MindShare Moves Beyond Buying, Planning†

Restructures to Build IP, Create Branded Content and Take On McKinsey

Advertising Age, April 17, 2008 — WPP's MindShare has launched a wholesale restructuring of its business — effectively splitting the agency into four distinct units — designed to move the shop beyond planning and buying, and create new revenue streams from content and intellectual property creation and McKinsey-style business consulting.

The global reorganization, the first in MindShare's 11-year history, comes as at a time when commoditization of media buying is a real threat, as procurement executives and the requirement for transparency in terms of costs have enabled clients to squeeze media agencies' margins to such an extent that many are often left making only a couple of percentage points on marketers' media expenditures — media expenditures that are themselves often flat, or even down, in developed markets. That leaves agencies such as Mindshare — which counts Unilever, IBM and Sprint as clients — to try to re-create themselves as more than just volume buyers of media owners' wares.