Design Surrey did not start from nothing. It is twenty-five years of performance marketing and digital product work — Samsung, Vodafone, McDonald’s, Volkswagen, Accenture, Microsoft, the BBC — folded into a studio and pointed at businesses the size of yours. Same method. Same standards. A fraction of the budget.
Sites and campaigns
you have already used.
Work the studio’s people have been involved in — as marketing lead, advertising director or client-services lead, in-house and agency side, over twenty-five years. Some of it run directly, some of it steered from the agency side. All of it taught the same lesson: the discipline underneath does not change with the budget, only the size of the mistake.
Three disciplines, in the order the studio is strongest in them. Most firms claiming all three are good at one — these are the ones the twenty-five years above were actually spent on.
Paid media judged on what it returned, not what it reached — including advertising direction at Accenture on budgets running to £55 million and the EMEA launch of Meta’s business unit. The arithmetic does not change at £1,000 a month; only the size of the mistake does.
The part of this trade that has changed most in two years, and where the studio now does most of its best work. Systems that answer enquiries, book jobs, chase quotes and read invoices — and the judgement about which of them actually pay back.
Sites and interfaces at a scale where a tenth of a second is measured in revenue. Design systems, frontend performance and accessibility held to standard rather than to opinion.
The roles the method came out of. Global, in-house and agency side, before any of it was pointed at a business in Cobham.
Four specialist agencies — consultancy, interface design, development and a data, CRM and automation practice — made to read as one proposition across third sector, insurance and membership clients.
Media budgets to £55 million. The scale at which measurement stops being a report and starts being the thing the decision actually rests on.
On the EMEA launch of the business unit — building a commercial proposition and a team at the same time, in a market that did not yet have a category for it.
Marketing for the association behind Mobile World Congress — an audience of operators and manufacturers who are professionally difficult to impress.
A team of thirty-six across a continent of very different markets, media costs and levels of infrastructure. Where the habit of building for one bar of signal came from.
All of the above, folded into one team and pointed at established businesses in Surrey at a price they will actually pay. Founded and led by Daniel Martins, who takes every first call.
Four agencies,
one proposition.
Konekt Group brings four specialist agencies under one roof — consultancy, interface design, development and support, and a data, CRM and automation practice. It works with established brands on digital products and transformation programmes.
Head of Digital Marketing and Client Services across the group, a role now folded into this studio. Four agencies with genuinely different disciplines look like four suppliers to a client who only wants one — the job was to make them read as a single integrated proposition without flattening what each one is actually good at, and to make three quite different verticals, third sector, insurance and membership organisations, each feel deliberately served rather than incidentally covered.
Design Surrey is that structure scaled down: several disciplines, one number, one report at the end of the month. Automation sitting alongside design rather than bolted on afterwards is not a new idea — it is how the good groups have worked for years. It has simply never been offered to a business in Cobham at a price they would pay.
Interfaces for people
who count every second.
A digital interface agency in Shoreditch specialising in the user experience, design and frontend build of large-scale products. It sits on rosters for brands including Microsoft and the BBC, and joined Konekt Group in 2017 as its creative division.
At that scale a tenth of a second of load time and a badly placed form field are measured in revenue, not opinion. The discipline is unglamorous: performance budgets, accessibility to standard, design systems that hold across hundreds of screens, and interfaces tested against real behaviour rather than internal preference.
It is the reason this site is static HTML rather than a framework, why every build ships to WCAG 2.2 AA, and why we measure a prospect’s site before offering an opinion about their logo. The standards do not change because the client is smaller. Only the budget does.
The work above was made for organisations with marketing departments. The method underneath does not need one — that is the whole point of the studio. Half an hour on a call and you get a price and a date, not a proposal to wait for.
Daniel Martins takes a small amount of contract and consulting work alongside running Design Surrey — interim performance marketing leadership, AI automation builds and digital product work. Day rate or retained, remote or on site across London and the South East. Short engagements welcome; the useful ones usually start with somebody needing a specific number moved.