Blur begins: Mediabrands acquires creative agency

By Paul McIntyre | 16 April 2012
 
Mediabrands executive chairman, Henry Tajer.

Mediabrands is set to rumble the industry with the acquisition of a creative agency into its broadening portfolio of services.

Airborne is the name of the new and rebadged creative unit after Mediabrands acquired a small independent, Creative Breeze, which does work for the likes of Lego, Coles and Microsoft.

Mediabrands executive chairman Henry Tajer said the move was inevitable and four years in the making but he did not expect to compete head-on with the likes of BMF or Droga5.

“The BMFs are still high quality businesses but the trials and tribulations of companies like that in expanding have had their successes and some not so successful. We will continue to look for areas where we can maintain our relevance.”

Mediabrands now has at least 10 operating units, including its flagship media agencies, UM and Initiative. The company also announced it was rebranding its analytics division to Marketing Sciences Australia under former Commonwealth Bank customer analytics head, Chris Carr.

Tajer said media agency groups were better placed to deliver a full-service offer than traditional advertising networks.

“It’s just a function of what is happening more broadly with media,” he said. “We can deliver on the creative channel but just haven’t until now. It’s still early days though and  really exciting for us. What’s been really interesting is from the moment the [Airborne] team was established here, the level of engagement from the rest of the group, whether it be UM or Reprise or Ensemble, is fantastic. Everyone is saying they have clients that Airborne can help develop a solution for.

“There are a lot of businesses and agencies in our space that makes things more complicated and clients have enough complexity. They need to try and keep things as simple as they can. This is going to help.”

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