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Sue Little

McCann Manchester closes city centre office and brings Metro staff back to Bonis Hall

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

September 27, 2011 | 3 min read

McCann Manchester is closing its Metro office in Manchester city centre and bringing all 80 of the digital staff working there back to its Bonis Hall headquarters in Cheshire.

The Metro branding will continue to operate and the team will service its own clients and those of the main agency.

But McCanns has exercised a break clause in its lease agreement which means it can serve notice on its premises in Basil Chambers in the Northern Quarter.

In a statement the agency said it had taken this decision "on the back of a number of large integrated accounts that require much closer collaboration between the digital specialists and the agency’s account teams".

It continued: "The move has been undertaken to help the agency drive towards it five year target of having around half of its revenue being derived from digital work. At present digitally based revenues are running at more than one third of total revenues."

McCanns said "a secondary factor" was that the Basil Chambers office did not allow for further expansion without staff being broken up and split across different floors of the building.

Without making use of the break clause the agency would have been committed to Basil Chambers for nearly three further years.

Chief executive Sue Little said: "Nearly three years ago we set up Metro on a separate site as an innovation hub, with a view to incubating and growing the operation. This has been an unprecedented success with the Metro team handling high profile work for a mix of its own clients as well as servicing McCann Manchester and McCann Worldgroup clients.

“The changes to how clients view digital in the past three years have been seismic and now we have incubated a successful business, we have taken the decision to bring it back to Bonis to drive closer digital integration for all of our clients.”

Metro opened in January 2009 and has since handled work for McCann Manchester and McCann Worldgroup clients American Airlines, London 2012, Holiday Inn and Welcome to Yorkshire.

It has also picked up its own accounts with C&A, The Carbon Trust and October Films.

Little added: "One of the other reasons for launching Metro was to establish us as a digital specialist in our own right to enable us to attract a wider pool of digital talent to McCann and also to secure work that had digital at its heart as opposed to being one element of a wider campaign.

“Metro has met both of these objectives, has been a commercial success and secured numerous clients and projects and we look forward to building on this success and having all of our digital resource under one roof.”

Staff have been informed of the plans and will be relocated to Bonis Hall on a staged basis between now and the end of the year.

Sue Little

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McCann Manchester

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