Gillette AOR to move to MindShare India in January 2003

Gillette India plans to move its media account to MindShare India in January 2003. The account will move from Interpublic Group of Companies' Universal McCann. While the size of the business could not be ascertained, executives with knowledge of the review say the move becomes imperative after the global realignment of the business in September this year.

To put things in perspective, around end September Gillette Co awarded its estimated $600 million global media business to WPP Group's MindShare, following a keenly contested review which involved Omnicom Group's Optimum Media Direction (OMD), and Universal McCann, part of McCann-Erickson WorldGroup. OMD had handled a majority of Gillette's global media, all of it in North America and Europe. Universal McCann worked on media in Latin America and Asia Pacific.

WPP Group's MindShare was originally invited to participate in the review because of the marketer's relationship with WPP sibling Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Ogilvy did some strategic and creative work on the Duracell battery brand in North America before the account was shifted in August 2002 from Omnicom's BBDO to Acme Idea Co. According to Taylor Nelson Sofres' Competitive Media Reporting (the largest provider of advertising tracking services in the US), Gillette spent $174 million in measured media in the United States alone last year.

Gillette launched the global media review earlier this year as an outgrowth of chairman-CEO James Kilts' "Strategic Sourcing" cost-cutting initiative, which included a review of every vendor relationship. "We'll start using the muscle that a company of our size and reach clearly has but hasn't flexed," Kilts said in discussing the broad review with analysts in 2001. He said the company needed to improve analytic capabilities to develop the best media mix for its brands.

The company, which markets Gillette and Venus razors, Duracell batteries, Oral-B toothbrushes and Right Guard deodorant worldwide, spends more than $600 million on advertising globally, though the spending is distributed broadly throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. © 2002 agencyfaqs!