Mullen Lowe global CEO says ‘third time lucky’ for the IPG merger
Interpublic Group’s third attempt to merge its Lowe brand – with US creative group Mullen – is working, said global CEO but it needs to win more business.
IPG failed twice to bring together Lowe with other agencies in the group, initially via a troubled wedding with Deutsch and then in an ill-fated move with Campbell Ewald.
In May last year IPG rolled the dice again, this time anointing the creatively-driven Boston agency Mullen as the vehicle for Lowe’s future, with the merger completed in January when Australia’s 303 Lowe was rebranded as 303 Mullen Lowe.
The brand has since positioned itself as aggressively creative and adopted an octopus wearing boxing gloves as its logo.
Alex Leikikh predicts the era of re-bundling is arriving
Mullen Lowe global CEO Alex Leikikh told Mumbrella that the first year had been a challenge and a steep learning curve.
“We wanted to make sure that we got the merger right,” Leikikh said.
‘This is the third time in recent history that IPG has attempted to merge Lowe with one of the other agencies. We actually spent a lot of time eliminating the conflicts. We spent the majority of our time looking at shared values”.
In its first year Leikikh believes the agency is ahead of its plan, with the challenge now being to take existing US business and start to serve clients on a global level.
Leikikh also said he wanted Mullen Lowe to be at the forefront of the new era of “rebundling”.
“We are looking at a theme here ahead of us which is the great re-bundling,” he said.
“I think over time this notion of a social agency or a digital agency goes away. I think clients are looking for differentiation that’s driven by creativity and our view is, you get the best creative output by this smashing together of media and creative and you get the best media ideas by smashing together creative and media.
“Then you layer in shopper marketing, you layer in digital, and whatever else.”
Leikikh said the separation of media and creative, with media agencies often long distances from the creative agencies, was creating an environment where the best ideas could not get though.
“You make it together from the very beginning. For us, that’s our model. We’re smashing as many practices together as we can.”
In Australia he believes local outpost 303 Mullen Lowe is still two international clients short of what the agency should be serving but is sitting strong with clients such as Audi and Budget Direct.
However, he admitted that globally the agency had not yet met its targets in new business, saying that despite getting its foot in the door in numerous pitches, it had failed to close.
“We haven’t gotten yet to a global consistency with respect to new business,” he said.
“The economy is performing well in some of our larger markets, we are doing well here in Australia, the US market is strong, so we haven’t had a need to really be more judicious than probably we have been on new business consistency. I’d like to see the hit rate increase.
“We are getting the calls, we are getting invited to pitches, we are making it to the finals, but I don’t think we are converting enough quite yet.”
He said that the agency needed to work on the bringing in the right resources from the right markets to complete pitches successfully.
“I would be more worried if the phone wasn’t ringing.”
He said at this stage of its life the best new business strategy for the agency was to promote the work it is doing for existing clients such as JetBlue and American greetings.
Last week the agency launched its global work for Knorr/Continental in Australia promoting matchmaking through food and flavour with its #LoveAtFirstTaste campaign.
With Mullen’s strong creative streak, Leikikh also said he felt award shows around the world were still not doing enough to counter scam ads.
“Every year you have the fake awards and ‘please run this at three in the morning’ requests. We police it very strictly. I hate to see it but it does exist.
“I think part of it is this industry loves to talk to itself and about itself and the output of that is scam and fake stuff that ends up on Cannes and other award shows.”
