R/GA Won the PwC Creative Review

By Patrick Coffee 

R/GA has won the PwC agency review.

The agency beat out incumbent Deutsch, Huge and other unnamed agencies to win what we’ve learned is a per-project assignment for the international tax/audit/consulting firm.

We first broke news of the review one month ago, and The New York Times noted the R/GA win with a sentence buried deep in a piece about the client’s Oscars problems last week. (PwC has been handing the Academy Awards vote tally process for more than 80 years, and one of its accountants was responsible for the Best Picture confusion on Oscars night.)

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Both Deutsch and R/GA declined to comment on the news. The client simply confirmed that R/GA had won the review and that, given its current agency roster, it does not plan to name an AOR at any time in the near future.

Here’s what U.S. marketing lead John Sviokla had to say during the review itself:

“As we continue to strengthen the PwC brand, we are reviewing media agencies to assist in the execution of an advertising campaign. Our in-house team will be intimately involved in the creative direction of the campaign and will remain focused on helping PwC’s clients drive digital transformations.”

We hear that the scope of the work sent to R/GA is somewhat limited and that it will promote services such as global consultancy Strategy&. Deutsch advertised the former with the “Extraordinary Challenges” campaign in 2015.

The IPG agency recently won the social media portion of Samsung’s marketing business away from Big Spaceship and expanded its L.A. team with several executive-level hires in creative, strategy and production.

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