by Herman Manson (@marklives) Quirk will rebrand as Mirum as of today, Tuesday, 1 November 2016. Mirum is the global digital agency brand of the J. Walter Thompson Company, part of WPP. The global agency has 2400 staff across 46 offices in 20 countries. Quirk, now Mirum, employs 150 people in South Africa.
The agency also announced that Quirk founder and CEO, Rob Stokes, moves on to become its South African chairman. James McKay will be the new CEO in South Africa, with Andrew Bloom its chief creative officer.
Quirk will join Cleartag, a digital agency active in Lebanon, Dubai and Saudi Arabia, and HeathWallace to form Mirum in the Middle East and Africa. Tarek Dajani, Cleartag co-founder and CEO, becomes the CEO for Mirum in the Middle East and Africa.
‘Love reasons’
According to McKay, operationally, Quirk has always fallen under Mirum but for ‘love reasons’ stuck with the name Quirk after its 2014 acquisition by WPP. But, with the agency having been growing into the broader, global Mirum market, joining various global client projects, McKay felt it was time to properly embrace the brand. The deal will help the agency scale its offering through the rest of Africa and into the Middle East.
While agencies remain siloed within Mirum, cross-resourcing is the name of the game; in SA, the agency intends building its CRM, dev and data offerings, and turning them into resources for other offices in the network. McKay says the idea is to avoid duplicating offers already available from the Cleartag or HeathWallace offerings and vice versa.
Bucking the trend
McKay notes that digital agencies have been disappearing off the SA agency landscape as they become part of larger integrated outfits. Mirum bucks this trend and delves deeper into technology and development landscape.
“Quirk becoming Mirum is right for the business in so many ways,” says McKay. “We are completely aligned in our cultures that embrace curiosity, innovation and entrepreneurship and our vision for what progressive clients will need to win in the future… Joining Mirum gives our staff and clients access to an amazing set of regional and global expertise and experience, tools and partnerships that are required for us to stay relevant as a client partner and employer brand.”
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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