54.7 F
Laguna Hills
Monday, Mar 18, 2024
-Advertisement-

New Mazda Ad Team Hires Creative, Execs

An Irvine-based advertising agency formed to handle the account of Mazda North American Operations is taking shape with about 100 staffers, including Orange County newcomers, local hires and a few holdovers from the automaker’s prior agency.

The agency, Team Mazda, is part of Britain’s WPP PLC and is named for the $150 million yearly Mazda account it will handle.

David Latta is Team Mazda’s managing director. He held the same title at Team Detroit, a WPP agency formed to handle Ford Motor Co.’s advertising.

Harvey Marco has been brought in as chief creative officer, a post he held at the New York office of JWT, a WPP agency that handles advertising in Europe for Mazda’s parent, Japan’s Mazda Motor Corp.

The business and creative chiefs are set to oversee “a combination of local hires from within the communications industry and WPP alumni,” according to John Abel, director of marketing for Mazda.

Some of the staffers will come from the Newport Beach office of Southfield, Mich.-based Doner Co., which has been the largest advertising agency in OC by capitalized billings, thanks in large part to its 13-year run on the Mazda account before losing the business earlier this year.

“They have hired a few people from Doner where there has been a specific fit,” Abel said.

Mazda didn’t get involved in lower-echelon hiring for the agency but did weigh in on the team, he said.

“Their structure marries up to our structure in a way where they have a core competence in communications and we bring our core competence as an automotive manufacturer,” Abel said.

Team Mazda will work from offices on Irvine Center Drive, a short distance from the automaker’s North American headquarters in Irvine.

The new agency “is literally walking distance from our office,” Abel said.

New Strategy

Team Mazda will come up with ads and do media buying in a switch from the multiagency structure that Mazda formerly used.

“The biggest single difference is that we had multiple agencies handling various specialties,” Abel said. “We now have them handling everything.”

Team Mazda also will work on the automaker’s Canadian and Mexican operations.

The automaker appears to be following in the footsteps of Fountain Valley’s Hyundai Motor America. Hyundai made its main account the keystone of the Huntington Beach office of Innocean Worldwide when it expanded the shop’s duties in 2008.

Innocean had about 30 workers in OC when it added creative work to the media buying duties it already handled for Hyundai. The agency has grown to more than 100 since then, helped in part by additional media buying for the automaker’s sister company Kia.

Innocean is part of South Korea’s Innocean Worldwide Inc., also a Hyundai unit.

The Business Journal estimates the shop’s yearly billings at $200 million.

Mazda has spent the better part of the year ramping up for its new agency.

“This has been quite a significant investment for Mazda in North America,” Abel said.

The agency change comes as Mazda attempts to reverse a couple of years of declines by boosting U.S. sales to 250,000 this year, a gain of about 8% from a year earlier.

According to a business plan released earlier in the year by Mazda Motor Chief Executive Takashi Yamanouchi, the automaker wants to see U.S. sales of 400,000 vehicles—well beyond its highest total ever here—within five years.

Team Mazda will face some challenges as it devises the advertising to drive sales.

The automaker recently launched its Mazda2 subcompact car. But it wants to be known for more than small cars. It will be making a major push behind its CX-7 and CX-9 crossover vehicles, but those have been around for a few years. Mazda isn’t scheduled to launch any new or fully redesigned vehicles until 2012.

Mazda appears set in the interim to count on advertising campaigns built around new, relatively minor interior options that will be offered on existing models next year—add-ons such as Bluetooth capabilities and new fabric choices.

Mazda5

The first vehicle to be handled by Team Mazda will the Mazda5, a small minivan that’s been on the market since 2006 and will have some of the new options on interiors and offer buyers a six-cylinder engine for the first time starting in January.

The first ads by Mazda’s new agency won’t be seen until next spring, Abel said.

“Good-quality work has a gestation period of six to 18 months, so we have tried to manage expectations to say it will be April before we see new and fresh strategy expressed on air,” he said.

More substantial changes are due in late 2011, when Mazda plans to offer its Sky engines and transmissions, which are billed as offering hybrid-like fuel economy with both gasoline and diesel engines, using direct-injection technology.

Direct injection puts fuel directly into the combustion chamber rather than into the intake port, enabling fuel economy and performance gains over traditional fuel injection, according to Mazda.

Mazda tapped Team Mazda as its agency in June after an extensive account review that ended its relationship with Doner, creator of the automaker’s “zoom-zoom” slogan.

Team Mazda will be handling the remainder of Doner’s work through the end of the year including the year-end clearance event.

The agency transition followed an internal shakeup at Mazda.

Don Romano, president of Mazda Canada Inc., was promoted to chief marketing officer for the automaker in May.

Abel was general manager of Mazda’s global brand management in Japan before being tapped for his job in Irvine in June.

Since his arrival, about half of Mazda’s U.S. marketing staff have changed jobs or been replaced.

“We have been restructuring the team to handle the concept of integration,” Abel said. “We will have a much more integrated approach to producing communications.” n

Want more from the best local business newspaper in the country?

Sign-up for our FREE Daily eNews update to get the latest Orange County news delivered right to your inbox!

-Advertisement-

Featured Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-

Related Articles

-Advertisement-
-Advertisement-