DORSET’S digital and creative scene has seen a “stutter” and needs to invest in strategy to see off competition from other areas.

That’s the view of one leading figure in the sector, Daniel Ward-Murphy, strategy director at Poole design agency Salad.

He said: “The explosion of the Bournemouth agency scene is, in the main, still a continuing, successful journey.

“There has been a stutter with some redundancies at a few of the larger agencies recently and a recruitment freeze at others, plus experience tells us that marketing budgets are always the first thing to be cut in a recession, and considering Brexit alongside historical trends, you would have to say there is a decent chance of this now.

“So we have to be cautious and a ‘good news, good news’ only narrative would have to be viewed as misrepresentative but we have seen a continued expansion of the freelancer and micro/small agency scene, which suggests buoyancy to an extent.”

The sector employs more than 15,000 people locally and is worth £352million in gross added value, according to the 2017 Tech Nation report. The equivalent report in 2015 said Bournemouth and Poole had the fastest-growing digital economy in the country.

Although Dorset’s digital and creative agencies can boast of working with major brands, Mr Ward-Murphy said they “typically do one piece of a large jigsaw”.

He said: “It might be one website, one development project, one app. We can carry on doing that as community, and we will, but digital talent pools will grow elsewhere and we may have increased competition for this work.”

He said some clients preferred a single agency doing all their strategy, branding, advertising campaigns and more.

“So if we are not sometimes playing the role of a lead strategic agency or a lead strategic/creative agency then we don’t get to play a bigger role in the conversations for brands,” he said.“It is these strategic conversations that shape what work is needed and then selects who does the work. It’s the way we get more gravitas down here as well as a larger piece of the pie.”

Salad has hired two strategists, at senior and middleweight level, from a local pool which Mr Ward-Murphy said consisted of only 5-10 people. He moved to the company last year from Bournemouth agency Thinking Juice, where he was a board director, and has been joined by Annie Hall.