Winner: Edelman (Global, DJE Holdings)
The ambition for Edelman is not only to cement its place as the world’s largest PR agency, but to ensure that it can perform as a serious competitor to the ad agencies and digital firms — and even content producers like CNN — competing for clients’ marketing dollars. That has meant expanding the firm’s digital and social capabilities, so that its creative department—now more than 600-strong around the world, with 350 in the US—includes growing numbers of advertising and paid media specialists and formidable data and analytics team.
Those investments are reflected in new business success. There was organic growth from clients like Adobe, Citadel, Hologic, HP, Mars, and the State of Florida’s Department of Citrus, and new business from Ajinomoto, Genentech, Puget Sound Energy, ServiceNow, and Sonos. But there were also digital assignment from the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau and Sears Holding Company, and advisory services business from Bridgestone and Microsoft.
In Europe, Edelman acquired Swedish creative shop Deportivo (which describes itself as an “earned advertising agency” that helps brands shape culture) in the summer of 2014, and is turning it into a global creative hub, with 30 people now in the UK, where Toby Gunton, a veteran of OMD and WCRS, was hired to embed some of Deportivo’s creative DNA in the region’s largest office.
In Asia-Pacific, meanwhile, Edelman’s digital capabilities now account for more than 15% of the firm’s regional revenue, even if that number is slightly misleading because that’s only the firm’s pure-play digital activity. A broad restructuring has moved those capabilities into a horizontal construct that spans the firm’s brand and reputation practices across all markets. So while there were some key departures (including digital president and MD Gavin Coombes and Martin Shaw, respectively), the restructuring has ensured that all aspects of digital — including those more readily associated with advertising agencies — are delivered across Asia-Pacific.
Edelman has invested significant sums in this initiative, across such specialist areas as search engine marketing, social media optimisation, paid media and measurement/analytics, building centralised hubs that feature skills and talent that each of its markets can tap into on a local basis. Edelman’s data and analytics operation, meanwhile, remains one of the sharpest in the region — demonstrated best by the predictive intelligence centre it has formed in conjunction with Singapore’s Economic Development Board. That approach is also illustrated by the SABRE-winning Shell Emotion Tracking campaign in Malaysia (which has since gone global), an analytics-based initiative that used wearables, chatbots and drive performance technologies to track, measure and correlate driver emotions with driver performance and contextual and environmental factors from personality to diet, music, health, weather and traffic.
And Edelman’s best work continues to be among the best in the business, as evidenced by brand marketing and content creation for Unilever brands such as Dove and Axe; from a follow-up to REI’s massive award-winning Opt Outside campaign focusing on gender issues to empowering young adults to get tested for STDs on behalf of the American Sexual Health Association.
As you would expect, there was also sophisticated digital marketing work in the brand marketing area — notably, a creative technology campaign for HP; an interactive lunchbox for Extra; and, superior digital video for Surf Excel and Johnson & Johnson Vision. Meanwhile, the firm’s digital savvy is also transforming its corporate reputation practice, via work for AstraZeneca and AIAC. And the firm has a new startup offering that helped to launch Japanese app Eight in India, developed global research for China’s Ecovacs Robotics, and drove global ecommerce through social media for Zerotech. — PH/AS