Agency Reviews Decided at a Cost of Millions

To start we have one global client GSK who has decided to stick So after all the angst and grief of a pitch and the countless and very expensive hours spent both by agencies and client the decision is to leave things pretty well as they are Thus GroupM and Omnicom continue to share the business and add the recently acquired Novartis from Starcom Starcom having decided to withdraw at an early stageIt would be interesting to cost the amount of time spent by the client on leaving things as they are and comparing that cost with the nodoubt tougher terms negotiated with the two agency networks Iamp8217ve never known a client do such a costing exercise but the amount of time spent and disruption caused at the client end by pitching is huge Clients might be less inclined to go through the full process if they knew the cost to themselvesIt seems quite likely that GSK has spent thousands of hours getting a better deal out of their partner agencies although amp8220partneramp8221 seems the wrong word in the circumstances To compound the issue GSK is now according to Campaign proposing factoring services to all their agencies which will lose the agencies even more money as any factoring arrangement will of course paid be for by the agencies not the clientAnyway presumably in this case the client thinks the pain was worth itNext up a change likeforlike Mindshare has won the General Mills business from Zenith Congratulations are due to Mindshare who no doubt performed very well and certainly managed the AdAge coverage superblyThe fact is though and I certainly donamp8217t mean to diminish Mindshareamp8217s achievement General Mills has changed from one traditional media agency to another Itamp8217s hardly a fundamentally new approach although of course we canamp8217t know either the services offered by Mindshare nor the terms at which theyamp8217ve been offeredThe third result is rather more intriguing Citibank has decided to move their media business from GroupMamp8217s MEC and the Publicis agency Starcom to the agency One Citi Global created by Publicis to handle the bankamp8217s strategic creative and production needsIt sounds as if Citibank has ended up with a fullservice agency under the Publicis banner dedicated to its businessSo we have three results in the last few days One stays as is one moves from a traditional media agency to another one and one goes for a new model and new approachIf you put these results along with Cokeamp8217s decision to add Ogilvy to their media assignment there do seem to be some new models starting to emerge one of which looks a bit like a dedicated fullservice agency Back to the future indeedI said at the start of this rush of reviews that I felt the traditional network media agencies would be the net losersOnce one adds in Horizonamp8217s win of Hyundai an independent agency winning a huge account from one of the network giants to the Ogilvy and One Citi Global successes it seems that even though some or even many will stick rather than twist change is certainly in the windThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageMyersBizNet management or associated bloggers

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Agency Reviews Decided at a Cost of Millions

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Brian Jacobs

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

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Agency Reviews Decided at a Cost of Millions

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