LONDON — Jim Hawker, the founder of 20-year-old brand and performance marketing agency Threepipe, is leaving the firm next month.

Hawker founded Threepipe in 2004 as a traditional PR agency, before merging the company with a paid media agency and acquiring creative agency Earnie and an SEO agency. He then oversaw the creation of new teams to capture rising media spend across retail media and marketplaces.

By 2019, Threepipe was a 100-strong business working with B2B and consumer scale-up and challenger brands, providing growth marketing services across PR, social, paid media, SEO, marketplaces and data science.

That year, Threepipe was sold to global technology consulting firm, Reply, based in Italy. Over the past four years Hawker has been responsible for senior client counsel and business development, and completed the earnout period at the end of 2023.

Hawker told PRovoke Media: “I’ve spent the last 12 years upskilling myself in performance marketing and building out digital teams, but I’m looking forward to ‘coming home’ to the PR industry where it all started. In the short term I’m taking on some advisory work for agencies and brands with a focus on driving growth, while I figure out next steps.”