Campaign India Agency Report Card: LMG

Campaign India Team, 18 December, 2008

Mumbai

Type of agency: Media
Company ownership: IPG
Key personnel: Lynn de Souza,chairman and CEO, N P Satyamurthy, Sudha Natrajan, joint presidents, Premjeet Sodhi, chief planning officer
Accounts won: ITC personal care, Sony Electronics, Jyothy Laboratories, BPCL, Tata Capital, Business Standard, Geodesic, Luxor-Parker, Canara HSBC Oriental Bank of Commerce Life Insurance
Accounts lost: South Asia Breweries, Ultra Motors, Greenply

This has been a pretty significant year for LMG. The agency merged its specialist media divisions into LMG. A new structure was created around ‘Collectives’ where each collective has to focus on key clients. Following this, Lynn de Souza was promoted as chairman and CEO.

The agency appointed Sudha Natrajan and NP Satyamurthy as joint presidents and Premjeet Sodhi as EVP. Anita Mukherjee who was handling the ITC Foods business quit to join Mediacom as its Bangalore head.
The agency has some significant  wins during the year including ITC Personal Care, Sony Electronics, BPCL and Tata Capital. It managed to retain Sulekha.com and Khadims after the accounts were up for pitch. It, however, lost accounts like South Asia Breweries, Ultra Motors and Greenply.

To strengthen its digital offerings, the agency announced a partnership with digital agency Pinstorm to collaborate to give solutions across digital media.

This year, LMG launched web based media management system iMix, an integrated system that offers planning, estimation, release, invoicing, payment and MIS functionalities. It also launched Strategic Allocation model (SAM) to aid media budget decisions.

Most significant is the retention of the Idea Cellular account, when all other Aditya Birla Group accounts shifted to Mindshare.

Campaign Score: 8

How LMG rates itself: 9

We are  happy with our performance this year; it seems like the new branding and positioning we embarked on at the start of the year has seen really good results in the way new business has flowed in. An analysis that Spatial Access did shows that we have won more new business and more new accounts than any other agency this year – Rs 480 crores – accounting for 24% of all the media business pitched. Also the work we are doing on all our current clients –  we wish we could pay more attention to awards though. We won three golds at the Goafest but are an award shy agency and don’t participate in the Emvies. We prefer to get good bonuses from our clients instead – that’s real!

Given the journey since 2004 (when we lost all five of our top five accounts!!!!) we have done reasonably well. For 2008 in particular, we would give ourselves a 9.