United Partners (Bulgaria/Independent)
Now in its 21st year — making it one of the pioneers of PR in the Bulgarian market — United Partners has worked with more than 150 clients on almost 1,400 projects—more than half of them international in scope. More recently, it has set itself a “big hairy audacious goal”—to be the “Tesla of the communications industry.” It has also put a lot of thought into the kind of values that will get it there: reliability, innovation, learning, positivity and passion.
So while the firm continues to work with some long term clients — P&G (20 years), IBM (12 years), Johnson Wax (20 years), VMware, Viber Abbvie, Bayer and H&M — it has been aggressive on the new business front, picking up assignments from major telco MTEL; Hyper Science, Fadata, Indonesian Embassy; MyLan; Alvogen; Sofia Municipality; Tesy; Monsanto; and the Data Science Society in the past 12 months as it grew by about 10% to end the year with a team of 30 and fees of around $1.67 million.
A full-service firm, United has also reinvented its teams to better fit client needs — structuring talent around Inspiring Innovators (Developing strategies and services), Ingenuous Insighters (research and analysis), Creative Cooks (concepts, video, text, visuals), Wonder-making Wizards (Client relations) and Lasting Linkers (external relations). The agency has also stepped up its workplace culture initiatives and is a regular presence at major PR and marketing events in the CEE region — working with data scientists and machine learning engineers to try and solve fake news, for example.
For its 20th anniversary, United Partners created a yearlong effort to boost its own reputation, including a rebranding and 20 experiments two areas — innovation and people. For external clients, highlights included the Mtel Media Masters; the Baylab initiative for children; and the communications strategy for Sofia’s presidency of the EU.