Lenovo has chosen Wunderman Thompson as its B2B global creative agency of record following an eight-month-long competitive pitch. The review was handled by R3.

Emily Ketchen, VP and chief marketing officer of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets, declined to comment on how many agencies previously serviced the company’s business-to-business account but confirmed this move marks a consolidation for the PC giant. Lenovo is “driving towards a more unified and efficient agency model,” Ketchen said.

Lenovo’s B2B business is “significantly” larger than its consumer business, according to Ketchen, who said the goal moving forward is to “elevate the perception” of the Lenovo brand as a premium product while remaining competitive in the market. This will include a push in marketing Lenovo as a provider of business solutions from the “pocket to the cloud.”

Market-driven opportunity

Lenovo, which operates in 180 markets, posted nearly $62 billion in revenue during its fiscal year ended March 31. Its advertising and promotion spending fell to $845.8 million that year, down from $1.13 billion the year before, according to its latest annual report. Lenovo did not disclose how much of its marketing budget is allocated to B2B, the piece won by Wunderman Thompson, and consumer marketing, where it partners with multiple agencies.

“We have all kinds of assets in the organization from the fact that we own Motorola, so there’s your pocket, all the way up to our infrastructure division to the cloud,” Ketchen said. “There's a huge opportunity for us to tell that story in a new and compelling and unique way.”

This will also include marketing AI and IT-related solutions for companies, said Ketchen, who noted how the corporate world experienced significant shifts during the height of the pandemic.

“With the market under pressure, we see lots of new opportunities in the next generation of AI PCs and devices,” Ketchen said. “To meet the needs of new generative AI workloads, the PC will move to a new category of AI PCs based on advanced chipsets. We see the future of AI PCs as a disruptive, hybrid blend of client, edge, and cloud technologies, ushering in enhanced functionality, speed, creativity, and immersive realistic experiences.”

In June, Lenovo announced it exceeded $2 billion in annual revenue from its AI infrastructure business and that it would invest $1 billion over three years to accelerate the use of AI in its solution for businesses, which includes its portfolio of smart devices.

“Over the next three years, the trend of digital and intelligent transformation will continue to drive strong growth of global IT spending, especially in IT services,” she said. “At the same time, overall demand for vertical solutions, including smart city, smart manufacturing, smart education, and smart retail is expecting strong growth through 2026. And driven by strong AI demand, the [information and communications technology] infrastructure upgrade is accelerating even further with strong growth expected in services, edge, and enterprise software.”

Creatively, Wunderman Thompson will be tasked with taking existing B2B campaigns and creating a more “cohesive brand narrative,” according to Ketchen. This will include digital and social marketing and not as much of a focus on TV marketing, where Lenovo hadn’t been investing much.

“The need for mixing emotion with rationale is more important than ever, in large part because the world has changed. At the end of the day, we’re talking to humans, and we spent a lot of time on this challenge with Lenovo thinking about those decision makers [such as chief information officers], but also who is influencing those decision makers, whether that’s their leadership and their organizations as well as the end customer,” Wunderman Thompson Chief Client Officer Carrie Philpott said.

“As we think about Gen Z, we think about mindsets. More importantly, what we’re finding is that we can call it B2B and it is, but it doesn’t stop there,” she said. “The sphere of influence is broad.”

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The Lenovo account will be led by Philpott, Chief Strategy Officer Ellie Bamford and Chief Creative Officer Tom Murphy. The global account will be run out of Wunderman Thompson Atlanta. The agency’s first work for Lenovo will run by the middle of next year.

“They understood all of the different factors that impact our strategy,” Ketchen said of Wunderman Thompson. “The research was meticulous. The data that they provided was really well synthesized, because data for data’s sake is not super helpful. And through that process in the strategic frame, it really demonstrated their ability to be a strategic partner.”