General Mills and Kimberly-Clark have put significant parts of their media business under review
Update: This story has been updated with a comment from GroupM.
Two Mindshare clients, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark, have put significant parts of their media business under review, Ad Age has learned.
The scope for the General Mills review is global, while K-C is focused on North America, according to multiple people close to the situation.
“General Mills regularly reviews our agency relationships to ensure they meet our strategic needs,” said Chelcy Walker, a spokesperson for General Mills, one of Mindshare USA's top three clients. “Our focus is on ensuring we have the right partners to help us meet the needs of our customers, stakeholders and consumers.”
K-C was not immediately available for comment.
Last week, Mindshare announced the departure of North America CEO Amanda Richman. An internal memo obtained by Ad Age did not specify any reasoning for her departure, but said her exit would be “effective immediately.” Multiple executives who spoke to Ad Age confirmed that Richman was let go by the agency and that the move came as what they called a “complete surprise.”
Richman, who joined the agency in mid-2021 from sibling Wavemaker, declined to comment. Mindshare also declined to comment.
It is unclear if Mindshare is defending the accounts.
General Mills consolidated its U.S. account and a bulk of its global duties with WPP’s Mindshare in 2015. Mindshare also handles U.S. media for K-C and in parts of Asia; in October 2022 K-C moved its EMEA business to Omnicom Media Group.
General Mills reported worldwide advertising and media costs of $690 million in the fiscal year ended May 2022, according to a regulatory filing, while K-C’s global spend for 2022 was $901 million.
According to Vivvix, General Mills spent $328 million on measured media in the U.S. in 2022, a drop from $461 million in 2021. K-C spent $188 million on U.S. measured media in 2022, a decrease from $224 million in 2021.
A former WPP executive said Richman’s exit comes as Mindshare is under pressure from clients to improve what he called a “rigid” culture, which ladders up to GroupM.
“There are a few larger relationships that Mindshare has right now that are at risk,” the former WPP executive said, referring to K-C and General Mills. “They have real challenges in account management.”
The executive said clients have complained about slow response times from the agency and said that Mindshare will refuse to do projects that it sees as incremental. “There’s a culture there that is less partner-oriented,” he said.
Multiple executives with knowledge of the situation cited issues with performance marketing as one potential reason for the two client's dissatisfaction. The former WPP executive said Mindshare hasn’t invested enough in performance marketing, which is especially concerning for clients in the current shaky economic environment where they have to prove the value of every marketing dollar spent. “The expectation to prove ROI is all the more required,” they said.
GroupM strongly contested the accuracy of the details and characterization of Mindshare’s business and relationships in this story.
As it relates to performance marketing, Mindshare integrated its performance agency Neo under a plan announced last April, bringing Neo’s 1,200 performance marketing experts and consultants and its digital services into its global offering. As part of that restructuring, employees and technology from Finecast, Xaxis and GroupM Services, the group’s community of activation experts, were combined to form GroupM Nexus, which WPP said at the time would be the “world’s leading media performance organization,” with 9,000 digital and technology practitioners.
