It’s one thing to espouse a “People first, better results” philosophy; it’s another to actually practice it in the middle of a global crisis.
In 2020, MediaCom proved its devotion to that creed, deciding early on to invest in talent and save as many jobs as possible globally at the expense of short-term losses.
“Our ambition was to make sure we came out of it together, our culture intact. We spent the best part of 20 years building MediaCom’s culture,” MediaCom global CEO Nick Lawson says. “Protecting that culture was really our No. 1 priority.”
The process was not painless, with employees making salary sacrifices or transitioning to shortened workweeks to help save jobs. In the end, the WPP media agency claims it avoided layoffs entirely in the U.S. while reporting a 7% revenue decline globally for the year.
For its big-picture thinking, ability to provide the solutions clients needed in 2020, new business dominance, seamless management of a global leadership transition and commitment to its people and culture, MediaCom is Adweek’s Global Media Agency of the Year.
Under Lawson’s leadership, MediaCom expanded and evolved its capabilities in service of being a comprehensive partner to marketers and helped clients navigate the worst of the pandemic.
The agency quickly developed tools to help clients and planners respond to the pandemic and its effect on media across industries with real-time media supply data and closely tracked information around consumer sentiment, health, media investment and search trends.
“We had to create a fluid structure and a different way of working with our clients,” Lawson says.
As MediaCom U.S. CEO Sasha Savic explains it, that included partnering with clients to redefine media and investment strategy to support ecommerce and respond to the dramatic business shifts of 2020, which often entailed moving away from traditional approaches to frequently engaging with consumers online.
“In many cases, this created a level of complexity for the agency never seen before. … You can imagine how much you have to redefine and reframe the process within the agency,” Savic says.
Near the end of 2020, MediaCom introduced a new “Seeing the bigger picture” agency positioning, offering a holistic approach to addressing clients’ marketing concerns that Lawson explains is “about broader, deeper conversations that go beyond media to all of our clients’ marketing activity.”
That seems fitting following a year of rapid consumer evolution that saw clients accelerating a transition to digital and ecommerce that otherwise may have taken years.
“Our clients have gone through this extraordinary change,” Lawson says. “They’re looking at the way they’re going to market in every way now. Our response is to provide specialist services.”
MediaCom’s investments in talent and expanded capabilities should put it in a prime position to capitalize on new opportunities in 2021.
“Keeping people and giving them financial security last year was the smartest investment we could have made in 2020,” Savic says, adding, “From all the transitions, we came out stronger, more closely tied to clients than ever. Clients think of us [not as] agents but as trusted partners and advisers, which is a beautiful place to be.”
