Adelaide’s KWP ditches the X and adds some partners
One of South Australia’s leading advertising and digital agencies has yet again changed its name, this time ditching the ‘X’ (blame Elon). It’s a move that CEO and chair David O’Loughlin told Business Insight signified a more unified future for the company.
When KWP acquired Digital Noir in 2021, it dropped the exclamation mark and added an ‘X’.
Now, having sold its media division to Atomic 212° in December 2024, it’s twisted the X slightly on its side to add a new bit of punctuation to its name, and a few more letters after that.
As of this month, the company goes by KWP+Partners, but don’t call it a rebrand, CEO and chair David O’Loughlin told InDaily – it’s a chance to show off the firm’s national footprint and shared ambition of the parts that make up the whole. This includes Clemenger (acquired in 2014), managing director Sam Davies’ Digital Noir and &Partners (a WA brand acquired in 2023).
When KWP! Acquired Digital Noir, O’Loughlin said the company wanted to take that deal to market “with a bit of fanfare”.
“What better way to do that than change a brand name?” he told InDaily.
“We didn’t want such an important change to go through to the keeper. That’s where the ‘X’ came from.
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“Now at the time, the X was before Elon got hold of it.”
Notably, in the past year the company – then called kwpx – sold its media division to a national player Atomic 212°.
O’Loughlin said this gave the team “the opportunity to re-evaluate the branding and reintroduce ourselves to the market”.
“When the opportunity came for us to look at our brand again, well the simplest thing was the ‘X’ had become a bit on the nose for obvious reasons,” he said.
“Our core brand is ‘KWP’. The ‘+Partners’ became a philosophical approach we could take. We’re not changing our business model. We’re not going to a partnership model, we’re saying that partnership is our ethos and belief system and a promise.
“We’ve been trading as KWP+Partners in WA, we’re going to a national brand which signals our intention to continue those cross-border raids into the East Coast and become a strong independent national company based in Adelaide.”
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KWP+Partners CEO David O’Loughlin. Photo: Supplied
It’s not just the name that’s changed, but the way KWP+Partners presents itself to the market that’s had a refresh.
The new message from the team is that ‘BORING NEVER CHANGED ANYTHING’; a theme they’re bringing into the future but also describes their campaigns across the years, including recent work for the RAA and Foodland.
“It’s about our tone of voice, our ambition and attitude,” O’Loughlin said.
“There’s one thing that’s happened to the market over the years that troubles me slightly, and that is a default to work that sometimes is designed to get a message out in its most simplest form, but doesn’t actually do anything emotionally or functionally move a customer into doing something.
“That really troubles me. As an industry, we’ve moved to sedate marketing in a lot of respects. Us taking that claim, or taking that position, that we believe boring never changed anything is a shot out to the market, our clients, and everyone in the market, to say that we need to be doing work that actually gets noticed more and more.”
Alongside the new name and redesign, KWP+Partners announced it signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Adelaide-based digital transformation consultancy Bailey Abbott which will give the former access to the latter’s clients.
In return, Bailey Abbott will get access to KWP+Partners’ creative communications agency to assist with brand development.
“Partnership is in our name for a reason – the best outcomes come from collaboration. This alliance with Bailey Abbott brings together complementary strengths to deliver smarter, more effective solutions for our clients,” O’Loughlin said.
Bailey Abbott CEO Tom Carlton said it was a “great example of complimentary South Australian brands working together to deliver exceptional customer outcomes.”
“With the current market changes, we are seeing a lot more work move to local, high-value delivery partners such as Bailey Abbott,” Carlton said.
“This strategic partnership will allow the Bailey Abbott Group to deliver end-to-end digital solutions for our customers and further position it as the premium local capability provider for IT Transformation and Data projects in South Australia.”
