Venture Stream’s Vic Morgan shares how reacting to the evolving digital marketing scene is setting their business apart

Having niche expertise is a must for any company but becoming a leader in bold new frontiers requires risks, research and plenty of innovation. Thankfully, these are all things that Venture Stream – including team CEO Vic Morgan, COO Andy Robinson and CCO James Chapman – are already investing in.

Venture Stream is an e-commerce-focused digital marketing agency that helps brands big and small optimise their performance. Over the years, they’ve won the attention of major high-street players while breaking new ground in the ever-changing world of workplace culture and landing themselves on the shortlist for the Best Large Integrated Agency at the UK Digital Growth Awards. They’ve  even figured out a way to bring freelancers into the fold with Flow, a spin-off outfit pairing new brands with the bespoke creative solutions that’ll help them stand out and succeed.

Through the support of our North East Investment scheme and wider Creative UK funding, Morgan has been hard at work combining his in-house marketing experts with groundbreaking new AI tools that’ll help set his team apart. With Typesmith, he hopes to usher in a new era of ‘co-pilot’ work combining simple and swift automated e-commerce services with a human touch.

We spoke to Morgan to find out more.

You’ve had great success with Venture Stream but how have you reacted to the evolving digital marketing scene?

There are things we’ve invested in that every business does to compete and stand out in an ever-changing market. However, I feel like if there’s a defining characteristic, it’s that digital agencies have helped bring technology, innovation and solutions to the business world but it’s the human element [that’s key]. You can’t do it without the best people and robust teams, and we believe we have a talented team second to none. As technology becomes stronger, we try to care as much about the human element when building a business like ours.

You’re also a leader in workplace flexibility. How has your staff responded to this?

One of the things we’ve implemented that our people love is four-day work weeks. Obviously, during the pandemic, you couldn’t help but be flexible but it’s been over two years since we’ve introduced fully-flexible four-day work weeks. The BBC’s One Show even ran a five-minute segment on us in February 2022. Our staff love it and it’s proving to be good for business too.

Venture Stream has reacted to the fragmented nature of modern freelancer creativity by creating Flow. How did that come about?

We created Flow a few years ago as a sister company to Venture Stream. If a client wasn’t quite right for Venture Stream or involved a skillset we weren’t invested in (after all, you can’t invest in every single skillset), we had our own roster of top-talent freelancers. Typically, in the agency world, all roads lead to your agency and maybe you’d occasionally sub something out to a freelancer. I wanted to flip it and offer different ways to help businesses. It has set us up well for the world we’re in right now because that blurred line of where the expertise is lends itself to having a business that is both an agency as well as having a freelancer offering – it significantly expands our capacity and flexibility in providing clients with the expertise they require.

You’re breaking new ground by equipping your staff with the latest AI tools. Tell us about this.

Part of doing our jobs involves using the best tools possible and so in the last year, we’ve done a lot of research and development to embrace those tools. Chat GPT has created a demand to use AI tools but there’s still a lot of work to be done to know how to best use them. We’ve organically developed a couple of services to fill gaps in a fast-moving market. Maybe at some point, autonomous systems will be doing everything but in the short term, we’re in the era of the AI co-pilot. Here, AI is an amazing tool that can help experts do their job so my experts are selectively using AI tools to improve what we can do for clients. At the same time, we’re developing our own tools to assist with that.

Like Typesmith – how does this work?

It’s a solution for a problem that clients don’t typically hire us – or many other agencies – for, because it’s the rather static world of e-commerce product descriptions and related content. Writing product descriptions is not traditionally cost-effective for humans to generate or update regularly in an impactful way. We built Typesmith with the input of our content and SEO experts who know what it takes to do this on a human level and generated a software solution that assists in creating this content. There’s still very much a human element involved where clients are tailoring things to a particular business but we’re able to tap into AI to automate that at scale and deliver it at a cost that would be the equivalent of hiring us for a day. It’s creating work that wasn’t being invested in previously and it’s keeping our teams busy and opening doors to clients we hadn’t worked with before.

You received support from Creative UK’s North East fund two years ago. How did this help catalyse these goals?

It’s been a huge deal. Whenever you’re trying to do research, development and innovation you can often feel like you don’t have the patience if you don’t have the financial runway for it. The investment meant we didn’t have to think about whether this is something that has short-term paybacks so it’s been great from that standpoint. We also knew that it was more important to get customers using [our agency services and new solutions] rather than immediately generating revenue so it definitely came at the right time. Creative UK nationally invested [in us] at the same time, so the combination of those two investments was an important catalyst in the strategies we embarked on.

How have you found working with the team at Creative UK?

It was money – but money with support. Their events and networking lunches are great and they get people together. Over the past 20 years, I’ve had investments from lots of different sources and it’s probably been the investment with the biggest X factor. We even acquired an online fashion business in the past year – Lily Ella – to help us further diversify as a creative digital business thanks to the inspiration and support of Creative UK.

What’s next for Venture Stream, Flow and Typesmith?

We’re evolving our core service model. For a while, we’ve looked like a conventional agency with top talent that uses the best tools. Increasingly, we’ll be a bit more public about how, when you hire us, you’re hiring experts who also use the most progressive tools. It’s almost all-new again for us; we’re an established business with start-up energy. I feel like our AI-oriented Flow and Typsemith services could become huge businesses in their own right building on the foundation of  Venture Stream as a forward thinking people-first agency. We’ve grown a lot but it’s going to be an even bigger phase of growth for us in the evolving agency market and the impact AI is having and how we continue to invest at this crossroads of human and tech innovation.