Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries has handed its pounds 1 to pounds 2
million advertising account to Butterfield Day Devito Hockney, ending
months of uncertainty following this summer’s collapse of Woollams Moira
Gaskin O’Malley.
The business had been handled on a temporary basis by Osprey
Communications, which took on ten of WMGO’s staff and some of its
accounts after the agency closed down.
However, the brewery kicked off a formal review in September, which
eventually produced a final shortlist of three agencies, including Foote
Cone and Belding and Leagas Shafron Davis as well as Butterfield Day.
Butterfield Day will initially hold the account, which covers Banks’s,
Banks’s Bitter, Hansons, Camerons and Zamek lager, for a two-year
period.
The Wolverhampton and Dudley Breweries director of marketing, Alison
Cannon, was keen to sign up with an agency that had a strong planning
base, after a particularly good relationship with Raoul de la Bedoyere,
the former planning director at WMGO. In August de la Bedoyere moved to
Burkitt Edwards Martin, which could not compete because of its place on
the Scottish Courage roster.
Cannon said: ‘It has been a tough process, but Butterfield Day won
through on excellent planning and undisputed creativity, matched by a
true understanding of our business.’
The chairman of Butterfield Day, Leslie Butterfield, said it was a
‘brilliant’ win for the agency: ‘Having a major brewery as one of our
clients has been an ambition of ours for some time, and to have brands
with the potential of Banks’s and Camerons is particularly exciting.’