At 1 Windmill Lane, on the site of the old Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, Core chief executive Aidan Greene has reason to be in upbeat mood. The largest marketing communications company in the Irish market saw its net profit climb from €1.69 million in 2022 to €4.08 million last year, a rise of 141 per cent.
Newly filed documents for Magalas Ltd, Core’s holding company, show an operating profit of €2.57 million, up from €1.57 million, and 6 per cent growth in revenue to €37.4 million.
The group – which buys advertising on behalf of clients and now operates across nine practices, including creative advertising – saw its billings swell to €254.5 million last year, up from €238 million.
This year has also been positive, with media billings up 9 per cent in first nine months and employee numbers rising again, from 351 to 365.
“We’ve had a lot of production this year for TV and online. That’s where an awful lot of new growth has happened, but we’ve also been making sure that our business is tightly controlled from a cost perspective,” says Greene.
Core now secures 30 per cent of its revenue beyond its media planning and buying origins. Its creative practice has grown “faster than we anticipated” since it first invested in it about six years ago, with Core creating campaigns for brands such as the National Lottery, Sky and Fáilte Ireland.
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Greene sees further opportunities on the creative side, as well as in buoyant market areas such as digital audio, digital video and social media, while the launch of Amazon.ie in 2025 means retail media is also firmly within his sights.
“When Amazon.ie comes online that will be a game-changer for Irish clients.”
The group continues to benefit from its 2018 move to break down the silos between its different practices.
“We have had some [media] clients who have been with us for years asking us to pitch for their creative, and we have also won creative business on our own, with no connection elsewhere, and then they have appointed us subsequently to handle their media.”
Market entrant OUTsurance is a new creative client, while it is understood to have just added the media business for Sky Ireland to its existing creative work for the brand. L’Oréal has also come in on the media side – business it won through its international network.
French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, which long held a 16 per cent shareholding, increased that stake to 49 per cent a couple of years ago.
“We knew we wanted to be closer to them, and then they approached us and said they were interested in increasing their investment. We discussed it for a number of months and where we ended up was 49 per cent.”
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Still having control of the business is important as it gives Core the agility to make quick decisions, says Greene, who succeeded Alan Cox in 2022.
Right now, it is not just Core that is in expansion mode, but the Irish advertising market. At the start of 2024, Core forecast market growth of 4.1 per cent, but amid “a bit more optimism”, it has since revised that to 6.9 per cent, pencilling in growth of 9.7 per cent for digital, 2.6 per cent for television, 2.7 per cent for radio, 15 per cent for out-of-home and 17.8 per cent for cinema. Only print advertising is expected to decline.
“There were changes that happened during Covid to media consumption that will just never go back,” says Greene.
“The people who are say ‘well, nobody watches television’ have watched the match at the weekend. That still happens. But we see linear television continuing to drop,” he says. While Netflix, Disney Plus and Prime Video have yet to start selling advertising in the Republic, “it’s definitely coming”.
Online, Core uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools for brand safety: “We can’t have our clients’ messages appearing beside any offensive or damaging content. We don’t want to support it and also we can’t have it reflect on our clients’ brands.”
It books “very little, if anything at all” on Elon Musk’s X.
“It’s gone quite quickly, and that can be about brand safety but there has also been such a shift to other social media channels, particularly TikTok.”
As fitting for a company attuned to evolution in digital technology, Core has long embraced its capacity to improve its own workplace. While other businesses are busy rolling back Covid-era remote working practices, it maintains its decade-old flexible working policy.
This helps it reduce office occupancy costs, with Greene describing it as “a business must”, but it’s not only about costs. Workplace culture is a point of pride for Core, which has developed specific policies around both cancer and menopause.
“I think we all have to be a bit more reasonable and nicer to each other,” says Greene.
“One of the benefits of Covid is that people realised they didn’t have to show up to work as different people. I think the onus is back on employers now to create an environment where people can be themselves.”
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