JWT regains £5m Coty Euro contract
Cosmetics company Coty has re-appointed J Walter Thompson London to handle the European advertising business for its global brand, Margaret Astor. The business is understood to be worth about £5m.
JWT, which lost the Astor business to BBDO Dusseldorf in 1999, already handles the $40m (£27m) global account for Coty’s mass-market cosmetics brand, Rimmel.
Margaret Astor, which is a market leader in Germany and Spain, represents 50 per cent of Coty’s turnover in mass-market cosmetics worldwide. Coty is a subsidiary of German-based Benckiser. The brand was launched in the UK last spring with a £5m advertising campaign, created by BBDO.
It is understood that a new JWT campaign will soon be rolled out in the UK, Spain and France, prior to a possible pan-European roll-out.
The decision to appoint JWT is believed to have been made by Coty’s Paris office, which is responsible for the company’s European marketing. No one at the company was available for comment.
In the UK the Coty account, which is spread across several agencies, is worth £9.3m (Nielsen-MEAL).
Last year the cosmetics company announced the launch of its first global Coty-branded fragrance in more than a decade. It also intends to increase its marketing and advertising budget across its range of products (MW December 7).
