WPP’s London head office has announced overnight it is merging its two media agencies, MediaCom and Essence, to form a new media agency to be known as EssenceMediaCom. The merger is global and will obviously impact the local Australian operations.
The new entity is expected to be fully operational around the globe by 2023.
Further to that, current Australian MediaCom CEO, Yaron Farizon (pictured below), will relinquish his post after just 12 months and return to WPP in the UK.
Yaron Farizon
An Australian spokesperson described Farizon’s new job as “a new global role in London working to build and deploy the new EssenceMediaCom proposition for our biggest global clients”.
The Aussie operations of EssenceMediaCom has announced incumbent Essence CEO, Pat Crowley (pictured below), will take over as boss of the local operations of the agency.
Pat Crowley
Farizon will, however, remain in Australia for the immediate future to “support Crowley and GroupM CEO Aimee Buchanan with a smooth transition over the coming months,” the spokesperson added.
B&T understands there is no client conflict from the merger here in Australia, nor is there predicted to be any redundancies.
Locally, the new agency will be have more than 550 people across offices in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, making it one of the largest media agencies in Australia, with more than $1 billion in client billings.
In a statement, WPP in Australia said: “The global merger brings together Essence and Mediacom to form a new performance-led, and data and technology enabled, agency called EssenceMediaCom.
“The two agencies complement each other strategically, with the digital, creative technology, data-driven performance, and product development capabilities of Essence supercharged with MediaCom’s global scale, exemplary client service, and multichannel audience-planning expertise.”
The spokesperson added: “The creation of the newly formed EssenceMediaCom allows us to take the future facing smarts of Essence and scale it with the depth of capability in MediaCom. With an incredible mix of clients, people and talent, we believe we have the right ingredients to create a very different agency in Australia.”
Globally, EssenceMediaCom will be led by Nick Lawson, currently the global CEO of MediaCom. While in other news, current global CEO of Essence, Kyoko Matsushita, has been promoted to WPP Japan CEO.
