Evening News 26 Nov 2002
DIGITAL media agency Bigmouthmedia has plenty to shout about with Safeway, Cadbury, Kimberley-Clark and the Scottish Executive among the new clients it has won in the last month alone.
This amounts to more than £250,000-worth of new business for the small Edinburgh firm which specialises in brand positioning and protection.
The company, founded by Steve Leach and Heather Luscombe in 1997, was the first in Europe to specialise in promoting websites through search engines.
Steve said that as the business got under way they consulted the Small Business Gateway at a number of different levels and found them "a huge help".
He said: "At the beginning we struggled like any other small company but we have not been in the red since day one. We have doubled our profitable revenue every year for the last five years, even during the dot-com recession."
The founding duo have been responsible for developing some of the UK's leading brands online by driving tens of millions of home and business users to what are now some of the biggest blue chip and household name websites.
It is all about keeping close to the search engines, understanding them and ensuring their clients get the highest listings with the relevant key words.
There are no fewer than 3500 search engines in the UK but, according to Steve, 19 of them account for about 98 per cent of the web visit business. Making sure that their clients get the web visits they want and provide the information that the visitors want is the name of the Bigmouthmedia game and they now do it in nine languages.
The firm has just launched a proactive traffic monitoring service and online brand protection service which reports on brand digital misuse - the first of its kind in Europe. Steve said: "This can be logo abuse and newsgroup slander to digital asset theft and cyber-squatting. All major brands are at risk online but until now there has been no way of identifying how big the problem is. Now we can remove the interloper within 48 hours."
The company also has offices in London and Madrid and has its own licensed software and skills portfolio to secure its position as "brand positioners and protectors". In April it topped the Media Category in the Sixth Annual Evening News Lothian Business Excellence Awards.
