WeightWatchers, Continental Europe
Johan was introduced to us by the AAR for both our pan European creative agency pitch and then the subsequent media agency pitch.
With the AAR's help we made our long list and short list of agencies in the usual way and we then asked Johan to assist us with managing the detail of both these pitch processes.
His level of knowledge and expertise was invaluable in helping us to select agency networks that aligned most closely with our objectives. He ran the pitch processes for us, managed all the logistics and negotiated all the fine detail of our commercial arrangements on our behalf.
In this task he worked very closely with our European CEO, our European Head of Marketing and with me. We have rationalised our arrangements and with his support ensured that we exceeded our savings targets and for 2005 we have estimated a $2.5m saving on our marketing costs.
In addition and just as importantly, we have established strong, transparent relationships with both our creative and our media agencies and we have in place meaningful performance measurements and agency incentive programmes.
We would have no hesitation in recommending Johan for similar complex tasks. He was really good fun to work with and kept us on track during a very important review process.