BBH has to defend flagship Audi – what is owner VW up to?
I see that Audi is re-pitching its UK creative account, at BBH from just about the time the agency started nearly 40 years ago. Well that’s a long time and, no doubt, it’s been re-pitched in the meantime.
But BBH’s work for Audi has always been pretty good and, recently, it’s seemed to have been rediscovering its old form.
Audi owner VW has been taking a right old pasting recently and a new CMO regime seems to be trying to help out the owner, hit by billions of dollars in emission fines, by grinding down its agency fees.
DDB recently retained the account in Europe, on a much lower whack. VW creative in the US went from Interpublic’s Deutsch to a cobbled-together WPP team, which must have surprised even WPP.
BBH is re-pitching it seems and good luck to them. Owner Publicis was recently awarded Mercedes’ creative account (apart from Germany and the US, two quite large markets) which might not have gone down well with VW.
But you do wonder which planet some of these clients are on sometimes.