Dentsu Aegis consolidates PR brands into two ‘super’ brands as part of BWM Dentsu
BWM Dentsu Public Relations Australia management team: Paul Williams, Tim Powell and Cox Inall Communications managing director Lucy Broad
Dentsu Aegis Network is consolidating its PR agencies into two national “super” PR brands as part of BWM Dentsu, Mumbrella can reveal.
Haystac will represent the consumer side of the business, absorbing the Pop Agency and content business, Spark, while Cox Inall will be the agency’s specialist PR brand – absorbing Haystac Community.
Current managing director of Cox Inall Communications, Tim Powell, has been appointed to the new role of managing director of BWM Dentsu Public Relations Australia and will lead the two brands.
BWM Dentsu Group CEO, Paul Williams, told Mumbrella: “BWM Group did a deal with Dentsu about 14 months ago and we’ve been looking at a raft of different ways to build our scale.
“We had three PR brands within our PR suite and Dentsu Aegis Network had three brands as well. We looked at it, thinking about the opportunities and requirements in the PR space and this strategically made a lot of sense.
“What we decided to do was take the brands and the power brands within the Dentsu network and take the highly 
successful business that we had within the BWM Group and bring them together into two power brands.
“The first being Haystac in the consumer space, and Haystac is a long standing, highly-respected business in that consumer space and we’ll bring BWM consumer brands together on that.
“The other is Cox Inall, which has been going for more than 25 years; long-established, experienced teams and a brand leader in a number of specialist verticals.
“That’s going to be our specialist PR agency – concentrating on those special verticals – and they are going to be the two brands we lead PR with.”
Powell says the restructure gives the PR network scale and heft.
“The Dentsu Aegis Network has some very big businesses that deal with some big clients. This gives us a PR offering which has national scale and a lot of heft,” he said.
“We can muscle up with BWM Dentsu or Carat, or whoever else the solution is, and we all have the heft and the depth to deliver whatever is on the table. There’s no client or project that we don’t have the capability to take on.”
Powell asserts no redundancies have taken place as a result of the restructure, with the two agencies having a total of 75 PR practitioners working across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.
“People are getting new business cards because people who were Haystac are coming Cox Inall, people who were Pop are becoming Haystac, and people who were Spark are becoming Haystac Content,” Powell explained.
“There’s been a bit of a restructure. As I’m the MD of the whole business I’ve shifted a few roles around to make sense of the new business. Jason Carnew who ran Pop for me has a new role with Haystac.”
The restructure has also seen managing director of Haystac and Spark Communications, Patrick O’Beirne resign once it was clear Haystac would be a “pure play” consumer agency under BWM Dentsu. He has since joined Six O’Clock Advisory as a director.
The consolidation of the PR brands into Haystac and Cox Inall will see the two agencies work closer with creative agency BWM Dentsu.
“Being part of the Dentsu Aegis network we are now aligning to their operating model, which provides big, specialist skills in each of the verticals and brings those skill-sets into a close, collaborative team around clients’ problems,” Williams said.
“In doing this, it allows us to build one of the larger creative, PR business in Australia. We’ll be working very closely together around bespoke clients and bespoke client problems. You always bring together the teams that are right for a given problem on a regular client brief.
“In some cases it will be not at all and in other cases it will be tightly orchestrated, depending on the client.”
Lucy Broad has taken on the managing director role of Cox Inall. A managing director of the expanded Haystac business is yet to be appointed, with Powell covering this position at this stage.
Miranda Ward
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Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Perfect example of why PR Agencies are not worth using particularly when they can’t brand themselves properly.
BWM Dentsu: Few people, dyslexic or not, aren’t going to read the first three letters as the name of a luxury car brand, so it involves some additional mental energy to pronounce and remember that correctly.
#fail
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Haystac really took a dive when the guys who started it left. Hopefully the new managers can lift its reputation up again.
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Cox Inall?!? Is this April fools day?!
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Could they make this a little more difficult to follow….thanks!
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Major English Major,
just checking you know that BWM have been in the advertising and marketing industry for close to 20 years now?
perhaps their success is attracting clients and staff with spare more mental capacity than you?
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If it smells like a super brand. And the CEO days it’s a super brand, well gosh darn it, it must be a bloody super brand.
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