Same audience problem. Different creative pocket.
Premiership Rugby needed fresh reach without losing the codes of an established brand, and without ending up with the same shortlist as every other rights-holder.
Outcome: Two-year agency contract
The brief
The challenge was reach without repetition. New audiences meant new insight and a genuinely fresh top-of-funnel approach, but the work still had to sit inside Premiership Rugby’s existing brand codes.
The harder constraint was competitive. Sukh had already tried the obvious names. He asked DCA to find a creative partner his competitors did not already have on their radar.
Every agency will tell you they can do everything. What I needed was someone who was confident enough to say no — and to say no to me, too, when the brief was wrong.
The process
DCA ran a curated pitch rather than an open call. The shortlist focused on independent agencies that could meet the brief without falling back on the familiar category roster.
DCA stayed in the room as a neutral third party, pressure-testing both sides. The brief itself was challenged and sharpened before it reached the pitch room, and agencies were assessed on the people who would actually do the work rather than the breadth of a capability deck.
Going into a pitch normally feels like you’re doing it blind. This felt like working with a recruiter who genuinely understood both sides of the table — what we needed, and what the budget and stakes actually meant.
Why it worked
The agency Premiership Rugby signed was not the safest name on the list. It was the one willing to push back on the brief and treat the relationship as a shared problem to solve.
- No echo chamber The search was designed to get outside the same recommendations already circulating through the category.
- Care over capacity The process looked at the attention and seniority behind the work, not simply how many services an agency could claim.
- Neutral judgement DCA did not earn a success fee from the match, so the job was to improve the decision rather than push a particular agency.
The outcome
Premiership Rugby signed the matched agency to a two-year contract. The selected partner was deliberately outside the traditional agency defaults and was not shared with a direct competitor.
The proof is not that DCA surfaced the most famous name. It is that the process helped the client make a different, more confident choice.
Sukh Sadhra, Premiership Rugby
