FCB has appointed two senior executives from Wunderman Cato Johnson
in an attempt to put direct marketing at the heart of the agency’s
activities.
Paul Schulz, 39, Wunderman’s database director, and Marianne Jones, 34,
its customer acquisition director for Europe, will launch FCB’s direct
marketing division next month as an integrated part of its client
service offering.
The new division will also link closely with Mind and Mood, the agency’s
consumer research programme.
Chris Rendel, FCB’s chief executive, said: ’This will change the way we
work. We will remain as one profit centre with one bottom line. This
isn’t about making high margins in direct marketing.’
FCB confirmed in the autumn that it was moving John Penberthy, the
managing director of FCB Direct in New York, to London to help replicate
FCB’s successful direct marketing operation in the US via start-up or
acquisition (Campaign, 24 October).
The appointment of Schulz and Jones, who had been looking to break away
from the Young & Rubicam-owned Wunderman to set up a specialist division
within a mainstream agency, ends an extensive search by FCB to plug its
direct marketing gap.
’A lot of our international clients recognise that direct marketing is
essential,’ Rendel added. ’Increasingly, it’s a price of entry to
pitch-lists for large pieces of business.’
Schulz, a bank manager before becoming a database marketing specialist,
joined Wunderman two-and-a-half years ago.
Jones, a psychology graduate, began her career at O&M Direct before
embarking on a seven-year spell at Wunderman, where she worked
extensively on BT’s business-to-business account.
’We had looked at how Wunderman and Y&R, two large organisations with
different structures, tried to integrate,’ Schulz said. ’At FCB, we
start with a clean sheet of paper.’
