The Rebrand Celebrations Are Over: What's Next For Mediaplus UK

Personalised bars of Tony's Chocolonely and a German beer and pretzel party. That is how executives and staff welcomed in the new brand for what is now known as Mediaplus UK.

The chocolate packaging included the new corporate identity alongside the statement 'part of the family'. It was handed out on the day of the launch while the party included a live band and mixologists making cocktails, lots of German beers and a pretzel van.

The moment had been well prepared for after almost a year since Total Media and its behavioural consultancy, Behave, signed a deal to be acquired by long-time joint venture partner Mediaplus. Since then, it has taken its time to rebrand, signifying the global vision of its new owners.

And it was able to take a period to ready itself as before the deal, Total Media had spent the previous eight years working alongside Mediaplus on joint client accounts such as BMW, De’Longhi, and E.ON. That gave the pair a long time to suss out whether something more formal could work out.

“We have very complementary skill sets and requirements where we were a solid and strong UK agency, expanding internationally but with no significant capability outside of the UK,” explains group UK chief executive Tom Laranjo. “I think culturally, we're very similar entities as well. We're both very ambitious and driven to have scale, but we retain a strong entrepreneurial flare, and I think that continues because we're now the largest independent global agency group. The combination of those two things is really important to the culture.”

The UK agency has three locations around England with London, Manchester and Birmingham, each led by individual chief executives working under Laranjo.

Across the three locations within the UK, the business currently employs around 170 communication experts.

Mediaplus is part of the Serviceplan Group’s agencies, operating under the House of Communication stable and founded in Germany. It has since expanded to include a presence within Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Brussels, United Arab Emirates, Romania, France and the Netherlands.

As a result, it was only inevitable that at some stage, the agency would look to open in some form in the UK too.

“From a media industry point of view, the UK is still a super-important market. Some of the pitches are led and decided out of the UK, so strategically for us, it is an extremely important step to have a full presence and not only a partnership in the UK,” explains global CEO Matthias Brüll about the next step in the business’ development. He also cites the country’s close connection to the US and other markets as another benefit.

Reaping the rewards

In the nine months since the deal was agreed, business has already picked up for the UK team by strengthening opportunities for staff to develop while working on new types of accounts and services with other parts of the Serviceplan network.

Mediaplus counts a range of clients such as Nikon, Spin Master, De’Longhi, LinkedIn and ING Deutschland amongst examples of its recent work.

“There's been a huge amount of cross-fertilisation of our businesses,” adds Laranjo. He says it is now bringing together innovation and product development from across the group, including; trading techniques, trading products and data solutions. “We've exported some of our capabilities into the group as well. So that's offered people the opportunity to expand both ways.”

Top-line growth has proven to be strong this year, he also claims, with the addition of global scale, benefitting the UK business across retention, product development and growth. But that comes from the long-term relationship built over the eight years, however, recent months have included the integration of new IT infrastructure, software and hardware.

And now, clients will be able to tap into Mediaplus’ array of talent and its capabilities across its technical infrastructure, data architecture and an increased scale of service.

“We're already expanding our Behave offer into different markets through multiple different solutions,” adds Laranjo.

Mediaplus Moving Forward

The closing gap between media and creativity services is predicted to deepen over the coming years, a trend Mediaplus has already begun to see working within the Serviceplan Group and its established creative ideation offer.

“It's a great opportunity,” states Brüll, one he intends to explore further. “We are looking at the client businesses and that growing complexity. They are looking for easier solutions - less agencies. There's a huge focus on ROI efficiency and we think this combination of delivering media services and next to it, in a very combined way, creative services underpinned by the intelligence of data, is leading to a very efficient ecosystem.”

Serviceplan has a content production sub brand named Serviceplan Make, which has led the way through its AI-based asset production and management offering.

“We are growing very much together. For some clients, we are working in such a system already. The largest of them is BMW, but there are others and this is where we see the big opportunity,” continues Brüll.

And when it comes to the adoption of AI within the media business, it is being seen as an operation tool that uses automation to speed up processes such as reporting, which is already saving several manual hours of work with each project. However, with around 2,000 members of staff employed globally, it won’t be used to replace anyone, promises Brüll.

“For us, it's not the ambition to be the most efficient media agency with a very much reduced staff cost. We want to come up with intelligent solutions for clients. That's the main ambition,” he explains.

Meanwhile, the business is in the process of building a data platform that will work across all of its regions after an initial roll out for its German offices.

It is being overseen by global chief data officer Karin Immenroth, brought in by Brüll in November and aims to deliver Mediaplus a greater level of analytics, augmentation and activation.

Laranjo elaborates: "We've been able to port into that network AI tools like Phoebe AI, where we're able to do tonal analysis and analyse the difference between what people say and what they're feeling. We're able to bring in platforms like Indemo, we're able to passively record people's experiences as they move through client's platforms and look at frictional analysis, but also record their voices and see how they're feeling and interacting with brands. We can take those data sets and have lots of very clever algorithms interpret the data, and use them to inform media planning strategies, audience segmentation, creative adoption and adaption."

Now that the UK integration, for the most part, is complete, the ambition is for it to be “more noisy” and operate with confidence within its global network as it delivers for clients at a new level of scale.