McCann Erickson Manchester denies widescale redundancies with UPS loss
McCann Erickson Manchester has denied speculation that it has made over £1miilion worth of redundancies as it downscales its workforce looking towards the departure of McCann Group client UPS International.
UPS International has narrowed its search for a new company to handle its global marketing to four, not including incumbent McCann Group, having announced that it would review in April.
As a result, rumours have surfaced that McCann’s Manchester would be hit badly by the loss of UPS and had begun making redundancies as a result.
A spokesperson for the agency has vehemently denied this.
The spokesperson explained: “As an agency we have not yet been served notice by UPS and are continuing to work for them. Based on the information we currently have, this looks likely to continue for some time. However we recognise that workloads will reduce as they transition to a new agency over time. To suggest that this situation will result in immediate large scale redundancies is incorrect.”
The spokesperson continued: “This year has seen 50% growth in our digital work and our involvement in the Olympic Games through McCann Worldgroup is creating numerous growth opportunities. Servicing these and other development areas will require talented people and many of these positions will be in high growth areas such as digital. We cannot ignore the fact that our relationship with UPS will come to an end at some point in the future but in the mean time we already have robust plans in place to offset its departure when it happens.”
UPS has announced that WPP Group’s JWT, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam and Havas’ Euro RSCG will compete for the business, thought to be worth over $200million, at some point this month.