Company Profile
Playtime PR
A perfect ten Playtime PR, the multi-award-winning Toys & Games industry PR agency, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Lesley Singleton, founder & CEO of Playtime PR, tells Toy World how the communications industry has changed over the years, the achievements she’s most proud of, and why she’s keen to keep making lives more playful. When you set up Playtime PR 10 years ago, did you think you’d be where you are today? Has the agency’s development followed the path you thought it would? In all honesty, our launch back in 2014 was somewhat naïve! I had three or four toy brands to play with, no financial backers or investment and my business plan at the time was: “Well, what’s the worst that could happen?” I had an inkling there was an appetite for something fresh in the toy marketing space, but I also had a hunger to create a genuinely flexible working solution for really good PR people. I’d met a lot of incredibly talented PRs who wanted proper flexibility in their careers, and I figured I could build something that suited them and therefore benefitted clients who wanted fantastic (and happy) senior talent working on their business. As for the way things have developed, every year I pinch myself. Playtime has certainly pulled its socks up from a business perspective. Our 17-strong core team is headed up by myself and our phenomenal director of Strategy & Creative, Ceriann Smith, and we’re supported by a stellar management team of three who oversee all the day-to-day running of the client accounts and teams. Evolving from doing everything myself (literally everything: I was even doing the bookkeeping for the
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first five years) and ensuring brands understood that they were hiring Playtime, not just me, was an adventure in itself. And of course, the pandemic helped our business model ‘mature’ in many ways as the virtual approach we’d taken for years suddenly became the norm for most of our clients and suppliers. Did I think we’d be where we are today? Yes, I think deep down I did - I just might not have had the balls to say it out loud back then.
How has the PR and communications space changed in that time? The most significant change in the last 10 years has been the shift to values and purpose-driven comms, communications with heart but authenticity. Fluff and bandwagons have thankfully been replaced by accountability, and this has truly filtered beyond the comms and into how businesses are run today. While media and consumers are much more demanding when it comes to proof points around areas such as sustainability and diversity, so too are employees who simply won’t stay at a business which doesn’t have clear values to live and die by.
Can you tell us a bit about the team you’ve amassed and the skills and experience they bring to the table?
