Vodafone Awards $1 Billion Global Media Business to OMD

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Vodafone, the world's largest mobile telecom provider, consolidated its $1 billion-plus global media-buying account with Omnicom Group's OMD.

The assignment covers vast swathes of the globe, including Europe, Middle East and Asia-Pacific markets. Twenty markets in all were covered in the review, though some were already handled by OMD. The review didn't include the U.S., where Vodafone's presence is a minority stake in Verizon Wireless. That was not part of this review.

In the beginning of the year OMD lost Vodafone's U.K. media account, which it won back today, to Aegis' Carat. In a statement, the marketer would only say: "After an extensive review Vodafone has appointed OMD as its global media network."

The move follows by just a few days reports that Vodafone made the surprise move of putting the London office of Buenos Aires-based Santo in charge of its global creative account, displacing Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is said to still have the account in the U.K.

OMD, which beat out Carat and a WPP unit called Team Vodafone, which works on the phone maker's creative business, referred calls to the client.

This marks another global win for OMD, which has been on a new-business winning streak for about a year now. Earlier this month the agency was awarded the $200 million global media-planning and -buying account for the online job search engine Monster without a review.