Member Article

easyGroup reach for skies with business heritage video from Stone’s Throw Media

The history of the easyGroup family of brands has been featured in a video by Stone’s Throw Media in one of the leading digital agency’s most high profile projects to date.

The new video, published on the easyHistory website, covers the expansion of easyGroup, the private investment vehicle of easyJet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, from its early days in the 1990s through to its modern status as home to popular brands including vehicle hire business easyCar, storage company easyStorage and finance venture easyMoney.

As the video outlines, the history of easyGroup began in 1994 when entrepreneur Sir Stelios visited the United States and developed the idea of a “value for money” family of brands under the over-arching easy prefix starting with the easyJet airline, which revolutionised air travel in Europe.

Building on this high profile start, which captured the popular imagination by selling directly to the public, the business built its heritage through moving into bus travel with easyBus and then hotels with budget offering easyHotel. Today the easyGroup does business through more than 100 sub-brands, with 1200 trademarks registered worldwide along with 500 trade names.

As well as depicting key moments in the company’s history, the video shows how the easyGroup has been built around key values such as “great value”, “keep it simple” and “for the many not the few”.

Wolverhampton-based Stone’s Throw Media engaged with Sir Stelios on his vision for the company history video and had unrivalled access to the easyGroup archive. They also worked with the client to include third party footage including BBC news reports and national newspaper coverage which capture the times.

Working with easyGroup represents one of the highest profile projects to be delivered by Stone’s Throw Media to date. Stone’s Throw Media was launched in 2011 by founders Mike Chinn and Matt Weston after they met on a University of Wolverhampton media course.

Tony Anderson, Strategic Advisor for easyGroup, said Stone’s Throw had been a “very versatile” partner in delivering the project. Tony said: “The brief we set for this video was we really wanted a way to engage people and explain the heritage and the history of the easy family of brands and to do that in a reasonably concise and engaging way.

“We chose Stone’s Throw Media after going through a process of tender and reviewing the responses. We deliberately set out to choose an independent agency and one that we felt was progressive, innovative and could do the job that we set them.

“It was a pleasure to work with Mike and Matt and the guys at Stone’s Throw. We found it very easy to work with Stone’s Throw Media and the team were great, very versatile and we were very happy with the final outcome. I’d certainly be very happy to recommend Stone’s Throw Media to other people.”

The founders bill Stone’s Throw Media as being for clients “looking to grow” with video, animation and livestreaming events. Clients include leading brands such as Redrow, JLR and Wolverhampton Wanderers, while staffing grew to eight last year as revenues and profits grew to new highs.

Matt Weston said: “We are proud to have worked with such a prominent and exciting business in easyGroup, which has a history unrivalled in modern British business. It was empowering to be able to tell the easy story and to work with Sir Stelios and his key team on a video sharing their story was a highlight in the Stone’s Throw Media story to date.”

Mike Chinn said: “Having recently celebrated our own 10th birthday, Stone’s Throw has hit a new high in working with one of the best known brands in the UK and around the world. We were delighted to work with easyGroup and the whole team were thrilled to be able to partner such a well respected business. Everyone at Stone’s Throw is pleased with the end result so receiving such positive feedback from the client means a great deal to all of us.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chris Leggett .