McCann-Erickson wins £6m Pioneer account

McCann-Erickson has won the pan-European creative account for Japanese electronics group Pioneer, which last year ploughed £13.5m into a corporate identity revamp.

The account was won after a seven-way pitch against Ogilvy & Mather, Grey Advertising, FCB, Dentsu, FCA! and Japanese agency Asahi. The account is expected to be worth about £2m this year, rising to £6m next year and running in ten countries across Europe.

The business will be run from McCann’s Belgium office because of a clash in the UK with Japanese electronics company Panasonic.

The company, which was famous for consumer durables in the Seventies and early Eighties, revamped its corporate ID last year and ditched its blue tuning fork marque for a more dynamic logo.

Pioneer is hoping to double its turnover by 2005 from $4.2bn (£2.6bn) last year to nearly $9bn (£5.6bn) and will launch campaigns to promote two products: its Digital Video Disk player and a new generation of flat widescreen TVs.

However, Pioneer faces a significant threat from companies such as Philips and Sony which, with their wide product ranges, are well placed to take advantage of the trend towards convergence. Convergence is the linking of different audio or visual products such as telephones, PCs and TVs to work seamlessly together.