JWT Melbourne: Mumbrella Creative Agency Review – Old school agency reinventing itself
The newly published Mumbrella Creative Agency Review examines Australia’s top 30 ad agencies. Today Robin Hicks examines how JWT Melbourne has fared over the last 12 months.
As international networks go in Australia, JWT’s Melbourne office is
one of the few that threatens to make a real impact on the market this year.
The bosses on Balmain Street are all too aware that JWT is – like the Sydney
office – lumbered with a reputation as an old school agency dependent on
internationally aligned clients and are keen to reinvent an agency that seems to have spent a while in the wilderness.
A new positioning should provide impetus to internal changes led by Michael Godwin, who joined the agency as MD from DDB less than a year ago. The ratio of local to international business is now a much healthier 50:50, with less reliance on globally aligned clients Ford, Shell and Kraft.
The management team of ECD Richard Muntz and planning head Angela Morris, with Sydney-based national CEO John Gutteridge in support, looks more like a force its rivals would be foolish to disregard. Hiring Josie Brown from P&G to run its digital department was an interesting appointment.
Creating what is probably one of the best campaigns of the year for Vegemite – which featured stories including a Darwin ice hockey club and a flying scientist – helped secure JWT’s place on the Kraft roster and, along with work for Ford and Melbourne Writers Festival, points to a much improved creative product.
JWT Melbourne’s performance in our survey reflects an agency with a poor image. However, the agency’s higher ranking in our expert panel survey compared to our reader survey suggests that the wider industry thinks JWT Melbourne is a worse agency than those privy to its inner goings on.
JWT gets its only top-20 rank in our survey for planning – thanks, perhaps, to its strategy-driven heritage – and client stability, which the Kraft reappointment affirms. But the agency should take heart from its next best position – momentum – which the repositioning will surely help. But there is still much to prove.
As one panellist notes: “New talented management teams makes JWT the multinational to watch at the moment. We will know in the next year what they are capable of.”
To read more about JWT Melbourne, including full details on how it was scored by both our expert panel and Mumbrella’s own readers, to view examples of the agency’s work and read its own assessment of its performance, buy a copy of the Mumbrella Creative Agency Review priced at $75. The book features an assessment of the country’s top 30 ad agencies. To buy the book, click here.
