Offline meets Online: TPA and Blix have merged

Thursday 14 July 2016

Design agency TPA and web design and application development house Blix have joined forces.

Moving forward under the TPA brand, their objective is to combine two businesses to create an integrated approach to online and offline marketing.

“Channel Island businesses want to derive value from unified creative strategy, campaign execution and transformational technology. Our merger gives them that option,” Director Tony Tostevin said.

With more than 20 staff in Guernsey and Jersey, the merged businesses will be led by an experienced team headed up by directors Mr Tostevin, Nigel Kennedy, Ben Inder and Phil Regan. Investment professional Jon Ravenscroft has been appointed chairman.

Mr Tostevin said: “The growing importance of digital channels within marketing cannot be overestimated. Many agencies have sought to build in some digital capability, but to be the best we wanted to join with the best. In Blix we have a proven, market-leading digital team with an established, international reputation.”

He said the digital revolution in marketing means clients are rightly more demanding, needing hard evidence of a return on investment.

“We plan to deliver business value through intelligent solutions in which digital channels optimise the results achievable through traditional methodologies.”

Blix’s award winning work includes websites for Opera Philadelphia and Livingroom. The company also delivers digital marketing campaigns including content creation, pay-per-click (PPC), and search engine optimisation (SEO). Their work for Visit Guernsey over the past three years has more than doubled organic traffic and quadrupled top 20 rankings in Google UK.

TPA is also an award-winning agency, having twice won the Guernsey Awards for Achievement Business of the Year award and previously its forerunner under the former Board of Industry.

“Integrated marketing has become less about big ideas and more focussed on data-informed strategy, technical expertise and prolonged delivery of returns. Beside our design and build capability, we are keen to use this merger to strengthen our resources both in analyses-driven digital marketing and solutions development. We’ve always worked to be technically ahead of the market so that we can anticipate opportunities on behalf of our clients,” Mr Kennedy said.

Testament to Blix’s service development capability is the Suggestus platform built for Asset Risk Consultants, winner of the Citywealth Magic Circle Technology Vendor of the Year award in May.

Blix is a long-standing Google partner in the Channel Islands and recently hosted a workshop for clients with senior representatives of Google.

The business incubated, developed and sold the Phroot payroll platform - an RTI compliant cloud payroll system for the UK market that was acquired by a major technology player in the UK and subsequently integrated into KashFlow.com.

“Joining forces with TPA is an exciting opportunity for us to showcase our work across the Channel Islands, provides us with greater creative resources and enables us to be part of comprehensive marketing and technology solutions that deliver commercially,” Mr Kennedy said.

TPA was founded in 1989 while Blix has been in business since 2001.

New chairman Mr Ravenscroft said: “TPA not only deliver creative ideas but add real value by being commercially-minded. They have demonstrated a clear understanding of our business and brand, from online to offline. I welcome the opportunity to be part of their future success.”