When Tom Hostler quit his role as head of brand experience at Publicis•Poke in 2022, he also felt a sense of loss for the digital agency he’d helped bring into the world two decades earlier during the birth of the internet age. “I was very emotionally attached to Poke, having seen it grow from a tiny, scrappy startup with six of us in the basement of Mother through to being quite a creative force. But as the web has shape-shifted over time, the role for a digital specialism in an agency like that was waning,” he tells CR.

Having started his design career in the mid-90s, Hostler was behind some of the very first commercial websites for the likes of Apple and BBC before co-founding Poke in 2001 alongside Nicolas Roope, Nick Farnhill, Peter Beech, Iain Tait and Simon Waterfall. After the agency was acquired by Publicis Group in 2013, his focus turned to delivering complex digital products and creative tech experiences for brands such as EE.

Since leaving Publicis, he’s spent the last couple of years doing consultancy work for brands and agencies on the role of digital in their product and comms planning. Among them was Koto, the design studio founded in 2015 by Caroline Matthews, James Greenfield and Jowey Roden, which has since grown into a 100-person operation spread across offices in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney. “I’d admired them for years but from the moment I walked into the studio, it just felt like home. It looked like the places I’ve developed for myself in the past, and I could see that there was a gap here,” says Hostler.