Ecrubox and Heather Horton have been known to invest in some of the projects we are invited to collaborate upon. The common bond being equality of values and ambition. These investments usually take the form of an offsetting of our accelerator retainer and are of course limited in availability. Where we do invest, we require the client to have a full business plan and to have already deployed their prototype product, ideally with early stage sales.

We also invest in our own innovations. Oddly, or brilliantly (depending on how you look at it), we retain a "Head of Magic" whose job is to extend our performance at every level of the digital marketing industry. This means the creation of tools where such existing counterparts don't meet our needs and the invention of new processes, workshops and data systems to underpin our strategy and the strategic directives we publish to clients.

The digital marketing landscape is in constant evolution and as such, we purposely shape our agency to be in permanent start-up mode. Some of what we invent might be of initial benefit to our team internally but we thrive to create change that will eventually benefit all. Our in-house academy is an example of this. Combining decades (and centuries) of historic marketing/comms philosophy with modern toolsets. We don't just teach ourselves to "do marketing", we learn (together) how to understand and support the needs and values of people.

Ecrucademy is obligatory for our entire team and it's also the space where some of our innovations work takes place. Guest speakers are invited from all over the world and from quite unexpected places. For example, to really understand the dark side of personas, we've interviewed convicted hackers. And to study the art of the story, we've welcomed movie producers. Ecrubox believes that marketing has a role to play in the happiness and productivity of mankind and will continue to stretch the usual remit of "knowledge sharing" to support this.

Ecrubox might be the only agency in the world with an official Head of Magic. Yes, that's actually his job title.

With a career spanning three decades, Alex Sass brings world class dot com strategy to our mix. He's raised £millions for his own ventures and was one of the first pioneers in online social network theory. Having worked with the very big names (Converse, Adidas, BMW Mini, UK Government, Government of Greenland, Government of Serbia, Lastminute.com, Economist, the list goes on...) he was invited to invent his own path at Ecrubox three years ago. Fresh from conducting the world's largest ever study into human happiness, via IBM and Facebook, he now shapes all client commercial strategy and drives our start-up consulting business. When not in his lab, Alex provides teaching to us all through our internal academy and assists with our agency strategy, directly with the founder. A natural innovator, Alex is a big part of our USP when it comes to creating magic.

Starting 3 years ago we began developing a number of tools that could and should be used by all ambitious agencies. Those include our solution to the first party cookie challenge, Zamazon. This "game for data" is a fully transparent tool that gamifies shopping sessions in the form of a competition for users. It's been shown to unlock what consumers REALLY want to buy, given the opportunity, instead of what they regularly purchase on a day to day basis. Zamazon helps brands and entrepreneurs plot the aspects of products that will appeal to each persona with proof rather than guesswork. Zamazon is currently in the beta stage and used on our internal research but is available to interested parties who may wish to collaborate. Our onboarding tool, eBob is also suitable for white label distribution, subject to mutual values and ambitions.