Special Feature
Playtime PR
happy to help Playtime PR, an award-winning marketing and PR agency for the Toys & Games sector, has announced its first formal hire, as Ceriann Smith takes up the role of director of Strategy & Creative. The move comes following another year of growth for Playtime in terms of its turnover, client base and team members, a performance founder and head of play Lesley Singleton is delighted with. In this exclusive profile, Lesley and Ceriann explain why the agency’s remote set-up works so well, how it approaches all types of marketing - from the very traditional to the digital minefield - and why the happiness of its talented team is vital to Playtime’s success.
E
arly in our interview, Lesley notes how strange it is for her to be on the receiving end of a (friendly) verbal grilling - it’s usually her doing the digging on behalf of Playtime’s clients. Lesley’s background is firmly rooted in PR; prior to setting up her agency she was freelancing for Bananagrams and Linkee. While doing so, she’d become aware of a growing number of talented PR professionals feeling constrained by their hours, office locations or working styles. This frustration was pushing many of them into freelancing instead of taking jobs at larger, city-based PR firms, and Lesley recognised an opportunity to create a new kind of agency that offered two things: a tangible work-life balance for its team and the expertise of some seriously knowledgeable people for its clients. Lesley credits Rena Nathanson, CEO of Bananagrams, for reigniting her love of toys and games as an adult. Lesley had been doing PR for the entertainment and travel sectors before she was approached by Rena, who was looking for a PR manager to replicate the word game’s US success this side of the pond, a goal that was successfully achieved. Working
Toy World 46
on the Bananagrams campaign, Lesley was reminded how much of her childhood was spent playing classics such as Guess Who, Connect 4 and Hungry Hippos, as well as visiting Toys R Us with her dad, a man who nowadays would fall firmly into the ‘kidult’ camp. By the time she’d founded Playtime in 2014, her five or six retained clients were all toys and games companies. Anyone outside the industry was politely pointed elsewhere. All Playtime’s specialist PR consultants work remotely. Post pandemic, this is far less eyebrow-raising than it was in 2014, back when Lesley knew she wanted to offer complete flexibility to her team. Lesley always maintained that she wanted skill, not proximity to a particular location. As a result, Playtime has been able to assemble a team from all over the UK, drawn from a huge pool of talent. To use the fishing analogy, the bigger the pond, the better the fish. “The pandemic has helped others to understand and accept this way of working,” Lesley adds. “We encountered resistance in the early days, but some of that was due to me being an industry newbie. When I founded Playtime, the toy industry was a more
