Lowe reels as DLKW wins Astra

Lowe, the ad agency which lost the £16m Vauxhall Corsa business to a rival ad agency in June, has now lost the £9.3m Vauxhall Astra business to the same agency.

The switch means Lowe has lost almost half of the car company’s £56m advertising budget.

Delaney Lund Knox Warren & Partners (DLKW) has been briefed to create the next advertising campaign for the Astra, after a secret pitch between the two agencies.

DLKW won approval from the General Motors (GM)-owned car company for its Corsa ads which broke last month. The new Astra ads will be on television at the beginning of next month.

It is the latest in a string of losses for Lowe. Last month it resigned the £41m Orange advertising business and in July lost the £11m Burger King business, again to DLKW. The agency was forced to resign the £5m Heineken business after Interbew’s licence to brew the lager in the UK was terminated.

Lowe will pitch against DLKW in a few weeks, this time for the multi-million-pound task of launching the Meriva, a mini-MPV extension of the Corsa.

Lowe recently issued a memo to all 260 staff warning of redundancies (MW September 19).

It is not the first time Lowe, which has GM’s global ad business, has lost the Astra account. In 1998 Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe picked up the brief to launch the Astra. The business moved back to Lowe a year later when Rainey was bought by Young & Rubicam.