Vodafone ad tender leads to rift

After less than a year and a half on the job, advertising agency, Mark/BBDO cut short its contract with telecom giant Vodafone Czech Republic. The action came just as the Czech Republic’s third-place phone company announced it was opening a tender for additional advertising partners.

Prague-based Mark/BBDO, which Vodafone signed with in October 2006, will not participate in the newly opened tender, which was extended to six agencies last week—Chicago-based Leo Burnett Advertising; London-based Farm Communications; New York-based JWT; New York-based Ogilvy & Mather; and Ljubljana, Slovenia-based Futura DDB.
“We felt that the teamwork spirit [between the client and the agency] somehow disappeared,” said Petr Topinka, managing director of Mark/BBDO, in an e-mail to CBW. “We’ve experienced too many changes on Vodafone’s side recently, which always brings a new point of view and style of the communication.”

The change in advertising strategy has been in the works for several months. “We have been planning since autumn ’07 to start a new model of cooperation with our communication agencies,” Vodafone spokesman Filip Hrubý said in a separate e-mail interview. “MBBDO has known about these plans at least since December. We have been always open and fair with them. ... [Last week’s] announcement to terminate our cooperation and reject the offer of participation in the tender was highly surprising for us.”

This is the second time that an ad agency terminated its business contract with highly lucrative Vodafone, which was also dropped by Prague-based Kaspen in August 2006 after a three-year working relationship. Kaspen helped steer the company through a massive rebranding campaign in mid-2005 and early 2006, when it changed from Czech mobile operator Oskar to Vodafone Czech Republic.

For an ad agency to fire a client “is very unusual for the Czech market,” said Slavo Marušinec, managing director of Kaspen. “It is [almost] always the other way around, the client terminating contract with agency.” Marusinec added that his agency decided to end its business relationship at that time because the “independent spirit of Kaspen, as a small creative shop that suited so well Oskar at the time, did not match the corporate approach of Vodafone.”

Among Kaspen’s high-profile ad campaigns for Vodafone were covering Nuselský Bridge in Prague 4 in bubble wrap and the mobile Tram 77 advertisement, in which the second car of a two-carriage tram was stuffed with red numbers to promote an offer of free-minutes.

Splitting the pie

The new tender, Hrubý said, was part of a broadened advertising strategy that would involve “one central creative agency responsible for high-level creative concept, brand strategy and coordination of other communication agencies.” Those other agencies would, in turn, be responsible for products relating to their specific format: above-the-line advertising, such as TV and radio spots; below-the-line advertising, such as store banners, sponsorships, and pricing offers; as well as online advertising.

While Mark/BBDO’s move surprised the Czech market, advertising agencies and clients generally and routinely review business relationships, said Bruce R. Mendelsohn, director of communications for the Marketing Research Association, U.S.-based trade organization that represents more than 3,000 consumer- and market-research firms around the world.

“You see a lot of agency turnover because of numbers,” he said. “A telecom company doesn’t meet its numbers and blames its advertising firm. Then the telecom company seeks a new advertising firm—only to potentially repeat the vicious cycle,” he said.

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Source: http://www.cbw.cz/en/vodafone-ad-tender-leads-to-rift/6806.html