Last month Learndirect made three MARCOMS appointments via the Central Office of Information (COI). The first was digital agency LBi to redo the Learndirect website, the second Geronimo (part of the Tribal Group) to promote a new set of awards that will ‘celebrate success in learning’. The third appointment was of OMD Fuse to manage their sponsorship account. This represents a pretty significant shift in the MARCOMS activity at Learndirect, who for some time have been one of the largest investors in MARCOMS activity of any government education body.
LBi don’t mention Learndirect on their website or blog, an oddity for an agency who tout the benefits of immediate new media communication –‘Where the ordinary becomes the extraordinary’ – perhaps they do better work for paying clients?
John Simpson and Henry Pitman at Tribal will be pleased with Geronimo’s win as their shareholders will be expecting a serious return on the £13.7m they spent buying Geronimo. In the year they took over, education accounted for 70% of Geronimo’s revenue, although this is probably less now that the agency has repositioned itself as a full-service public sector specialist – yet they also won the PR Week 2006 Best Consumer PR Agency award. The task of promoting yet another set of education awards (Teaching Awards, Learning & Skills Awards, QIA STAR Awards, etc) will be a hard slog, even for an agency like Geronimo.
In sponsorship, Learndirect have been very active, paying £425k for a 12-week slot on ITV that covered The Jeremy Kyle Show, Heartbeat, Wild at Heart and The Royal. Phil Hope, Deputy Under Secretary at the DfES claims the £425k was the total spent and represented ‘excellent value’, when he responded to a parliamentary question from John Hemmings, Liberal Democrat member for Birmingham Yardley, back in March. We doubt that the £425k included Learndirect’s spending on activation and evaluation, which may well have pushed this past £1m. With this sort of sum OMD Fuse’s management must be very pleased with themselves.
www.geronimocommunications.com
www.learndirect.co.uk
www.lbigroup.com
www.omd.com
