Starcom wins $800m Kraft media business

LONDON (Brand Republic) – Food giant Kraft is understood to have consolidated its $800m North American media planning and buying account into Starcom MediaVest, the media buying arm of B|Com3, following a competitive pitch.

Other agencies pitching for the Philip Morris-owned business included WPP Group-owned MindShare, and True North’s media agency TN Media.

Starcom already handles national US TV buying and adult-targeted categories for Kraft, and its sister agency Leo Burnett handles creative for a number of key brands through its Chicago office.

Kraft said in September that it wanted to consolidate its media planning and buying activities for both its US and Canadian operations, and made it clear that pooling the account into one agency was a possibility.

It then dropped two media shops with no affiliation to its creative agencies – Young & Rubicam’s Media Edge and Grey Global Group’s MediaCom, New York, which handled almost $300m in local broadcast buying and children’s categories.

FCB Worldwide, also owned by True North, shares the creative work on Kraft brands with Leo Burnett, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and J Walter Thompson Worldwide.

With parent company Philip Morris’s acquisition of Nabisco, Kraft now has a new raft of top brands to advertise, including Oreo biscuits, and it is thought that further consolidation is in the pipeline as brands are folded into the Kraft agency roster.

Nabisco spent $188m on media from January to August this year.

This article was first published on brandrepublic.com