Samsung, one of the biggest out of home advertisers in the UK with a spend of around £70m, is believed to be moving its OOH account from Interpublic’s Rapport to Dentsu Aegis-owned Posterscope.
It’s a big blow to Rapport which lost Tesco to WPP’s Kinetic 18 months ago.
Most of Samsung’s media is handled by Publicis Group’s Starcom. Publicis doesn’t have a big OOH specialist agency and recently switched its allegiance from Kinetic to Starcom. The powers that be at Samsung have evidently decided some tidying up was required, doubtless with pressure from Starcom.
Rapport, which is acknowledged to have performed strongly on Samsung and its other, remaining, big account Sky, has suffered from the dire performance of IPG’s two media agencies – UM and Initiative in the UK. Without a regular feed of business from media agencies it’s hard to compete with likes of Kinetic and Posterscope.
As for Postercope, now helmed by former McCann CEO Stephen Whyte in the UK, it’s bounced back strongly from the position it found itself in when Kinetic’s Eric Newnham set up rival Talon (aligned to Omnicom) with a raft of former Posterscope executives and won large chunks of its business.
(This is an amended version of an earlier story).
Update
Rapport, without confirming the switch, tells me that the original headline figure of a £70m account is fiction, it’s more like £7m. Also that the principal in the arrangement was Cheil, with work outsourced to Rapport. A bit tail and dog it seems to me, but there you go.
In essence, according to numerous sources, it seems to be a deal with Starcom. Media accounts seem to move these days on a kind of geopolitical basis (and the offer of lower prices, of course). What a world.
What a ferociously innacurate article.
Fair enough (he says wearily)
Care to enlighten us?