The Soba: Private Label story

An agency-to-agency copy shop founded by senior marketers, designed to make agencies unforgettable.

Across our careers we’ve worked with hundreds of agencies, and noticed one thing:

They all look and sound the same.

This made it harder to consider them for projects, and easier to pass them up.

We started Soba to help make agencies unforgettable, generate more business for them, and allow them to move away from a referral based income model.

Meet the team

Seb Mackay
Creative Director

Dan Campbell
Managing Partner

  • Seb is one half of the managing partner duo, and has held multiple senior end-to-end marketing roles. His copy and campaigns have marketed cybersecurity products to Fortune 500 companies and governments, newspaper advertising packages to SMEs, and conversational AI solutions to the world’s biggest BPOs, among many other things. 

    He has more than a decade in the trenches, where he’s managed and built teams and marketed international products across APAC, North America and EMEA. 

    Seb firmly believes in three things: that B2B marketing doesn’t need to be boring; copywriting should sell; and that even numbers are superior to odd ones.

  • Dan is the other half of the managing partner team. He’s marketed FMCG and luxury items, as well as designing in-person experiences for household brands.

    With 10 years of marketing and copywriting experience at businesses including Unilever and Reach plc, Dan has spent his career actively trying to experience as much of the industry as he can while staying true to his core skillset of telling engaging product stories and delivering quality campaigns. He’s managed brands and product launches across the UK and worldwide, and lives by just two principles: people shop emotionally and justify rationally, and Iggy Pop is not a real punk. Sorry.

We’re big believers that origin stories don’t have to be boring or predictable.

We cut our industry teeth hiring and working with digital marketing agencies.

They were agencies that were lovely and talented but were struggling to stand out, and we thought to ourselves, “there must be a way we can help them.”

On a trip to the local ramen shop, we came up with a simple concept: bottle what makes us great marketers and agency wranglers, and ship it out to agencies across the land, so they could tap into our creativity and experience, and embrace our philosophy of radical change to make their agencies stand out from the crowd.

We called it Soba: Private Label.

Soba is a core ingredient in Japanese cooking that’s well known for its adaptability. Because it’s handmade (and still is, to this day) it’s built on a foundation of care and expertise.

Private Label is drawn from a rich history going back as far as the 1800s, when retailers purchased premium products from suppliers to sell under their own brand.

So, you know that we treat your agency as though it were our own and because we never take on more than five clients at a time, you know we’re dedicated to taking care of you.

It was the perfect combination.

Adaptability, care, and expertise meet exclusivity and premium quality to create Soba: Private Label.

Get in touch

Fancy a hot bowl of ramen or sharing your secret yakisoba recipe?

Hell, you could even get in touch about advertising, copy, and content that will land you more clients.

Just send through an email telling us what you need and we’ll set up a call to see how we can help.