YOU Agency is an integrated creative and communications agency of 40 to 50 people in Soho, London. It covers media planning and buying, brand strategy, creative, PR, social, web and app builds, and video for clients including Superdrug, Ritz-Carlton and P20.
The agency now uses Hebno as one interface across the tools it already had. Teams search past campaigns in one place and build budgets from what earlier jobs cost.
“We’re fully integrated, so the answer to a new brief is usually sitting in an old one somewhere. Now we find it in one search, and our budgets start from what similar jobs actually cost us.”
Simon Bennett
Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer, YOU Agency
The challenge
Every campaign left behind briefs, media plans, scripts, supplier quotes and budgets, spread across shared drives, chat threads, the project tool and the budgeting system. Finding the right one meant searching several places and asking whoever ran the job.
Budgets were built by hand, often from memory. Production and media costs ran over in the same places job after job, and the overruns ended up as write-offs. The agency also had no approved AI tool, and clients had started to ask what happened to their material.
Why Hebno
The founders wanted a tool that sat on top of the agency’s existing systems. Hebno connects to them and keeps the access rights already in place, so people see only what they could see before.
Answers come from YOU’s own past work, with links back to the brief, plan or budget they came from. Data is encrypted and hosted in the EU, which is what the founders now tell clients who ask.
How the team uses Hebno
Teams use Hebno to find past campaigns, draft budgets and media plans from what similar jobs cost, and build pitch decks. The leadership team uses it to plan people across media, creative and PR, and to review margin and overruns by client.
The result
Each person saves around 6 to 7 hours a week. Budgets and resource plans are up to 75% faster to produce, and budget overruns have roughly halved within six months.
