In February 2010, BT handed a £75 million media account to Maxus. The agency had been launched as a global network only in 2008. A newcomer was suddenly helping decide where one of Britain’s major advertisers would spend its money. There is something pleasingly awkward about that sequence. Advertising sells the power of established brands. Here was a young agency persuading an established brand to take a chance on it.
- Maxus paired local agency initiative with GroupM’s buying power.
- Its work joined media planning, digital marketing, consumer insight and technology.
- In 2017, its global network entered the merger that created Wavemaker.
A small agency with a very large parent
Calling Maxus a startup requires a little care. Local Maxus operations existed before the global launch. WPP’s 2008 decision gave them a worldwide management structure, with Kelly Clark as the network’s first global chief executive. This was a corporate expansion built on existing businesses. The interesting experiment was whether those businesses could keep their appetite for invention while gaining the advantages of belonging to something much larger.
Clark described the proposition as the entrepreneurial culture of a small agency combined with GroupM’s resources, technology and purchasing power. That combination mattered. An advertiser wanted attention from its agency, but also favorable access to media. Maxus could offer a comparatively young organization without asking clients to abandon the negotiating machinery of WPP’s media group.
Geography gave the proposition substance. In a 2011 interview, Clark said roughly a third of revenue came from each of Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas. India was already a strong business before the worldwide network found its footing. Maxus’s growth story therefore ran in several directions. Expertise could travel out of established Asian operations as readily as arrive from London or New York.
Approximate revenue split described by then CEO Kelly Clark.
What £75 million actually bought
The BT appointment covered media planning and buying, excluding outdoor, and took effect that April. The £75 million described the media account’s size; it was not a published agency fee. That distinction is essential to understanding this business. A media agency helps direct an advertiser’s spending. The money flowing through the account and the money earned for managing it are different quantities.
For a client, the practical questions were concrete: whom should we reach, where should we appear, how often, and what happened afterward? Maxus brought communications strategy, search, social, digital execution and analysis to those decisions. Its commercial offering was professional services for advertisers. Hiring it meant assembling a team around a marketing problem, with work spanning channels and markets.
The customer list reflected that breadth. By 2014, Maxus had expanded its NBCUniversal North America relationship to include digital, won L’Oréal’s Nordic brief and added Nestlé’s Canadian media business. Telecoms, entertainment, beauty and food required different consumer knowledge. The common problem was coordinating investment across an increasingly fragmented media landscape.
The buyer who wanted to build things
Media buying sounds like a business conducted in spreadsheets. Maxus also had Metalworks, a creative technology division founded in Singapore in 2012. Its remit brought creative people, programmers and technology specialists together. In 2013, Asia Pacific chief Neil Stewart described India as a development hub for this work. The agency was making room for experiments alongside the buying plan.
One example was Gameday, a mobile web application introduced at a Kuala Lumpur football event in September 2014. Fans could predict scores, answer match questions and earn points redeemable for prizes. It ran in a browser without installation. The idea made a sponsor’s presence something people could participate in while watching sport. That is a rather different assignment from finding another place to display a logo.
Under Lindsay Pattison, who became worldwide CEO in 2014, technology advice also became part of the pitch. In a 2015 video interview, she argued for choosing an advertiser’s technology suppliers individually rather than committing everything to one provider. The expertise was in understanding how those tools affected media spending. A tool’s usefulness depended on the advertiser using it.
“Not every brand needs to be your Facebook friend.”Lindsay Pattison, 2014
Count the outcome, then choose the number
Pattison’s remark about Facebook captured a useful restraint. A new channel did not automatically deserve a relationship with every brand. In the same 2014 interview, she identified a measurement problem: deciding what mattered rather than counting everything. More observable behavior produced more numbers. It also created more opportunities to mistake activity for progress.
The lesson a marketer can copy is modest and demanding. Start with the customer decision you want to influence. Choose the media and technology that can help. Then decide which outcome would justify the expense. This is an interpretation of Maxus’s approach, rather than a guarantee of results. It requires usable customer information, agreement on objectives and the ability to change spending when the evidence changes.
Then the parent changed the plan
On June 1, 2017, GroupM announced it would combine Maxus and MEC while expanding Essence’s geographic reach and traditional media capabilities. The strategic unit had changed. Management was organizing services across the portfolio, with the merged network bringing together media, content and technology. Maxus’s separate global identity became expendable within that arrangement.
+ MEC→Wave
maker
WPP announced the Wavemaker name that September, with local integration scheduled to finish by January 2018. Some operations followed another route: Maxus Korea’s 15-person team and clients were set to join Essence. The ending was a reallocation of people and capabilities, rather than a single uniform handover everywhere.
That ending also defines the limits of the Maxus proposition. Entrepreneurial energy inside a holding company depends on decisions made above the agency. For an advertiser needing only a narrow local assignment, the machinery of a global network may offer little advantage. For a multinational coordinating many markets, the combination can be compelling. Maxus’s enduring question is practical: how much freedom can a large organization give its smaller teams before it decides they should become one?