The performance agency for ambitious hospitality brands.
A new chapter in performance.
Three principles that shape every engagement.
Outcomes over impressions
Clicks and reach are signals, not goals. We optimise for the metrics your finance team actually cares about: covers, rooms, events and revenue.
Raised in hospitality
We plan around service patterns, seasons and openings, because we have lived them. Covers and GP, never impressions.
Performance with taste
Growth should never cheapen the brand. We bring an insider's judgement for how restaurants, hotels and venues need to be presented, so the work performs and the brand keeps its standing.
We partner with restaurant groups, hotels and venues to turn advertising spend into booked covers, occupied rooms and revenue you can see. Built lean, run senior, and raised inside hospitality.
NovaStory was founded on a simple idea: hospitality deserves performance marketing built around the way rooms actually fill. Most agencies treat restaurants, hotels and venues like ecommerce stores with menus, and the results show it. Reports full of clicks, dining rooms no fuller than before.
We started NovaStory to change that. We work with a small number of ambitious groups, hands-on, with a senior team that grew up in this industry. The goal isn't a glossy report: it's booked covers, occupied rooms and confirmed events, traced to their source, reconciled at the till.
We call it creating new stories of growth. Our clients call it the partnership they wish they'd found years ago.
Lean team, serious numbers.
Notes from the founder
How we partner.
The story so far.
The book stays open.
Want to see what a story of growth looks like for your brand?
Your team, extended
We work like your in-house performance team: at WhatsApp distance, in your venues, around your trading calendar. Not a monthly PDF in your inbox.
Senior, hands-on
The people you meet are the people running your campaigns, every day. No layers, no handoffs to a junior after the pitch.
Accountable to the till
We report what the POS says, not what the platforms predict. When something isn't working, you hear it from us first, with the fix already in motion.
Built around your calendar
We plan around service patterns, seasons and openings, because we have lived them, so the work fits how you actually trade.
The floors
Before the agency, hospitality: services worked, openings survived, quiet Tuesdays felt. The industry got into us first.
The generalist years
We built our craft running paid media for service brands of every kind, and kept noticing the same thing: agencies reporting clicks to operators who count covers.
The first table
A referral brought us a much-loved London restaurant group. We did what we'd always done, measured in what they actually cared about. The results made the decision for us.
Word of mouth
No launch moment, no big pivot announcement. Just trust compounding: one brand grew into more, one champion opened the next door. Every hospitality client we have arrived by recommendation.
The wider room
Dining rooms became work clubs, chalets and venues, from Soho to Miami to the French Alps. Different rooms, same craft and obsession.
CoverStory
Years of hand-built attribution modelling became first-in-class software: every booking traced to its marketing source, reconciled against the POS.
I grew up in London's hospitality scene. A chef from a young age, I came up through some of the city's most enjoyed kitchens and eventually ran my own pass. Years of service taught me the industry's uncomfortable truth: even the best food in the country still needs people through the door.
So I crossed to the other side of the food business. At Publicis Group I worked within the paid social team for brands like Jack Daniel's, Cadbury and Chambord, then spent some time fixing other agencies' media approach, always with the same methodology: optimise for value, not volume. Everywhere I looked, restaurants, hotels and venues had been handed the embers of an ecommerce playbook that was never built for them.
NovaStory is what I built instead: a team fluent in hospitality across paid media, search and AI-era optimisation. And because we spent years asking every attribution tool on the market whether it worked for hospitality and watching them stumble, we built our own. CoverStory follows a guest from their very first click, whether that's a PR feature, a paid social ad, an AI search answer or a Google click, through the booking and all the way to the bill at the restaurant. For the first time, revenue at the till points back to the marketing that earned it, and every channel gets the credit it deserves.
The engagement is built to feel like an extension of your business, not a supplier at the end of an email chain.
Meet the founder.
Tom founded NovaStory after years inside some of the country's biggest ad agencies, working with great people on big ideas - but inside rigid systems built for everyone but service brands. NovaStory is the agency he wanted to work with: transparent, nimble, outcome-focused, and built around how hospitality-led businesses actually grow. Today NovaStory partners with ambitious hospitality, commercial property and service brands hungry for a more thoughtful, involved and commercially aligned approach to paid advertising and performance marketing - one that turns spend into the business outcomes that matter most.