THE Commonwealth Bank's $50 million media account review process has been blasted by the London-based chief executive of the communications strategy firm Naked.
Naked failed to make the bank's shortlist of three, which comprises the incumbent, Ikon, Vizeum-Carat and a surprise showing by the creative agency BMF.
The boss of Naked, Nigel Long, said he was disappointed by the bank's dumping of communications planning specialists, including his firm and its global rival PHD, after he said the bank had given strong indications it was interested in breaking its media contract into two parts for strategic media planning and media buying.
"We're very disappointed about that," Mr Long told the Herald from London.
"The [bank's] feedback was that they decided not to go with a specialist communications planning approach. My view is they should have realised that when they drew up the long list [of bidders].
"We put an awful lot of work into it … the way pitches work is you talk to a lot of clever people and you end up ahead of where you are."
The Commonwealth Bank's chief marketing officer, Mark Buckman, refused to confirm the bank's final list of contenders to handle its media business but rejected Mr Long's criticism.
"We have conducted the review with the normal high degree of integrity and I'm disappointed to hear Naked's global management feel the way they do and have made the comments they have," he said. "Speak to Naked's Australian management and you will find a very different view."
Naked Australia's managing partner, Adam Ferrier, said: "No, we've got no issue with the way the pitch was run. We just didn't make it but we look forward to working with the bank possibly sometime in the future."
Mr Buckman also weighed into the contentious issue of the worldwide split of creative and media services into separate business units by the four biggest marketing services conglomerates - Omnicom, WPP, Publicis and IPG. Between them, the "big four" control more than $US150 billion ($153.4 billion) in corporate media and marketing expenditure.
"In many cases the media thinking and channel planning is too removed from the creative idea," Mr Buckman said.
Asked if he supported BMF pursuing a strategy similar to Commbank's San Francisco agency, Goodby Silberstein, which has retained media strategy inside the creative agency instead of outsourcing it to a specialist media agency, Mr Buckman said it was the "model of the future".
He also noted another US hot shop, Crispin Porter Bogusky, had done likewise.
"Crispin and Goodby have been big success stories in reinvigorating channel planning and media thinking into their creative capabilities," he said. "We're at a point in time when [the Australian] market is preparing itself for a truly digital environment from 2013. Data planning in the way you look at the direct marketing business and channel planning in [mass media] need to be integrated.
"If I was a betting man, those agencies that crack integrating data and digital and how it influences mass media are the models that will survive."
Although Mr Buckman would not confirm BMF was on the bank's shortlist, Naked and BMF are owned by the listed Australian communications group Photon, which spent more than $60 million acquiring the two companies in the past nine months.
On Tuesday, Photon, in which Reg Grundy's RG Capital remains the single biggest shareholder, announced it had finalised a $75 million rights issue to retire short-term debt and fund acquisitions at $3 a share.
The stock was trading yesterday at $2.80, down from $5.75 in February after announcing the Naked deal. After the BMF acquisition last September, Photon was trading at $6.25. Continued…
