ABOUT THEY SAID

We know what a story is. We've been on both sides of it.

They Said exists because of an unfair advantage. Our founder, Fayola Douglas, trained as a journalist before she was anything else - an MA in Journalism at City, University of London, followed by BBC London and London Live newsrooms, where you learn fast what is and isn't a story because the audience tells you instantly.

From the newsrooms, she went into the publication every marketing agency wants to be in. Campaign Magazine taught her the codes from the editorial side of the glass: which pitches get opened, which run, which become features, which die in the inbox at 4pm on a Tuesday.

Then she crossed over. At Amplify, and as a consultant for other agencies and brands since, she has run thought leadership programmes, trade coverage and expert profiles - years on the agency side of the same conversations she used to commission.

The most measurable line of that work is awards. She didn't make the campaigns that won - she wrote the cases for them. Category strategy, case-study development, entries built to jury standard. That work has earned 17 industry wins and 34 shortlists for the agencies and brands she's served. The wins were theirs; the arguments that earned them were hers.

The work kept proving the same thing: agencies are full of brilliant opinions that never leave the building. They Said is the company built to get them out.

It's an unusually full 360°: a formal journalism training, the newsrooms where stories get made or killed, the trade title that decides which ones run, and the agency side that has to get there. Most consultancies have one of those angles. They Said is built on all four.