“After more than 20 years in media, I've got a pretty good idea of what I'd keep. And an even better idea of what I'd change.”
Cath Offord Founding Partner, Bicycle Manchester
I've spent my career inside agencies. I've bought media, led teams, worked alongside clients and held senior commercial roles. I've spent plenty of time at the table where the big decisions get made.
I've seen this industry at its best. Great people, great thinking and work that can genuinely transform a business.
But I've also been around long enough to know that how you do things matters just as much as what you do.
What needs to change
For too long, broadcast has been treated as expensive, broad and difficult to measure. Something you graduate into when you're ‘big enough’. Something that sits in a box marked ‘brand’ while performance marketing lives in a different box entirely.
That thinking is out of date.
I see something different happening. Ambitious growth businesses are asking a harder question: What gets us to the next stage? And I believe broadcast bought smart, planned carefully, measured rigorously; is the answer.
With proper data, tighter targeting and real accountability, you can use broadcast differently. Test it. Learn from it. Prove what works. Scale when the evidence says you should.
It brings together two worlds that have spent far too long pretending they're opposites: performance and brand.
How we do it
But here's what I've learned: smart planning isn't just about the maths. It's about the people doing it and the culture that shapes how they think.
I don't want to build another agency where culture is something written on a wall. I want to build a place where good people can do work they're proud of, be themselves, have a voice and genuinely enjoy being part of it.
Where we tell clients what we really think. Where they feel like we're on their side, not simply servicing an account.
That's not nice to have. It's fundamental to better work.
Why Manchester. Why now.
I'm fiercely proud of the North. Of the businesses being built here, the talent that lives here and that very Northern combination of ambition, creativity, graft and straight talking.
For too long, Northern businesses have been made to feel that the clever answer lives somewhere else. That when they reach a certain size or ambition, they need to look to London.
I don't buy that.
Manchester doesn't need a satellite version of somebody else's agency. And Northern businesses shouldn't have to leave the North to access the very best thinking, talent or opportunity.
We can build it here.
And I wanted to build it here with partners who understood that. Bicycle gave me that freedom: to build something that felt genuinely mine and genuinely Manchester, but with serious capability behind it from day one.
The power of AND, again.
More open. More accountable. More curious. Less politics. Less ego. More trust. More humanity.
That's what Bicycle Manchester is.
Cath Offord
Founding Partner, Bicycle Manchester