Report by Lindsay Pattison, worldwide chief executive officer
Lindsay Pattison, worldwide chief executive officer
As the newest media agency CEO to contribute to this report, it’s a great privilege to update you on our network.
2014 at Maxus was characterised by continued growth and evolution of our capabilities and services to our clients. We are the youngest of the GroupM media agency brands, and we’ve held onto our hardworking ‘challenger’ mentality, with lots of fun along the way.
We consolidated our largest account globally – adding the digital brief to our NBCUniversal North America relationship. We extended our multi-market relationship with L’Oréal by winning its Nordics brief and defending our existing Thai business. We helped GroupM reinforce its position on Nestlé by winning the media business in Canada. Overall close to $1 billion of new business billings were added in 2014 across our global network of local agencies.
We also welcomed some formidable talent to the Maxus family in 2014. Former Omnicom executive, Steve Williams, took the helm of our North American business and has set about creating an agency built around the ‘idea’ and focused on client growth. Our succession planning is working really well, with Ajit Varghese becoming APAC CEO and Nick Baughan taking over as UK CEO just as Maxus UK was crowned Agency of the Year by Media Week.
Media is now much higher up the wider business and political agenda; it can affect mass global attitudes and bring about tangible change. In 2014, we developed communications with purpose, helping Tata Tea India to drive the female empowerment agenda with ‘Power of 49’ (and win Crème de la Crème in WPP’s WPPED Cream awards) and collaborating on a cross-WPP team for the Climate Reality Project campaign, ‘Why? Why Not?’.
I’m fiercely proud of Maxus’ work and look forward to 2015, which will see us continue to evolve and lean into change for our inspiring clients.