Fourteen people who'd rather show you the numbers.
We started Neon Rocks because we were tired of watching good work get buried under account management. There are no account managers here. You talk to the person doing the job.
Two desks above a barber's
Danni and Owen met at a fifty-person agency in Leeds, where between them they ran nineteen accounts and met about four of the clients. In 2016 they took two of those clients, a redundancy payout and a room above a barber's shop on Tib Street, and started again.
The rule then was the same as the rule now: whoever pitches the work does the work. It's the reason we've turned down accounts we couldn't staff properly, and it's the reason we're fourteen people rather than fifty.
We've been in Ducie House since 2021. The barber is still going, and still cuts half the studio's hair.
- Founded
- 2016, Manchester
- Team
- 14, all in the studio or within an hour of it
- Clients
- 27 on retainer, plus project work
- Smallest
- A two-person ceramics studio in Stockport
- Biggest
- A DTC brand turning over £31m
- Partners
- Google Partner, Meta Business Partner, Shopify Partner
- Longest client
- Nine years and counting
- Dogs
- Two, both badly behaved
Who you'll be dealing with
Founder & MD
Danni Vaughan
Runs the paid accounts she started the company with, and refuses to stop. Fifteen years in performance marketing, most of them spent arguing with attribution models.
Creative Director
Owen Mercer
Brand, naming and the reason our work doesn't look like everyone else's. Previously in-house at a drinks brand you've definitely walked past.
Head of Paid Media
Kwame Boateng
Google, Meta and an unhealthy enthusiasm for feed optimisation. Has personally managed more ad spend than the rest of us combined.
Head of SEO
Sofia Ricci
Technical audits, migrations and the patience to explain why a rebuild broke your rankings. Speaks four languages, three of them to search engines.
Social Lead
Jess Latham
Shoots, edits and posts. Built a doughnut shop's following from 900 to 140,000 in eighteen months, which she will mention.
Senior Developer
Ryan Whitlow
Builds the sites and keeps them fast. Cares about Core Web Vitals to a degree that occasionally worries the rest of us.
Four things we won't budge on
Whoever pitches, does
The person in your first meeting is the person in your account. If we can't staff it properly, we'll tell you rather than hire around it.
Your accounts are yours
Ad accounts, analytics, domains, the lot — in your name, on your billing. If you leave, you leave with everything. We've inherited too many hostage situations to run one.
We report on money
Impressions are not a result. Every monthly report leads with revenue, leads or bookings, and we'll say plainly when a month was poor.
Rolling contracts
Thirty days' notice, always. If we're worth keeping we shouldn't need a twelve-month tie-in to prove it.
Come and see the studio
Ducie House, two minutes from Piccadilly. There's decent coffee and a dog who will sit on you.