Mindshare’s Katie Rigg-Smith welcomes Aimee Buchanan, launches ‘Good growth’ proposition
WPP AUNZ has had significant structural changes in the last six months, with the most recent move of OMD Australia chief executive officer, Aimee Buchanan leaving Omnicom Group to take up GroupM’s CEO position.
As previously reported, Buchanan will join GroupM in October to lead the network of agencies including Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Essence, Neo and m/SIX and specialty media businesses including Finecast, Xaxis and Sightline.
Buchanan has been in the role at OMD since October 2016, taking over from Peter Horgan who stepped up to lead the wider Omnicom Group.
Speaking of Buchanan’s newly-appointed position, Mindshare’s CEO, Katie Rigg-Smith told Mumbrella that Buchanan’s arrival has been welcomed by clients and said she too has “an enormous amount of respect” for Buchanan, both as a CEO and friend.
“I have worked with and alongside Amy for a very long time in terms of being a competitive CEO, but I’ve had so much respect for her during that time. I think from a client level, they’ve been happy with Mindshare and understand that changes happen around the group, but that it’s more important for us to have a steady ship and to make sure that we were really consistent, because there were changes around us, but now that they can see that momentum coming in, and being injected from GroupM, they’re really genuinely looking forward to it.
“Wavemaker, MediaCom, Essence, are all doing exactly the same thing. What that means for us as a brand and what’s great is that Mindshare’s positioning very much links into GroupM’s positioning about making advertising better for people. And those two things complement each other,’ Rigg-Smith added.
Buchanan’s new role was vacated by Mark Lollback who left the business in March after five years in the position. Lollback was part of a string of changes at WPP AUNZ in the months leading up to the takeover by WPP Plc, which then saw CEO and managing director Jens Monsees step down.
Rigg-Smith explained that Mindshare has been particularly busy after winning a slew of new accounts recently.
“We’ve actually just been fortunate enough to win quite a lot of new business, in the likes of Jenny Craig, The University of Melbourne, Click Frenzy, Footlocker and Campari, so we’ve already got great clients that we’re getting to do some new work with. And then of course, with all of our clients, we’re having this discussion going forward about the good growth, what’s ethical, where their wide ambitions are, how do we help? How do we help facilitate that?” Rigg-Smith said.
“We have a job to do, in just delivering excellence as a brand. The new global positioning gets us to play with that. Locally, we have been playing for about six months with the vision and mission around helping our clients achieve their wildest ambitions.”
Rigg-Smith revealed Mindshare’s new ‘Good Growth’ proposition for its clients, saying it will provide more sustainable growth over time for its clients.
Mindshare’s CEO said of ‘Good Growth’: “What we’ve noticed is that nowadays there are more citizens that are connected by digital platforms than their own countries. The point of that is that we’re all rallying behind ‘things’ and people’s values transcend borders, and brands transcend borders. So, I think it’s a great positioning around ‘good growth’, that growth needs to come whilst being sustainable for the business and aligning to both the business values and the individual consumer values.
Rigg-Smith added: “Some clients will play in one area and another client may play in another, but each client will have an individual part of a good growth story for them. Some parts of good growth are not being too short-termism and actually seeing that person today to sign up for something, but without any foresight of how it’s going to build a relationship in the future is probably not the best version of growth.
“And there are other people, other clients that are going to change the world with their growth and want to make sure they have all the ethical support and so on. So, it’s a big spectrum that will be relevant to every client individually.”
‘Good Growth’ is underpinned by GroupM’s ‘Responsible Investment Framework’, with its five focus areas – brand safety, data ethics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), responsible journalism and sustainability.
