holding it together. Sometimes we take on the whole programme from research through to execution, and sometimes we join an existing team or agency group to add the strategic, creative or delivery capacity it's missing.
Our work with organisations such as INEOS, British Cycling, The Royal College of Nursing and Airbus shows the kind of relationship we want to build, where we get to know a complex organisation well enough to develop a joined-up campaign and then deliver it across lots of touchpoints.
If you have an objective you're trying to move and haven't yet found the idea to get you there, tell us about it and we'll help you work out where to start.