Special Feature - Playtime PR

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.

Early 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 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

traditional place, and PR was often formulaic. Things were always done the way they’d always been done. Our agency was a blank canvas, however, meaning we could try the old methods alongside something completely new. Companies that might have been with incumbent agencies for years saw how successful this was, and many realised their own PR needed the breath of fresh air Playtime could offer.”

She continues: “On the subject of remote working, lockdown made no difference to us as we were already perfectly set up for it. We might see each other at toy fairs, or get together for brainstorming sessions, but all being in the same place has never been an essential part of the business and never will be. Our clients’ end user experience is the same as would be offered by any other agency, but the big difference is that everyone who has a hand in their account is both senior and highly experienced. I think our most ‘junior’ consultant has seven years’ experience under their belt, while Ceriann Smith and I are somewhat more towards the upper end of that scale.”

In 2014, when Playtime was founded, Lesley had to wear many hats. Since then, by building out the team to its current 25 consultants, Lesley – a self-confessed ‘control freak’ - has been able to take a step back from the minutiae of the business to focus on talent recruitment and running the agency. And this is where Ceriann comes in, as director of Strategy & Creative. Playtime’s first official employee, despite being a part of the Playtime landscape for years, she and Lesley enjoy a hugely complementary working relationship as their interests fall organically on different parts of the business.

“It’s fair to say that compared to where we are now versus where we started out, we’ve more than grown up as an agency,” Ceriann notes. “Lesley and I worked together on Argos before I joined Playtime, and we got on really well. I used to work right across the breadth of the consumer field, so I found it interesting how sectorspecific agencies operated. There’s been a big evolution in the way we at Playtime approach the media. We don’t fall back on tried and tested routes. We’re always pushing the rudder, seeking out the platforms and channels that will be most effective and deliver on our clients’ objectives. Lesley mentioned earlier a formulaic approach to PR, because that’s what was most comfortable for the industry. I think we’re past that phase now. Our clients are able to see and appreciate the opportunities available to them through different channels with tangible results.”

In the seven years since Playtime came onto the scene, social platforms have emerged as a dominant force in the media space. As Ceriann explains, a dropoff in ad revenue has seen traditional consumer media

evolve and diversify. Over the past two years, Playtime has been digging deeper into consumer media, liaising with content commercialisation and affiliate editors – navigating the blurred lines between editorial and advertorial content and ensuring the information the agency shares with journalists across the board is considered and delivering what the media, as well as what clients, need. This ranges from the basics of ‘PR 101’ - hi-res images, accessible text, relevant, easily digestible information - to enhanced background knowledge such as stock levels and retail partnerships, information content commercialisation teams need to make informed decisions on top toy lists or category roundups, for example.

“I won’t lie, this is something we’ve had to come to terms with as it’s a completely different level of conversation,” adds Ceriann. “But when everything falls into place, our clients reap the rewards. Take Christmas 2020; the research we did into how the affiliate editors were working, and what the national journalists and content teams needed, really paid off. We were able to deliver significant ROI for our clients during a hugely challenging year. From Playtime’s perspective, traditional media is still as important as digital and social media now are.”

Lesley interjects here, telling us Playtime’s approach ties back to client objectives. While the impact of PR on toys or games sales can be difficult to quantify, the agency knows from experience that getting a product onto TV or into a newspaper (Lesley highlights This Morning and The Independent’s IndyBest feature) will almost always result in an instant sales uplift – and in Lesley’s phone ringing, an excited client at the end of it wanting to know why orders are through the roof. The challenge lies in showing exactly which element of a PR push is responsible for what. Digital and social media marketing campaigns provide detailed breakdowns of views, click-throughs, and conversions; traditional PR doesn’t. How can you show how many people read a product round-up in a physical newspaper, or saw a product during what might have been a short segment on a TV programme? And while some companies may find that lack of clarity disconcerting, even off-putting, Playtime is keen to ensure its clients keep traditional media as part of the marketing mix. It’s important, and it generates results.

While on the subject of traditional PR, Lesley is also keen to highlight the work Playtime does with kids’ print, which has enjoyed a major boost during the pandemic, especially the likes of The Week Junior and National Geographic Kids. Partnerships involve creative pages, competitions, branded content and more, adding that little something extra to wider campaigns that target an engaged audience of forwardleaning kids.

However, it can’t be denied that digital is playing a greater role in marketing plans than ever before, as outlined in detail in our article ‘Take it from media’, published in the September issue of Toy World. Playtime’s approach to marketing has always been a 360-degree one, spanning everything from print media relations to influencer partnerships. Ceriann reiterates what Lesley mentioned earlier; the pair have a rich ‘heritage’ (as they put it) in PR, going back decades. They’ve evolved their own skills and ways of working as the media space has continued to morph into what we see today. They’re not newcomers, but old hands. Ceriann used to work in an agency that supported brands and organisations with their broadcast PR specifically. Part of her role was to identify and book talent and experts that would resonate with a target audience to speak on various topics relating to client campaigns. The influencer scene isn’t vastly different, she says. The key to success is ensuring the chosen influencer is right for the brand and the platform, and that they have an audience among which their message will resonate.

“We know as consumers as well as PR professionals when someone is being paid to say something they don’t believe,” Ceriann notes. “Playtime invests a lot of time and resources into finding the right influencers for its clients. Our work in this space has given us a deep understanding of who works and who doesn’t, where the engagement lies, and crucially – how much they cost. This knowledge allows us to make tailored and informed recommendations to our clients about where to place their budget.”

We were keen to explore further what Ceriann meant regarding cost. Playtime, she explained, rarely receives a quote for an influencer partnership and simply accepts it. The pandemic has seen the price of paid partnerships soar in line with the eyes on the space and growing demand for content, but in many cases these prices are unreasonable. Given the volume of work that Playtime does in this particular area, the team is able to benchmark outputs which helps them to guide clients on where to place their spend according to engagement rates, reach and overall content performance. The insights in turn help inform team negotiations with talent managers to establish fee levels that work for all parties.

By now, readers will hopefully have gained a sense of just how far Playtime goes for its clients, how deep it drills down. The agency has never been one for following the crowd or playing it too safe, and it shows. For several years, starting with Magic Box’s SuperThings in 2018, Playtime and its clients have been developing in-school programmes across nurseries, primary schools and secondary schools. This year alone, over 850 had signed up at the time of writing. These programmes go well beyond the ‘here’s a flyer, please talk about this product’ approach, instead providing robust educational resources that genuinely benefit kids. Take the recent Casdon schools’ programme. Playtime launched a Helping Out in the Home Corner campaign for its client, which more than 100 reception classes nationwide signed up for. The campaign saw home-themed corners enhanced with a carefully curated selection of some

of Casdon’s best-loved role-play toys. Alongside this, educational resources packs were created featuring stickers, certificates, learning activities aligned with the national curriculum and more, all of which could be taken home to mum and dad. Playtime is running a similar campaign for Orchard Toys this year, with the focus on pre-schools and nurseries. As many schools are somewhat under-resourced, these initiatives are a great way to boost the classroom aids teachers have to hand while also providing tangible learning outcomes. They’ve never been about dumping product in schools and calling it a day. Instead, they go right to the heart of what makes this agency tick – playtime.

Since 2014, Playtime has signed an impressive roster of clients. Asmodee and Zuru were mentioned at the start of this piece, Casdon, Magic Box and Orchard Toys a few paragraphs ago. Other big names include Golden

Bear, John Adams, Exploding Kittens, Bandai, Gibsons, IMC Toys, Moose, PlayMonster, Schleich, Toynamics and more. We invited Lesley to brag a little about why these clients have signed Playtime, something that didn’t come easily. She did tell us that Playtime does what it says it will do, crafting individual, tailored campaigns from scratch for each of its clients and delivering excellent results which lead to both client attraction and retention. At the same time, she added, the agency does turn companies away for a variety of reasons. If an approach doesn’t feel right, it goes no further.

With Lesley remaining humble, Ceriann seized the opportunity to big her up instead. She tells us Playtime’s success is down to Lesley; her people-first approach to business, her consideration for the welfare of her team, her deep-rooted values of kindness and respect. Playtime gives all new clients a document outlining its ‘Rules of Play’ - how it will treat its clients, and how its team expects to be treated in return. There’s simply no room in Lesley’s agency for bad behaviour. Ceriann adds: “I came from a traditional agency background, and it was very different. Knowing that there’s a different way you can work, and how fulfilled and happy you can be at work – is more than just a novelty. It makes business sense too and the team and our clients see the results of that.”

Playtime’s growth continues unabated, which Lesley embraces head-on. Over the following 12-18 months, she expects to see significant organic growth from existing clients, noting that the longer a relationship continues, the more trust a client places in the agency’s abilities. She also recently unveiled The Play Group, an expanded new global collective of PR agencies founded by Playtime PR (covering the UK), PlayWise Partners (USA), blattertPR (Germany and Austria),

Be Now Communication (Spain), and Pragmatika (Italy). Enabling each agency’s teams and clients to tap into insights from other territories to help sensitively localise strategies and deliver campaigns in a more authentic and culturally-relevant way, The Play Group offers a flexible solution for existing clients seeking a similar agency approach in other countries, as well as for new brands looking for a one-agency-style approach with truly localised solutions. And while she was happy to turn down clients in the early days, Lesley is now open to onboarding playful brands that may not specifically fall within the Toys & Games category.

“We often have conversations about growth as we would never want to stretch ourselves too thin, but the team has grown phenomenally and we’ve got some incredibly talented people joining us in the months ahead,” finishes Lesley. “For now, we’re focused on Christmas, but beyond that? Wait and see.”