by Herman Manson (@marklives) Mortimer Harvey has won the business-to-business component of the Barclays Africa Group advertising account, MarkLives can confirm. The financial services group, which includes Absa in South Africa, split its account into B2B and B2C components during the pitch.
FCB Africa was earlier announced as the winner of the consumer component. While the winning agencies have been informed that they have won the business, Barclays Africa has yet to conclude any formal agreements.
According to Gerald Harvey, group chief creative officer of the Mortimer Harvey Group, the agency will meet with Barclays Africa on Friday 26 August, 2016, to get final insight into the full scope of the business it will be handling. The agency has a long-standing relationship with Absa, spanning 14 years. It has been working upon the consumer business in a retail capacity; this will now be moved to FCB Africa. The B2B win means no staff will need to be retrenched, he says.
Harvey believes the agency won because of a strong presentation that highlighted its aggressive move into innovative omnichannel solutions, aimed at enhancing its established direct marketing and CRM offerings. The group recently acquired direct marketing agency, Action Ambro’s, and last year appointed Winnifred Knight as direct business director and Luisa Mazinter as group chief innovation officer. Knight and Mazinter are tasked with building up the agency’s strengths in direct and digital marketing, data marketing, analytics, social media and ecommerce.
Mortimer Harvey also partnered with a technology company to build a platform that allows marketers to zero-rate data charges to consumers and deliver mobile video or audio channels to their phones. It also has licensed loyalty programme management technology out of Denmark, and launched a music studio.
“We were able to show them a lot they did not know about us,” says Harvey, which contributed to the business win.
Herman Manson (@marklives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com. He was the founding editor of media.toolbox (1998–2006) and Mobile.Works, and the co-founder of Brand magazine. He has served on the editorial boards of The Journal for Convergence, as well as of Fast Company South Africa. Winner of the 2011 Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year award, he was also a finalist twice in the Highway Africa Award for the Innovative Use of New Media in Africa (2003 and 2004). Over his 20-year-plus career, Herman has contributed to numerous journals and websites in South Africa and abroad, including the Mail & Guardian, .net, Intelligence, AdVantage, Men’s Health, Computer World and African Communications. He has consulted on web architecture to several financial institutions.
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