The history of Launch

Find out more about this award-winning performance marketing agency, where we have come from, and where we’re going.

From a kitchen table to a happy, high-performing team

Launch began in the early 2010s, born from a simple need for flexibility and a belief that marketing should have impact. Our founder, Jaye Cowle, had just moved from London (where she led sales and marketing in luxury travel) and, like many in the South West, started out consulting, helping businesses to drive more impact from their marketing campaigns.

At the time Google Ads was one of the new kids on the block. It was a measurable way to grow revenue quickly with very little competition and not many experts were positioned to help with it.

What started as one person at a kitchen table grew into a small team, then into a fully-fledged performance marketing agency. We expanded across the region helping clients all over the world and today we call Bristol and Exeter home, serving clients across the UK, USA, Nordics and beyond.

We rent our brains to brilliant brands who want more impact from their campaigns.

Finding our purpose (and naming it)

As we grew, a question kept surfacing: why do we exist beyond PPC tactics and acronyms?

The reality is that an agency is just a collection of people.

The better the people, the better the agency.

Finding and retaining great talent in the industry could create the biggest impact for clients – and the common thread across it all was happiness.

Our team really thrived in our culture of high performance and strong support.

These were the seeds of a new ethos we named:

Powered by Happiness

Jaye and the team started to dig deeper into the psychology of workplace happiness, reading books like Dan Pink’s ‘Drive’, and Matt Phelan and The Happiness Index.

Happiness isn’t forced smiles; it’s creating the conditions for people to do their best work. It’s psychological safety, learning, curiosity, and the courage to tell the truth – especially when the numbers aren’t pointing up and to the right. It’s also about impact: choosing to help heritage brands and challenger brands build loyal customers, not just drive another discount campaign.

In 2023 we became a B Corp: to hard-wire people, planet, and community into how we grow.

Building with bricks: resilience by design

Jaye describes our journey with a Three Little Pigs metaphor:

• Straw: the fragile early years – plenty of grit, few foundations.
• Sticks: better systems, tested by the pandemic and rebuilt to be made stronger.
• Bricks: post-pandemic our purpose became our anchor, strengthened our skillset, codified culture, and meant we were built to last.

We’ve faced our share of “wolves”: from losing ~40% of clients in two weeks at the start of COVID, to the founder’s cancer diagnosis and recovery, to today’s turbulent economy. The difference now is structure: purposeful decision-making, strong management and a culture that tells the truth fast. That’s a house of bricks.

What this performance marketing agency does differently

We’re the Happy Performance Marketing Agency.

• Paid media: Google, Meta, Pinterest and more – designed to find the right customers.
• Conversion optimisation: turning interest into revenue through better journeys.
• Data and measurement: clarity on what’s working, where, and why.

Performance is the hard end of marketing – clicks, impressions, ROAS – yet we refuse to be “just paid media.” We aim for long-term, sustainable growth, balancing efficiency and effectiveness, and telling the brand story that builds loyalty.

Our happy performance marketing agency values (co-created with the team)

We codified what we stand for in four memorable behaviours:

1. Happy to Own It – autonomy, accountability, transparency when things go right and wrong.
2. Happy to Grow – mastery, feedback, and a growth mindset.
3. Happy to Play – connection, laughter, and the human moments that make great work possible.
4. Happy to Create Impact – meaningful work for brands that make a difference.

We practice these in the everyday: Friday “Good Vibes” shout-outs, anonymous Friday Pulse check-ins (celebrations, thanks, and frustrations), quarterly offsites, and weekly “Ribbit” chats pairing teammates who don’t usually work together.

Hybrid working has been our norm since before the pandemic and our rituals keep us close on the bad days as well as the good.

It’s in the tough decisions that values are tested.

We’ve even turned away misaligned work when it clashed with our values—commercially hard, culturally right.

Human-first, AI-enabled

We are unabashedly human-first. We use AI to free people for higher-value thinking – to make humans more human – not to strip the craft out of marketing.

That’s why we invest heavily in so-called “soft” (actually hard) skills: confidence, communication, conflict navigation, time mastery.

When the numbers dip (and sometimes they do), how we talk about them matters as much as what we do next.

Growing the right way – alongside our clients

We’ve grown from 7 people at the start of the pandemic to 30+ and counting with over £3m turnover helping over 40 clients with tens of millions paid media budgets a year.

A favourite recent milestone: partnering with Icelandair, a forward-thinking challenger brand. Seven of the team flew to Reykjavík to kick things off right as a volcano stirred. (Yes, we have the photos.)

It’s the perfect example of partnership: aligned values, shared ambition, and the appetite to do our best work together.

Milestones at a glance

• Early 2010s – Launch founded; consultancy roots → agency.
• South West expansion – Offices in Bristol and Exeter; hybrid by design.
• Pandemic (2020) – Revenue shock; resilience built through stronger systems and a shared purpose.
• Purpose named – Powered by Happiness becomes our North Star; our values codified.
• B Corp – Formalising people/planet/community commitments.
• Team growth – From 7 (2020) to 30+; low churn via culture, learning, and clear values.
• Recognition – Over 25 awards including BIMA Agency of the Year and multiple Drum Awards.
• Today – A happy, high-performing team helping purpose-led brands grow sustainably.

How we’ll shape the future of performance marketing

The world is changing fast – AI, attention, expectations.

Our bet is simple: put humans first, use technology wisely, measure what matters, and keep building with bricks.

We’ll continue to share our performance marketing learnings on stages, in playbooks, and at our own events because a stronger marketing community lifts everyone.

If that sounds like your kind of partnership, come and build the next chapter with us.