Jägermeister, SoulCycle and AstraZeneca are among the recent top accounts global marketing services company Engine Group has taken home as it unmasks a major rebranding.
CEO Kasha Cacy, who joined the agency around a year ago after more than a decade at UM where she was president, has been at the helm of a mass restructuring that has seen multiple components of the business united under the Engine banner.
"No client wants immense complication and chaos," she told Campaign US. "Clients are looking for partners who can simplify things, manage the chaos and be more efficient and more effective."
Cacy explained that, when she joined, Engine was around 15 individual companies that had been acquired by a private equity firm. The ecosystem was too complex. To bring about clarity, the businesses were all flown under Engine’s brand. But internal murmurs were that the rebrand felt too corporate. The group is not trying to assimilate a holding company.
Now, Cacy has taken this reimagining one step further by stripping away company names and running all services under the Engine banner. Insights expertise capability ORC, for example, has been rebranded as Engine Insights. Its programmatic arm has been consolidated under Engine Media Exchange (EMX).
"We wanted to be much more creative, bolder and innovative and we wanted it to work for all the different types of capabilities we had," she continued. "At the end of the day, what we’re trying to convey is that Engine is a front door to all of the marketing services and capabilities you might need in the modern age."
The news comes on the back of numerous account wins and awards recognition over recent months.
Engine picked up creative, media and strategy rights for Jägermeister in the U.S. and U.K. Meanwhile, SoulCycle’s U.S. business, American Public Education, IEX and data insights for AstraZeneca were added to the group’s roster.
All of these have been won and grown through the integration of multiple services.
It fuels the industry shift Cacy is seeing: A movement away from the client structure in which brand and commercial efforts are separate.
Speaking to the transforming client landscape, Cacy said: "It’s no longer okay for media dollars and creative dollars to build the brand unless there’s going to be a commercial connection with it. What we’ve been focused on is how we help brands find their place in culture and be relevant, but at the same time, drive commerce.
"How can we get better at giving them the kind of system that will help them understand how all those piece parts work together? It’s a consumer insight challenge, it’s a creative challenge, it’s a measurement challenge, it’s an analytics challenge, it’s a media challenge."
This means more agency of record relationships -- a trend at odds with the rise in project-based work many shops are witnessing today.
Ensuring its clients have a place in culture is a creative challenge Engine will be doubling-down on going forward. It’s already seen triumph with a number of campaigns for HBO, including The Sopranos nickname social media drive which saw the Twitter account dish out New Jersey mafia-esque titles to its followers.
Purpose plays a key role in relevance, too. At the start of this year, Engine’s U.K. arm launched an integrated campaign for the Royal Air Force, "No Room For Clichés," which highlighted the fact that all roles are open to women, not just men.
Cacy added: "Really successful brands today are working in that paradigm where everything is working cohesively together and not in piece parts."