AIS London and Arnold KLP merge to become Field Day for Havas new business rush

AIS in particular had found what it actually did for advertisers at odds with the CRM heritage it had forged off the back of work for the likes of O2. And at a time when pitches can often be decided on what agency is the most efficient, a change of tact was needed to broaden the type of work both agencies got to work on. Now, Field Day is pitched as the best of AIS’ owned media expertise married with Arnold KLP’s brand and shopper expertise. What’s more is that the agency benefits from being embedded within the Havas Media Group, meaning creative has a better chance of complementing media strategies.

“The main thing is this is a new business push which is about finding clients who actually want to work in a more naturally integrated way,” said Geoff Gower, the agency’s executive creative director. How he sees this playing out in the early stages is by the agency working with existing creative agencies to formulate brand strategies through to more expansive digital projects.

That flip hasn’t sparked any client conflicts and in fact has been a boon to Field Day in its first pitches," revealed Gower. Field Day actually launched three weeks ago and as such has two wins its set to announce and is currently contesting another two. The former clients for both agencies have stuck with the merger and are expanding the workloads for Field Day.

However, Gower is quick to shoot down the notion that the merger is a last ditch attempt to keep the agencies afloat. For AIS, he claimed that the agency has been steadily growing for the last four years. The issue then is that in that time it’s got harder to make a margin when its larger rivals can do more for less.

“We asked ourselves whether we were really making a difference to clients or do we want to spend a lot of time building very complicated CRM programmes at great expense,” added Gower. “We realised that it’s not about loyalty and retention and so flipped our proposition to create something new that’s much more about acquisition.”

Steering this direction will be AIS executives Liz Barnsdale (managing director), Sarah Stratford (executive strategy director) and Gower. The trio will be supported by senior individuals from both sides including Kevin Bratley (creative director), Gillian Arthur (director), Jonathan Moore (creative director), Andrew Watkinson (creative director) and Jane Evans (head of CRM and data).

The teams finally merged last month, though consultations for jobs have been underway since January when people started moving into new roles. Some eight staff have left the business as a result.

“We can often be the most creative or the most interesting [when we pitch] but ultimately it boils down to who can be the most efficient,” said Gower. “From our perspective that’s not exciting and its hard to retain creative talent because they’re not enjoying it…we’re doing this from an understanding that most brands don’t have the budgets to do the lofty advertising they have done in the past and so need to do more arresting work that needs to be followed through from digital to retail to the point of purchase.”