Three years after consolidating its media business with MediaCom, Mars Inc. has decided to retain the WPP agency following an internal review.
The review ran for 10 months in 2021 and resulted in a new four-year contract that began last month and will run through the end of 2025. Mars Inc. is growing its relationship with WPP‘s media business, including making more use of WPP’s data arm Choreograph and adding GroupM sister agency Essence, which will manage Mars’ biddable media. WPP will work on all three segments of the Mars business, including Mars Wrigley, Mars Petcare and Mars Food.
Because of the long-running relationship, Mars Inc. chief brand and content officer Rankin Carroll told Adweek the brand opted to review its tie-up with WPP and explore what else the holding company could bring to the table, instead of opening the business up to other agencies.
“We gave a good partner a really tough brief that was super challenging and required a lot of work. And in doing that, it really focused our minds and theirs on what the future needed to look like to keep the relationship vibrant and productive,” Carroll said, adding that WPP’s handling of the brief nullified any need to head into an open review.
Carroll said the brief focused on helping Mars, which he said routinely spends north of $1 billion on measured media each year, become more data driven, transforming the business to better think about tracking the full integrated customer journey.
“The coming years will see accelerated changes in how Mars approaches media, reflecting changing media habits and the fast-evolving data-driven media opportunities,” said Simon Sadie, WPP’s global client leader, Mars and client president, MediaCom.
The saying goes ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ but we think we can learn new tricks with great partners.
Mars Inc. chief brand and content officer Rankin Carroll
Reviewing the relationship
Mars’ goal with its marketing is to bring consumer engagement, digital marketing, brand purpose, data and insights together to unlock growth, according to Carroll. To get there, Mars wants to lean into one-to-one journeys. Carroll said the brand went to its agency and said, “Look, we believe that there’s a different way to crack the code than we’ve been doing for the last few years.”
The brand challenged the agency to look within itself to find different parts within the network to help Mars modernize its marketing.
“The saying goes ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ but we think we can learn new tricks with great partners,” Carroll said, adding, “that’s at the core of what this is.”
Prior to the review, Mars honed in on three areas that were working well with MediaCom: WPP’s senior leadership stayed aligned with Mars’ values, MediaCom improved Mars’ effectiveness and efficiency and finally helped Mars better navigate the major platforms like Google and Facebook.
“We take great pride in being creatively led, but evidence based,” Carroll said. “MediaCom has been a very willing partner to step up in the more traditional spaces and help us get to much better quality measurement—and therefore a much better ROI.”
To execute the internal review, the brand hired a number of third-party partners to analyze and advise the process. These partners scrutinized both what Mars was asking of WPP, but also WPP’s responses to give Mars an outside opinion on whether the agency was meeting what Carroll described as a high bar.
“It made a huge difference bringing in those third parties to help us work through it,” he said.
Tapping more of WPP’s offerings
Mars will expand its relationship with WPP in three notable ways. First, it will utilize Choreograph, WPP’s global data company, more heavily. Mars had begun working with the platform, which launched in spring 2021, but hadn’t yet fully tapped into it. That will change during its four-year contract with WPP.
“It really helps bring data management capability to evolve the content strategy and then really adapt to changing media habits,” Carroll said.
Additionally, Mars will utilize MediaCom sister agency Essence to run its biddable media, which includes programmatic video, social, search and more.
The company is also expanding investments in inclusive and sustainable marketing through GroupM.
On the creative side of Mars’ marketing, Carroll said the new data-driven approach will change what it asks of longtime creative agencies, Omnicom’s BBDO and DDB, that Mars has “amazing partnerships” with.
“One of the big pieces for us has been thinking through how we reimagine the role that our agency partners play: our media agency, our creative agencies as well as ourselves in that equation. We’re rethinking who needs to be at what seat at the table.” Carroll said.
