Labatt Breweries of Canada has given its media planning business to M2 Universal and its sister agency Marketel.
M2 and Marketel have handled media buying for Labatt since 2000 and 2003 respectively, but have now added planning—which the brewer has done in-house since 2002—to their responsibilities. M2 assumes responsibility for national and regional planning for the entire Labatt brand portfolio excluding Quebec, where it will be overseen by Marketel.
“This is an incredibly important assignment for us and a very high-profile advertiser,” said M2 Universal president Hugh Dow. “Obviously the fact that we’ve had the buying assignment enables us to move very quickly in getting the whole thing up and running in terms of a totally integrated planning and buying service.”
Alain Tardy, Marketel’s vice-president of media, called the planning assignment a “natural step forward” for the Montreal-based agency, since it already had input into Labatt’s media strategy. “In our opinion we were not only just executing what the plans were, but contributing strategically to some media creativity,” he said. “We were the eye of Labatt in the market.”
Labatt took its media planning in-house in 2002, pulling the assignment from the now-defunct Ammirati Puris in a move that then vice-president of marketing Charles Oliver said would allow for better integration between its brand planning and media planning teams.
“I know that in the past they saw some interesting synergy between the brand planning and the media planning, and there’s always some, but we also see great synergy in buying and planning all together,” said Tardy. “Our mandate will be to make sure we work very closely with the brand team so the synergy’s complete.”
“I think that the opportunities and advantages of integrating both planning and buying out of one source became pretty apparent,” added Dow. “Obviously the availability of research tools and processes that have been developed in Canada, and in many cases globally, is something that’s becoming increasingly important for any advertiser to maintain a strongly competitive position. With the much closer day-to-day working requirements between planning and buying, in many cases it’s a lot easier and more effective to integrate the two.”
“We look forward to incorporating their planning expertise and sophisticated research tools into the Labatt communication process,” said Rob McCarthy, director of marketing services and innovation for the Toronto-based brewer, in a release.
The M2 Labatt team, overseen by vice-president, director of broadcast investments Dennis Dinga and general manager Chris Killeavy, will be about 20 people, with some new hires required to fill out the roster.
Marketel currently has three full-time and two part-time people working on the Labatt business—headed by Nancy Asselin—and plans to hire either one full-time or two part-time planners.
