Today, a company might work with up to 15 different agencies

Digital users are quite rightly becoming increasingly demanding, and it is getting more difficult for companies to streamline their digitisation and communication. In a tangle of agencies, there is a real need for a single point of contact. That's what Pieter Janssens, founder of iO, says. 

The digital landscape looked completely different in 2005 when Pieter Janssens started out in business with what was then called Intracto. The first iPhone hadn’t been launched, artificial intelligence was a concept from science fiction books, and few had ventured into online advertising. Almost two decades later, Janssens' company has become iO, and the digital consumer has become increasingly demanding.

'In the past you were happy when a package you ordered online arrived within a few days. Today it’s frustrating if you can’t contact your 24-hour courier service’s aftercare with a question through WhatsApp. As a company, you can’t deal with these changing requirements on your own, and you need skills and insights to properly establish and maintain that total experience. You can never hope to employ all the techies, creatives, marketers, and strategists yourself', says Janssens.

As a company, you can never employ all the techies, creatives, marketers, and strategists to offer solutions to today's digital consumer. iO offers that full picture.

This expertise often comes from external hires, but there’s no guarantees. 'Research shows that every self-respecting company that’s investing in communication and digitisation is working with up to fifteen different agencies on this. Coordinating the input from all of the agencies is complicated because they are all looking after their own interests and fighting for their piece of the project budget. They are also often small or medium-sized agencies, so they are limited in the number of puzzle pieces they can put on the table. The impact of this isn’t just in speed and quality, but it also significantly increases investment costs.'

Thirty companies become one
At the start, iO was a smaller agency like this, focusing mainly on e-commerce and performance marketing. Four years ago, the agency changed course and adopted a new end-to-end strategy which attracted investment from Waterland. Making this switch to helping clients through the entire digital transformation process, from communication to strategy and execution, bringing together knowledge and expertise in technology, marketing, communication, content, and data has since proved to be the recipe for success.

To be able to offer all services at the highest level, iO has acquired more than thirty companies over the last few years. From the beginning, they were thinking about how they could become one agency. 'We are taking one clear commercial offer to the market. These acquisitions are not purely economic, they have to provide our clients with the solutions they need. From now on, they don’t have to coordinate with different agencies, and they have a single point of contact.'

'We have always been a very pragmatic company that wants our clients to be successful through communication and digitisation, we and will remain so. That is why we always look for agencies that have the right expertise, but not just that, we also look for that human connection or click.'

Step by step, country by country
Janssens emphasises that iO can offer their clients everything they need, while there are many companies that currently come knocking on the door looking for one specific service. 'We’ve noticed that companies want to go broader once they start working with us. Our client base isn’t just made up of large companies, the lion's share are medium-sized SMEs.'

In Belgium, iO operates out of its campuses in Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent and Herentals. 'Initially, we’re focusing on the Benelux, and Scandinavia and then onto Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. In terms of content, we want to delve even more deeply into data skills and business consultancy. The iO campuses are becoming a breeding ground for talent. We are bringing professionalism and scale to a sector that usually consists of smaller agencies. The fertile environment that we are creating ensures that the talents will stay with iO.'