• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, November 1, 2011

In July, WPP’s Maxus won two of the biggest media agency reviews of the year, including S.C. Johnson’s $1 billion global assignment and the North American portion of NBCU’s nearly $1 billion account. Now it has won several more new pieces of business, even as it continues to ramp up operations in North America and around the world. The goal, the shop’s executives say, is to transform the agency from a planning boutique to a full-service global agency network.

The mission is just about accomplished, said global CEO Kelly Clark. Next month, the agency will open up an office in Argentina and after that, one in France. “I personally think we’re almost there,” said Clark. “We’re at 63 offices worldwide, and we can now deliver for clients in almost all of their important geographies -- if not directly through a Maxus office, then through the other resources at GroupM.”

The new wins include the U.S. assignment for contact lens and eyecare product marketer Bausch + Lomb, which spent about $25 million on ads last year, according to Kantar Media. In addition, the shop won Zest soap, the former Unilever brand now owned by High Ridge Brands, a unit of venture capital firm Brynwood Partners.

Ad Spending on Zest last year totaled about $5 million, per Kantar, but the expectation is that expenditures will increase sharply under the new ownership.

The shop also picked up the media business for Canadian paper products giant Kruger Inc., as well as the Canadian assignment for confectioner Fererro, whose brands include hazelnut spread Nutella. 

Over the last three years, since Clark took over as global CEO, Maxus has more than doubled its billings from under $3 billion to upwards of $6.5 billion. The staff grew from 750 to 1,500 and revenues more than doubled in the same period, said Clark. “We’d like to see the same result over the next three years.”

In North America, the agency’s billings were roughly $700 million at the end of last year and will approach $2 billion by the end of 2011. Three new offices just opened in Toronto, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

The North American operation had about 80 employees a year ago and now has about 230 and counting. “We’re about 90% there,” said Louis Jones, North American CEO at Maxus, referring to the staff gear-up. “It’s been a busy couple of months, and we’ve been scaling every day. Now, we have just a few things to sort out.”

Recent key hires in North America include Neil Sternberg, who joined as CFO in September, from Interpublic Group’s Mediabrands, where he was vice president and worldwide controller.

Maxus also recently tapped Elizabeth McCune from Omnicom’s PHD to be the shop’s director of communications planning. While her duties cover all North American clients, McCune works closely with Naked Communications on the communications planning assignment for the NBC Universal TV and cable networks.

While it’s not been widely publicized, Naked’s Minneapolis office teamed with Maxus on the NBCU pitch. Naked’s two partners in that office, Lisa Seward Perry and Amy Sheil, were both former planners at Publicis Groupe’s Fallon, NBCU’s previous planning agency. They had handled the NBCU assignment. The network found the combination of the Naked duo and Maxus particularly appealing.

In October, the shop hired Spencer Bahler as a managing director based in Chicago, where he will oversee the S.C. Johnson account. Previously, Bahler had been a Maxus client, when he was senior director of marketing communications for Alberto Culver, which was recently purchased by Unilever. (As a result of the purchase, the AC account shifted to sister agency Mindshare, which handles Unilever.)

While Maxus has growth ambitions, Clark says the goal is not to be the biggest agency network in the business. “We’ll continue to bring the feel and benefits of a small agency culture backed up by the power and resources of GroupM. It’s a combination that is resonating with clients,” he said.

GroupM -- and WPP for that matter -- bring a lot to the table, including an econometric modeling practice and an array of specialist units for services such as local broadcast and print buying, as well as data from research arm Kantar and even direct marketing expertise from Wunderman.

Maxus, in turn, provides its clients with planning expertise across all communications channels, national TV buying (headed by John Miles, who was hired in July from MediaCom) and digital trading, headed by David Fineman, who recently relocated from the Maxus office in London. The agency also has its own data and analytics practice, critical to planning, which is headed by Elif Akcayli, who recently joined the shop from OMD.

At the core of the Maxus offering is an approach that the shop calls “relationship media.”

What that comes down to, said Jones, is “thinking about a client’s business from two vantage points: What the grand ambition is or what you want to be 3 to 5 years from now and how do we get on that path now. We continually chart the way for a brand to make the right consumer connections to achieve that ambition.”