M&C Saatchi has opened its latest offering – shopper marketing agency M&C Saatchi Shop – led by Michelle Whelan who left rival Arc in March. Founder clients are existing M&C customers Jacobs Douwe Egberts and Pernod Ricard.
As it’s M&C Saatchi (which recently claimed to have discovered the secret of advertising) it says it’s developed its “own IP,” an audit tool that “identifies those factors that most influence shoppers in a particular category, and then ranks individual brands within that category by how well they are performing against shoppers’ needs.”
Whelan (left) says: “We now live in a world where people can shop everything as well as everywhere. To win in this environment, brands need to work hard to be as easy, interesting and rewarding to shop as possible. Our name is brutally simple (‘brutal simplicity of thought’ is another M&C mantra) and so is our mission: to make every brand we work with the most shoppable in its category.”
M&C UK group CEO Lisa Thomas says: “This is the ideal time to add a commercially rigorous retail and shopper specialism to our offering. It’s a challenging world out there, but also one that’s full of new opportunities. Given her deep understanding of how the modern shopper moves seamlessly between physical, digital and social channels, Michelle is the perfect person to help our clients seize those opportunities”.
M&C has done well out of its array of what we used to call below-the-line companies, especially CRM outfit LIDA which recently opened in New York.
Now the main agency needs to rediscover some of its creative mojo, rather lacking since Graham Fink departed to be CCO of Ogilvy in China.
