AD AGE’S 2018 A-LIST
MullenLowe in NO 10 of A-List 2018
Taking a tour of Ad Age 2018 annual A-List, my team and i came across with some of the top world advertising and communication agencies. Our task was to choose one of them and present its business and creative model, going behind the scenes.
After we done some research for each of them, we decided to cover the “MullenLowe” agency, as we had already taken over one of its projects for a previous assign, (My Line) that won the top creativity award in Cannes Lion.
in 2018 MullenLowe was the No 10 on Ad Age’s A-List, but before its great successes and important collaborations, MullenLowe as we know it today didn’t exist. Instead it’s the result of a merger that took almost twenty years to fulfill. This is because any other proposal for merger was failing due to the different cultures and characteristics, which obstruct the regular collaboration especially in the field of advertising, as the global CEO of MullenLowe, Alex Leikikh, explains.
The official year of the MullenLowe’s creation is 2015, when a combination of compatible cultures came true and still carries on till today. In this “tradition” has played its part the company’s key word “challenge”. More specifically MullenLowe claims to be “challenger agency for challenger brands, which seeks out for clients that see the world the same way”.
2017 was definitely THE YEAR as it turned into an unexpected triumph. Taking into consideration the statistics, 198 new-business, including work for Whole Foods, E-Trade, Chipotle, Nuveen and AkzoNobel’s consumer paint business, “conquer” the global network, bringing in an increase of 20% in new business revenue. This great success is due to a “hyperbundled” model including strategy, creative, media, digital, social, PR, CRM and analytics that the company offers. Having the creativity as a driving force, its challenger approach is defined even more sharp.
The agency’s success continued with Royal Caribbean. An other chance for challenge had to deal the MullenLowe, as this time its mission had to do with young travellers and how it could bring them on board despite the fact that they hadn’t been on a cruise before. According to Kara Wallace, VP of North American marketing for Royal Caribbean International it was a blessing to find this marketing agency, surpassing its expectations. MullenLowe offers exactly whatever the market needs: AGILITY and SPEED in order to work out the issues and opportunities really fast, as the marketing business demands.
MullenLowe Mediahub has raised in the scale of the media with an 80 percent win rate and profits that approach more than $20 million, attracting clients like MTV, Ulta Beauty and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Examples of its media work includes the “Narcos” work for Netflix. The plan was to change the look on CNN’S home-page by putting archival footage of Pablo Escobar’s prison escape giving a facsimile of his favorite sweater as a gift to influencers, and customized TSA bins. Another campaign again for Netflix, was for the series “Black Mirror”, inspired and made by R&D Lab an agency’s group. Avoiding hard business and coming up with breakthrough ideas, it transform creepy messages into websites in order to attract the Ad blockers audience. As a result, search traffic for the series quintupled compared with the previous season.
In comparison with other, more well-known media companies, MullenLowe uses the disadvantage of its low name recognition in favor of it, so as to differentiate from them in a more creative way.
As regards the E-Trade’s campaign, which was designed by MullenLowe,with the motto: “Don’t Get Mad, Get E-Trade” it brings the strongest third quarter ever, with 26,000 brokerage accounts added.
Finally despite the successful course, MullenLowe tries to stay realistic: “Just so we don’t get too big for our britches, whenever we win something, we say, It almost feels like a real ad agency”,as states Mark Wenneker chief creative officer for MullenLowe U.S.
