Mediacom win £4m Kwik-Fit media business from Faulds
Kwik-Fit has moved its media business out of Faulds and into Mediacom London.
The move is thought to have followed a two-way pitch for the account between Mediacom and OMD.
A spokesperson for Kwik-Fit confirmed the move saying: “We are pleased to announce that Mediacom has been appointed by Kwik-Fit to handle the media account. BMP DDB has been appointed to work on the creative business.”
Nobody at Mediacom was available for comment and Dennis Chester, managing director of Faulds, would not be drawn on the subject.
Meanwhile, Faulds has been unsuccessful in its bid to pick up the £150m Capital One advertising account after a pitch between the Edinburgh-based agency, McCann Erickson, Abbott Mead Vickers/BBDO and New York’s Kaplan Thaler and Publicis in the UK.
Following the pitch, Capital One has awarded its £150m US and UK advertising account to McCann Erickson.
The news will be a set back for Faulds after the loss of the Kwik-Fit business.
However, it is thought that the agency is pitching for a number of pieces of new business and that it remains in contention for the Standard Life Bank advertising account - which looks to have been whittled down to two agencies – Faulds and Leith.
At present Faulds has not been forced to make any redundancies as a result of the loss of the Kwik-Fit business and if the agency’s new business push is successful then redundancies may be avoidable.
In the mean time, the bad news of the departure of Kwik-Fit may be tempered in part by the announcement that Auto Trader, which uses Faulds for both its advertising and media, has spent more than £2.2m on its new television advertising campaign for the period March to May 2003 – its largest advertising spend to date in a single burst of activity.
The ads are a continuation of the ‘Find your perfect partner’ campaign launched in 2000 and bring the total spend on the campaign to approximately £12m.
The new ‘Perfect Partner’ end frame, which introduces the new Auto Trader National Number. There has already been a significant response to the launch, with regional centres already reporting ten per cent growth in customers wanting to advertise their cars.
Furthermore, the website recently recorded record page impressions of 110 million.