Fifty is revolutionizing digital media with AI-powered insights, strategy, media activation, and in-depth reporting. It allows clients to understand their competitors, audiences, and how people engage with their brand. This helps to deliver more accurate and effective campaigns. From helping sports brands connect with their fans to targeting vaccine-hesitant citizens with the right information to make an informed decision, Fifty generates and serves relevant communications to the right audiences.
Since its launch in 2015, Fifty has rapidly become one of the UK’s fastest-growing companies. With support from partner, Bryd, it implemented Slack, and has since achieved remarkable growth with a streamlined team of 50 to 60 people. From its early days as a start-up, the company has relied on Slack for communication, connection, and collaboration with both colleagues and clients.
“Slack sits at a critical point in the business to handle the exchange of ideas without being intrusive,” says Simon Shaw, Fifty’s CEO.
As well as being the place where Fifty employees spend the most time, Slack helps to:
- Streamline client briefs and track time
- Monitor and respond to IT incidents in real time
- Improve SLAs
- Allocate tasks to the right person
- Support the hybrid workplace.
“What makes Slack different from other platforms is the great features, integrations, and all the small ways it removes pain points from everyone’s workday.”
Eliminating friction and boosting productivity
Fifty has a hybrid workplace where different teams work together on client projects. Slack helps them communicate quickly and efficiently by bringing everyone onto one easy-to-use platform with features that simplify everyday tasks.
“When we were looking for a productivity platform, Slack was the obvious choice. It’s intuitive, and over the nine years we’ve been using it, matured into a more advanced solution than its competitors,” says Vesko Trakiyski, Managing Partner, Technology at Fifty.
Projects aren’t just organized into channels but managed almost entirely within Slack—pulling relevant stakeholders and information into one place. Each has a brief using templates created in Canvas. These templates immediately reduced the risk of briefing errors, which was a common issue.
Tasks and responsibilities are allocated using Lists. They can be prioritized, so everyone knows which tasks are the most urgent, and they provide a record of every action taken on each project. Staff can also set reminders in Slack, which appear in their direct messages.
“When the sales team closes a big deal, we need to get six teams collaborating over an intense, four-week period. Before we used Lists, tasks were forgotten, incomplete, or not finished to a high enough standard,” says Robbie Scott, Managing Partner, Operation at Fifty. “Now, we have no complaints. I can delegate a task and tag someone in it, which means I’m not trying to hold all that information in my head.”
The IT team built an automated workflow to bring timesheets into Slack. People receive notifications to log time against each client, which has improved compliance and the accuracy of timesheet data, without making staff feel like they’re under surveillance. And more accurate time tracking means more accurate billing, helping keep projects on scope and to budget while protecting profitability.
All in all, Slack helps everyone be more productive, manage their tasks better, and gives managers high-level oversight of everything happening. “It’s a game changer,” adds Scott.
Simplifying collaboration and tracking communications
Fifty’s Slack-first culture makes collaboration between teams, working with partners, and responding to clients faster and easier; and automatically creates an audit trail of every interaction.
There are private channels for internal catchups, direct messaging for chatting, fun channels for sharing good news and celebrating personal achievements, and a leaderboard with the most active Slack users.
“Slack saves us so much time. Almost 90% of the emails I get are unsolicited sales emails, which shows that there’s a shift away from using email as a primary communication channel,” says Kevin Segrue, Head of Marketing. “Slack cuts through the noise so I can focus on the most relevant messages.”
While different teams have different needs, Slack establishes efficiency as a standard. The insights and commercial teams can work on briefs and share information to close more deals. The operations team can request design work for internal presentations, and sharing links will be posted in the same channel for easy review and approval.
Slack Connect brings partners and high-profile clients into one place, which simplifies allocating work to third parties—such as the partners executing campaigns on Meta, for example—and gives clients a dedicated place to post briefs for ad hoc work, make inquiries, and for transactional communications about their account or projects.
“High-profile clients tell us that Slack helps them feel connected to our team. That ad hoc interface with our people significantly improves our service; they think it’s fantastic,” says Scott.
Fifty also uses Slack Connect to talk to Slack Professional Services when they need advice, support, or a second opinion on how to get the most from the platform.
“High-profile clients tell us that Slack helps them feel connected to our team. That ad hoc interface with our people significantly improves our service; they think it’s fantastic.”
Automating workflows and integrating alerts
Fifty has a small, tight-knit IT team. They’re responsible for developing and maintaining the Slack platform and monitoring the wider infrastructure. They use integrations to bring all their alerts and notifications into one place, which makes it easier to monitor the environment and respond quickly if an issue develops.
“We built notification hooks across Slack and used some of its native integrations for other systems,” explains Trakiyski. “We can handle requests and incidents in near-real time and build workflows to make colleagues’ lives easier.”
The analytics workflow, for example, is used to integrate reporting for new clients. It captures the right data points and manages the entire process. There’s also a workflow to keep projects progressing—from lead tracking to signing contracts and generating unique campaign IDs.
“Simple workflows help new starters to get familiar with our processes and standardize how we work. They also create a record of every step in the client journey, it’s win-win,” adds Trakiyski.
“We’re confident that we can monitor our IT estate in real time from Slack and keep it highly available. We’ve integrated all the relevant systems to act on alerts and notifications quickly.”
A place to work, collaborate, and celebrate
Slack isn’t just the backbone of Fifty’s business, it’s the beating heart too—a place to work, collaborate, and celebrate wins and individuals. In hybrid workplaces, retaining the company culture is really important to help staff feel connected and valued.
“Communication platforms aren’t unique pieces of software, what makes Slack different is more subtle. It’s the great features, the integrations, and all the small ways it removes pain points from everyone’s workday,” says Shaw. “It’s really beneficial to our business.”
