Back in October we broke the news that Bayer, maker of various healthcare products treating everything from headaches to head colds, planned to consolidate its agency work after acquiring rival Merck’s OTC business.
Today the company confirmed the story told in our initial post’s internal Havas memo for AdAge: all of Bayer’s creative work will be handled by WPP’s JWT and Omnicom’s BBDO moving forward.
The AdAge piece also details some internal trade-offs: JWT won Phillips (which was already with Bayer but was previously handed by BBDO) as well as the Merck brands Coppertone and Miralax. BBDO, on the other hand, won Merck’s three top-spending brands: Claritin, Afrin, and Dr. Scholl’s.
Since Bayer already sent its media work to Mediacom in October, the client’s move away from IPG and Publicis is now complete; Havas and PKT handled most of Merck’s products before the acquisition.
The client had no announcements regarding upcoming campaigns.