After Brave Bison acquisition, can remodelled Social Chain meet growth expectations?

That had less to do with the business rationale behind the deal than what it revealed about the buzzy company’s valuation – and the acumen of its co-founder, the broadcaster and business personality Steven Bartlett. The entrepreneur and podcaster had previously claimed Social Chain was responsible for hundreds of millions of euros in revenue to its German parent company, but two years after he resigned as co-chief exec the agency ended up being sold for £7.7m – suggesting the business Bartlett had originally built was generating less than previously suggested.

For his part, Bartlett has embarked on a new agency business, Flight Story, and has doubled down on celebrity with a second book on the shelves and a hit podcast on the airwaves. Meanwhile, his old agency has changed almost beyond recognition.

Since its acquisition, Social Chain has rebranded, overhauled its business model and made 28% of its staff redundant. In our conversation with chief executive Pete Metcalfe, the former co-founder’s name doesn’t come up once.

Instead, Metcalfe wants to talk about the agency’s future – a project he’s been working on since the beginning of the year when the Brave Bison deal was still being finalized.

The business has been merged with Brave Bison’s social and influencer unit and has developed a fresh “creator-led” proposition to bring in new clients, according to Metcalfe.

He says: “Social Chain will be 10 next year. It was built on this heritage of social natives, people who were living and breathing the conversation on social. That was a great foundation… but it felt like the industry and our business had evolved.”

The old business model of Social Chain rested squarely upon the value of the social and digital communities it specialized in managing, says Metcalfe. “It didn’t make much sense as an agency model. But… we’re respectful to the heritage.”

Metcalfe, previously an executive at media agencies Carat and iProspect, says the agency now prioritizes bringing in influencers, creators and social media talent far earlier into campaign conversations – using them less as a means of distributing messages to audiences and, instead, as valued production and creative partners.

“When we’re ideating, the creator and influencer team are in the middle of those conversations with the campaign team and content team,” he says. At the same time, Metcalfe says he wants to stop relying on digital native intuition. “I saw the need to be able to balance that with experienced comms practitioners, people who understand audience and understand how to write a marketing and comms plan.”

Those shifting internal priorities led it to make dozens of job cuts since the deal was inked. Half-year accounts filed by Brave Bison with the London Stock Exchange revealed it had cut 28% of its staff. Metcalfe refuses to share which areas of the business sustained job losses (though he says “it wasn’t a case of cutting in one area,” and the losses weren’t due to “duplication” with existing positions at Brave Bison) but says its worldwide headcount is now just 82 compared with a previous 122.

He’s keener to discuss its return to the hiring market – the company has six open roles – and recruitment of three senior leadership hires from larger agencies Goat, Ogilvy and Carat, alongside reinforcements for the business’s client services, strategy, influencer and account teams. “We’re back on a recruitment drive in every area,” he says.

Metcalfe says that the business is already on track to turn a profit for its new owner by the end of the year. It has brought in household brand clients this year, including Holland & Barrett and John Lewis & Partners. “My brain is very growth-oriented. When I was brought into the business, my mission was growth. Brave Bison is very, very growth-oriented and has big aspirations about where we want to get to in the next three years on valuation.”

But to achieve more than a short-term lift, it’ll need to prove it can compete against heavyweight rivals. In recent years, holding companies have invested in their own influencer practices – WPP’s acquisition of Goat earlier this year being a case in point.

“Having been part of a holdco, the appetite to get social right has been on the periphery and is now in the center. But, you’ve got large-scale agencies that can do social but are still operating as generalists. And at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got agencies that are super specialists, just doing influencer or just doing TikTok. I hope with our new proposition that we can sit in the middle. We cover the full gamut of social. But we are still specialists. We can do scale – you can trust us with your budgets – but we are also specialist enough to get you where you need to be.

“It’s a challenge. The market is getting broader. There are more people taking up share. I’m not naive to the fact that there are some other agencies that are in the same boat. But the more general challenge is actually wrangling with the creator economy.”

Social Chain’s reorganization and a new emphasis on planning and strategy will help it thread the needle, he argues. The firm has built brand auditing and audience listening practices into its service, merged its influencer and content teams into a single studio to promote conception of creator-led campaigns and retooled its approach to creators as ‘collaborations’ rather than classic brand gigs.

The strategy team has been an area of particular recruitment, Metcalfe says. “In a social agency, there’s this slight misconception that everyone’s a strategist because they’re always in social and they get it. But we’ve really we’ve really built some strategic muscle.

“It’s not about jumping on the latest algorithm, it’s taking a people-first approach – which is nothing novel. We take a minute to step back and really understand what the audience really wants to hear.”