BMW leaves Ireland/Davenport for OpenCo

by MarkLives (@marklives) BMW will be parting ways with its South Africa agency, Ireland/Davenport (a WPP agency), after a decade of working together. BMW was Ireland /Davenport’s founding client. The BMW business will be taken over by Openco (majority owned by TBWA\South Africa).

The news follows an announcement in June 2015 that Ireland/Davenport had lost its biggest account, that of Vodacom, to Ogilvy & Mather South Africa.

The Vodacom account represented 40% of Ireland/Davenport’s revenue and left BMW as Ireland/Davenport’s biggest piece of business. The agency had already started contracting in size, following the Vodacom announcement, with an unspecified number of positions affected.

“The relationship between BMW and Ireland/Davenport has literally been the catalyst for the wonderful success our company has had over the past decade,” says Guy Kilfoil, general manager: brand management BMW, Marketing Services BMW Group.

“For eight of those 10 years we have been the premium segment leader in South Africa. We won nine consecutive Coolest Car Brand Awards and a Coolest Overall Brand Award in the Sunday Times GenNEXT Survey. We won countless other accolades, from Assegais to Bookmarks and Loeries all because of the hard work, the commitment, the expertise and the brilliance of the I/D team,” he says.

“I have the utmost respect for Ireland/Davenport as an agency, for their talent and as a team of people. As such it was an incredibly difficult decision for us to make and a very hard-fought pitch process which was awarded on the narrowest of margins.”

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