Last week we posted on some changes in the advertising business of Lenovo-owned phone brand Motorola.
In case you missed it, Droga5 resigned the business after four years. This decision followed both the 2014 acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Lenovo (the products will be rebranded as Lenovo by next year) and the previously unannounced departure of the company’s CMO Adrienne Hayes, who has been replaced by Lenovo marketing executive Jan Huckfeldt. The account then went to Ogilvy without a review.
But we missed a far larger piece of news: prior to the Motorola decision, Ogilvy beat out five other agencies in a pitch for the Lenovo global brand business.
The company did not publicize the review, but a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed this morning that “There was a pitch for the Lenovo brand work which Ogilvy won.” No official announcement will be made and no further information will be provided, though the spokesperson did clarify that Ogilvy’s Lenovo and Motorola wins were not related.
The last global review for Lenovo took place in 2011 with Saatchi & Saatchi New York beating out CP+B and Ogilvy (which handled the ThinkPad product line at the time). The Publicis shop later led the company’s rebranding efforts with a new logo and identity.
Portions of the account began moving away from Saatchi in early 2014, when Lenovo picked The House Worldwide as its AOR in the EMEA region. Saatchi’s best-known work for the brand remains the $100 million “For Those Who Do” campaign from 2011.
Lenovo spent just over $70 million on measured media in the U.S. in 2015 according to Kantar Media. That number marked a considerable decline from the previous year, when the total was $103 million.