Beyond's CEO Zaid Al-Zaidy is challenging the fragmented agency landscape with a model that defies traditional industry silos. In an era where brands struggle to tell coherent stories across increasingly complex customer journeys, his vision offers a compelling alternative to the status quo.
“There are no independent agencies that are credible in media, creative, technology and innovation to the extent that we are," Al-Zaidy explains. "As a company, we’ve spent over 10 years building expert capabilities within a single company framework; we believe that this is the only way to develop creative commerciality that can set brands free and, when it comes to doing it, we are in a market of one.”
It's a bold claim in today's saturated agency landscape, but one that seeks to address a persistent challenge for marketers: how to unleash a brand’s biggest creative and commercial potential, in a world of major complexity and competition, when budgets may be getting bigger but never feel enough, due to the extreme fragmentation of media.
From Above and Beyond to something genuinely different
Beyond's journey began in 2016 when Al-Zaidy joined advertising agency Above & Beyond with a vision to create something more comprehensive. Drawing on his experience at Unilever, where he coordinated teams of experts to curate singular brand stories, he recognised that the traditional agency model was failing clients.
"In the age of fragmented media and consumer control and technology, brands were struggling to tell their story in a simple, coherent way," he reflects. "The industry setup was not helpful."
The solution was to build best-in-class capabilities across creative, media and strategy, working with clients like Avon on global repositioning, Subway on managing 2,000 franchises, and brands like Interflora and Shelter on media. Now, they've dismantled the founding agency brands to create a truly integrated offering under the Beyond name.
While network agencies increasingly assemble cross-agency teams for pitches, Al-Zaidy argues these rarely deliver a cohesive experience: "They're pulling people together across P&Ls, company cultures and reporting lines, and they never really feel like a single experience."
Mobilising brands from the inside out
Beyond's approach is perhaps best illustrated by their work with Alzheimer's Research UK, where they helped establish a clear brand position around "For A Cure", differentiating the organisation from other dementia charities and within the charity sector as a whole.
"It was a double challenge," Al-Zaidy explains. "Trying to get the UK’s no.1 killer the attention it deserves and for it to stand-out within the dementia category as a whole.”
What's particularly notable about this work wasn't just the emotional advertising that "made people cry and take action," but the comprehensive approach to brand transformation. The agency mobilised the organisation from the inside out, ensuring everyone from the CEO lobbying in parliament to volunteers organising cake sales understood and used the new positioning to inform the entire marketing system and company tone and behaviour.
"We wanted the CEO when they were lobbying in the corridors of parliament to use the new language. We wanted the PR comms person to be on Breakfast TV using the language. We wanted to elevate the scientists and put their work at the core of the brand," Al-Zaidy says.
This holistic approach delivered results that extended beyond traditional marketing metrics, with the work being featured on BBC One Breakfast Show and entering popular culture, generating greater impact and returns than budgets would normally achieve.
Building a culture of optimism and entrepreneurialism
Beyond's culture is built around values that directly support their integrated approach. Optimism tops the list, which is essential when helping clients transform their businesses with limited time and resources.
"Every organisation has a founding set of principles and ambition that are all too often lost in the complexity of the real world,” Al-Zaidy notes. "We are here to unlock a brand’s biggest potential, to go beyond the boundaries of what is ordinarily possible, to give brands their unfair advantage. To do this, we need to come to work ‘positive and optimistic’ everyday, in the belief that brands can be set free and that transformative change is possible.”
Curiosity is another core value: "This isn’t a cliche: if you stop asking questions, you can end up solving the wrong problem."
When recruiting, Beyond looks beyond impressive CVs featuring big brands. Al-Zaidy seeks people who "want to create opportunity" rather than those who have "had opportunity served on a plate, walking into established client-agency relationships, where marketing strategies, plans and budgets have already been signed-off.”
Respecting the role of every brand asset
In an industry often fixated on big campaigns and major brand repositionings, Al-Zaidy emphasises the importance of every touchpoint in the customer journey.
"Every moment in a brand’s experience has its place and within it is an opportunity to create a brand value and an advantage versus the competition," he insists. "If you're buying a new television and you're at the end of that purchase cycle, the stage where you’ve reduced your research list to a couple of candidate products, as much as price and promotion is key, a useful well crafted product demo film can be the thing that clinches the deal. Whilst this may not be the brief that excites the most seasoned of creative directors, it is the one that can make the biggest commercial difference to a business.”
This perspective reflects a deeper understanding of how modern consumers interact with brands, through countless micro-moments rather than just flagship campaigns. It's about "respecting the role that every asset has in the marketing food chain and treating it with the due level of respect."
Quality at every level
In creating this integrated model, Al-Zaidy has been careful not to sacrifice expertise in any discipline. "Our team have worked across many disciplines and on high-calibre brands, in high-calibre specialist agencies," he emphasises. “We want to blend the best talent to deliver the best outcomes.”
"We never wanted clients to question the quality of what we do, because we have no interest in becoming a one-stop shop; we have every interest in curating inspiring and effective brand experiences that delight the consumer, the CMO and the CFO in equal measure.”
This commitment to quality is backed by industry recognition across disciplines—from D&AD Pencils for creative work to Thinkbox TV Planning Awards and OOH awards for media, alongside the company’s IPA Effectiveness Accreditation for its media capabilities.
The integration imperative
As brands continue to struggle with fragmented consumer journeys and the challenge of telling coherent stories across an oversaturated media landscape, Beyond's integrated approach offers a compelling solution, particularly for those brands that find themselves underserved by traditional agency models.
"Brands of today need to be built differently to those of the past, and yet the industry that supports them isn’t set up to help them succeed," Al-Zaidy observes. "Challenger brands with twice the spirit and half the budget of the category no.1, need to go to market in new and disruptive ways. We’re their ideal partner. Dusty icons, brands that used to lead the category but have been pummelled by innovators and who can’t keep up with the digital era and speed of market, need to reinvent the way they operate. We’re their ideal partner.”
Al-Zaidy insists that Beyond’s secret sauce is not merely through the combination of media and creative thinking, it is in the ability to power-up brands to realise their maximum value in the short term, to rewire brands for longer term growth and to leverage creativity to new spaces for commercial growth. “It is our assembly of world-class talent, skills, technology and culture that allows us to uniquely help a new generation of brands thrive,” Al-Zaidy says.
Beyond's model represents a significant evolution in how agencies might better serve brands in an increasingly complex marketing environment.
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