BMP DDB scoops 25m worldwide Reuters brief

BMP DDB is understood to have won the 20m to 25m worldwide account for news agency and information service Reuters, beating M&C Saatchi, Saatchi & Saatchi and Lowe Howard-Spink to the business.

The agency won the account after a protracted pitch process lasting over six months. BMP DDB will look after the 7m account in the UK, and will be lead agency on the worldwide account, which will be handled by the DDB network.

While neither Reuters nor BMP would comment on the win, it is likely the forthcoming campaign will be aimed at securing Reuters’ dominance of the financial information market.

Reuters, still best known as one of the world’s leading press agencies, is vying with three other main operators for a leading share of the online financial information business. Its main rivals are Bloomberg, Bridge and Dow Jones. The four companies between them collected $4.4bn (2.6bn) of sales last year by providing information to the world’s financial markets.

Reuters considers there are likely to be two main players in this market within a short period of time, whereas there are at least a dozen or so leading suppliers at present. The company has traditionally been regarded as the market leader in the volume of information it has at its disposal – it can, for instance, relay the equivalent of 27,000 pages of data per second – though some analysts suggest it runs second to Bloomberg in supplying historical data packaged with analytical software.

George Pitcher, page 27