A team of fourteen who let the results speak.
Planet 9 exists because we'd had enough of seeing strong work lost beneath layers of account management. Here, you deal directly with the person doing the work.
Where it started
Danni and Owen first worked together at a fifty-strong agency in Farringdon. Between them they looked after nineteen accounts, yet met only around four of those clients. In 2010 they left with two of those clients, a redundancy payment and a rented room above a barber's on Rivington Street, and began again.
Our founding rule hasn't changed since: the person who pitches the work is the person who does it. It's why we've said no to accounts we couldn't staff properly, and why we've stayed at fourteen people instead of fifty.
Today you'll find us at 21 Bennetts Hill in central Birmingham. The barber's is still trading.
- Founded
- 2010 (incorporated on 24 June)
- Studio
- 21 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham
- Team
- 14, all working from the studio or living within an hour of it
- Clients
- 27 on retainer, alongside project work
- Smallest
- A ceramics studio in Walthamstow run by two people
- Largest
- A direct-to-consumer brand with a £31m turnover
- Partners
- Google Partner, Meta Business Partner and Shopify Partner
- Longest client
- Nine years, and still going
- Dogs
- Two, and neither is well behaved
The people you'll work with
Danni Vaughan
Founder and Managing Director
Still runs the paid accounts the business was founded on, and has no plans to hand them over. She brings fifteen years in performance marketing, much of it spent debating attribution models.
Owen Mercer
Creative Director
Leads brand and naming, and is the reason our work looks distinct from everyone else's. He was previously in-house at a drinks brand you'll almost certainly have walked past.
Kwame Boateng
Head of Paid Media
Specialises in Google and Meta, with a real passion for feed optimisation. He has personally managed more ad spend than the rest of the team put together.
Sofia Ricci
Head of SEO
Handles technical audits and migrations, and patiently explains why a rebuild knocked your rankings. She's fluent in four languages, three of which she uses with search engines.
Jess Latham
Social Lead
Shoots, edits and publishes. She grew a doughnut shop's following from 900 to 140,000 in eighteen months, and is always happy to tell you about it.
Ryan Whitlow
Senior Developer
Builds our sites and keeps them fast. His devotion to Core Web Vitals is, at times, a slight worry to the rest of us.
Four principles we stick to
The pitch team is the delivery team
Whoever you meet first is who runs your account. If we can't resource it properly, we'll say so rather than hiring to fill the gap.
You own your accounts
Ad accounts, analytics, domains and everything else sit in your name and on your billing. If you move on, all of it goes with you. We've taken over too many accounts held hostage to ever work that way ourselves.
Reports start with revenue
Impressions aren't results. Each monthly report opens with revenue, leads or bookings, and we'll be upfront when a month hasn't gone well.
No long tie-ins
Every contract runs month to month with thirty days' notice. If we're doing a good job, a twelve-month lock-in shouldn't be needed to prove it.
Visit us in Birmingham
We're at 21 Bennetts Hill in the city centre. The coffee is good, and one of the dogs may well try to sit on you.