Background

What does VCCP stand for?  It stands for the names of the four founding partners, Charles Vallance, Rooney Carruthers, Adrian Coleman and Ian Priest. It also stands for producing iconic advertising that gets talked about and adopted into popular culture.

VCCP was set up back in 2002, and was bought by Lord Bell's Chime Communications PLC in 2005.

As for us, our story started in August 2006, when Paul Mead and David Midgley were brought in by Chime to set up and build a search engine marketing business for the group. The idea was to combine three things: the creative and brand expertise of VCCP, the communications and PR experience of Bell Pottinger and the search specialism and technology of Paul’s team. This created a search option for large brands that went far beyond the one-dimensional, direct-response-only approach that existed before.

VCCP Search officially launched in September 2006, making history as the first creative agency to move into search engine marketing. David Midgley and Paul Mead were formerly founder and MD respectively of UK Net Guide, which grew through search engine marketing from a two man dot com in 2000 to become one of the UK’s top 25 websites with advertisers including British Airways, HBOS, John Lewis, Barclays Bank, COI and Sky and a user base of over 1.8m every month.

Business grew purely through natural and paid search marketing, quickly building a client base including British Airways, HBOS, John Lewis, Barclays Bank, COI and Sky.

The team decided to offer their experience and technology to the market, launching a search agency called Quartz Interactive as a separate division. 20 client wins and 12 months later, the management team left the business to take up a new opportunity with Chime. The VCCP Search service is the result of ten years’ search experience and technology development in the travel, finance, retail, recruitment and property sectors. Our client side backgrounds have given us a very different approach to running an agency and the entrepreneurial spirit of our dot com days still has a great influence on the way we manage our business