One of the largest recent reviews for an advertising account has ended with the incumbent agency keeping a significant part of the assignment, but relinquishing two large pieces to two other agencies.
The American Honda Motor Company, based in Torrance, Calif., said on Monday evening that it had concluded the review, which began in early December, with a split decision. The company, part of the Honda Motor Company Ltd. of Japan, spends more than $1.1 billion a year on advertising in the United States.
When the review began, RPA, an agency in Santa Monica, Calif., handled the creative assignments for the company’s two automotive brands, Honda and Acura, as well as the media planning and buying duties — that is, deciding where ads run and negotiating over how much to pay for them — for both.
RPA will keep creating ads for the Honda brand, American Honda Motor decided, but the task of creating ads for the Acura brand will be shifted to Mullen, an agency in Boston that is owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies. Mullen has previously created ads for automotive brands like BMW.
RPA, which is independent, and Mullen were among four creative agencies that were finalists in the American Honda Motor review. The others were another Interpublic agency, the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., and a Los Angeles agency, 72andSunny, which is part of MDC Partners.
The media planning and buying duties are leaving RPA for MediaVest, a giant media-specialist agency that is part of the Starcom MediaVest Group division of the Publicis Groupe. MediaVest competed in the review against media agencies that included Horizon Media and the PHD division of the Omnicom Group.
The review did not affect American Honda Motor’s relationship with two agencies that create ads aimed at consumers who are members of minority groups.
Those agencies are Muse Communications in Culver City, Calif., which creates ads aimed at African-American and Asian-American consumers, and La Agencia de Orci Asociados in Los Angeles, which creates ads aimed at Hispanic consumers.
All five agencies will be part of a new structure being created by American Honda Motor, which is to place the company at the center of what it calls a team of agency partners. The agencies will have space at the company’s office in Torrance that they can use in addition to their own offices.
“We are creating a new and highly collaborative path forward that will yield outstanding creative and enable us to focus more of our marketing investment in communicating with our customers,” Michael Accavitti, vice president for national marketing operations at American Honda Motor, said in a statement.
RPA had been the Acura brand’s creative agency since 1999. And RPA has created Honda brand advertising since it opened as Rubin Postaer Associates in 1986, spun off from what had been the Los Angeles office of the agency known as Needham Harper Steers and also Needham Harper Worldwide.
(The Needham Harper office began creating Honda ads in 1974. So depending on how lineage is traced, it could be said that RPA and its predecessors have been working on Honda for 39 years.)
RPA has other clients in addition to American Honda Motor, among them Farmers Insurance and La-Z-Boy. Adage.com, citing executives familiar with the matter, said the American Honda Motor account had represented more than half the agency’s total business.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/american-honda-divides-its-biggest-ad-assignments/?partner=rss&emc=rss