After ten years of working together, Emperor has taken a minority stake in exceptional™, marking the next chapter in a relationship that started, somewhat unusually, in a gym changing room.
It is a significant moment for both businesses, but also a natural evolution of a partnership that has been developing for the past decade.
Emperor is one of the UK’s leading employee-owned corporate communications agencies, with around 300 people working across reporting, sustainability, brand, employee engagement, digital, campaigns and stakeholder communications.
exceptional™ specialises in digital marketing for B2B and corporate organisations, with expertise across AI Search, SEO, paid media, social media, analytics and digital strategy.
Together, the two businesses have spent the past ten years working alongside one another for some of the UK’s largest organisations.
And it all started with a fitness class!
In 2016, exceptional™ founder Iain Scott was already a decade into running the agency, then known as Base Creative. Alongside agency life, he also taught a weekly fitness class with one of the regular attendees was Emperor founder Steve Kemp.
After several months in which the majority of their conversations involved instructions to squat lower or lift heavier, the pair eventually discovered what each other did for a living. They swapped business cards in the changing room. That led to a coffee, the coffee led to a referral, the referral led to a project, and that project developed into a partnership that has now lasted ten years.
One of the earliest mutual clients was energy infrastructure company Smart Metering Systems, which later became an exceptional™ client in its own right and remains one today.
The impact of that original introduction has spread much further.
People moved organisations. Clients recommended the agency to other clients. Relationships developed into new opportunities. A surprisingly large part of the exceptional™ business today can ultimately be traced back to that first meeting in 2016.
As Iain puts it:
“Around 90 per cent of our revenue today can be traced back, one way or another, to that gym in 2016. People moved companies, clients referred clients, but it all started with Steve turning up to class.
“I went from telling him to squat lower to planning a shared future for our agencies.”
The investment comes at a point when the worlds of corporate communications and digital marketing are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.
Over the past decade, annual reports have evolved into sophisticated digital experiences. Corporate communications has expanded across websites, social platforms, search engines and multiple stakeholder channels.
Now another significant shift is underway: the way people find and understand organisations is changing as tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude become part of everyday research and decision-making.
Investors, customers, journalists, employees and other stakeholders are no longer relying solely on Google or a company’s own website. Increasingly, they are asking AI systems questions and receiving synthesised answers about companies, sectors and issues.
That means organisations need to think not only about what they communicate, but whether that information can actually be found, understood and accurately represented across both traditional search engines and AI platforms.
This is where the capabilities of Emperor and exceptional™ increasingly intersect.
Emperor brings deep expertise across corporate reporting, sustainability, brand and stakeholder communications, while exceptional™ brings specialist expertise across AI Search, SEO, paid media, social, analytics and digital strategy.
The investment allows both businesses to work together more closely as these disciplines continue to converge.
Steve Kemp, founder of Emperor, explains:
“We’ve spent ten years proving that two specialists collaborating beats one generalist trying to do everything.
“Our clients increasingly need corporate communications and digital discoverability to work as one, especially as AI changes how companies are found, and this investment means we can plan that together over the long term.”
For exceptional™, the investment comes during another important period of change. The agency was founded in 2006 and operated as Base Creative for its first two decades.
In January 2026, on its twentieth anniversary, it became exceptional™, reflecting a sharper focus on B2B and corporate organisations, particularly across listed companies, financial and professional services, technology and clean energy.
The agency has also continued to develop its capabilities around AI Search, sometimes referred to as GEO, helping organisations understand and improve how they appear within AI-generated answers alongside their existing search visibility.
The partnership with Emperor gives exceptional™ the opportunity to bring that expertise into larger corporate communications programmes, while allowing Emperor to provide clients with deeper specialist digital marketing capability.
But the investment is not an acquisition or an exit. exceptional™ remains independent, retaining its own brand, leadership, culture and clients.
For Iain, that distinction matters.
“This investment isn’t an exit. It’s the next stage in building one of the UK’s leading specialist corporate digital marketing agencies.”
The business card exchanged in a changing room in 2016 has already travelled a surprisingly long way.
Ten years later, the next part of the journey is beginning.