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Does ‘clever media’ communications planning agency Naked have a future?
The jury must be out as the British-born company that expanded around the world by offering clients a new spin on their media strategies has been sidelined by the new generation of mega-media monoliths like WPP’s GroupM and Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi who appear hell-bent on turning media planning and buying into a science. Naked is now owned by troubled Aussie mini-marcoms outfit Enero, formerly Photon.
Naked founder jon Wilkins is still with the company as chairman but he’s been looking for a partner: first he tried ad agency veteran Steve Gatfield and now he’s alighted on Richard Dunmal (left), a former senior executive in Microsoft’s stuttering advertising division and latterly COO of German mobile outfit Madvertise.
Wilkins says: “We’re hiring someone who has worked in digital agencies and a technology environment, and that’s the world we’re operating in.” Which presumably means that Naked is going to go with the flow and try to turn itself into a digital media agency, a kind of media version of AKQA.
It’s not a bad strategy. At the very least there must be a fair number of clients who need someone who can make sense of the opaque offers from the likes of GroupM and VivaKi, not to mention Google and Apple.
