Entering the Top League with De’Longhi

Entering the Top League with De’Longhi

30 countries and a famous brand ambassador, Brad Pitt. Matthias Brüll, Managing Partner Mediaplus International, explains what makes the De’Longhi campaign so unique.

Since February 2020, Mediaplus has been entrusted with the De’Longhi account. Now the first campaign has been launched. What makes this account so special?

Implementing a campaign across 30 different countries with markets that are in part very heterogeneous and have very different coffee-drinking cultures – this was uncharted territory for everyone involved. De’Longhi has never conducted a brand campaign on such an enormous scale before, and certainly never with such a famous brand ambassador in the leading role. This was a huge challenge, not least for us.

How so? De’Longhi was not the first international campaign for Mediaplus…

Of course we have designed and implemented international campaigns in the past, though never of such an order of magnitude involving 30 different countries. We had to design and implement individual strategies for each of those 30 markets. This involved developing a high-impact moving-image strategy for each market, with the aim of achieving complete dominance over the competition. We prepared this during the 12-month lead time in a process overseen by our central Mediaplus International division, and then distributed it on a market-by-market basis in collaboration with the respective national subsidiaries. De’Longhi invested heavily in this campaign and the client likes to know exactly where their money is being spent. This is also why we are continuously flanking the campaign with market research. We have designed smart processes across all countries and set up a global dashboard through which we can monitor the campaign’s KPIs in every country. Based on the defined KPIs, the dashboard provides an immediate overview of the success that the campaign is generating for the brand.

Did the famous brand ambassador further increase the demands in terms of media planning?

Yes, of course. Brand safety is always a factor, but in this campaign featuring Brad Pitt there are explicit agreements in place regarding the environments in which advertising with such a famous brand ambassador can and cannot be shown. The benchmark a campaign like this must achieve in terms of awareness is also considerably higher. The challenge is to exceed certain visibility thresholds in each individual market. This is why we selected a very high proportion of premium/prime-time slots – over 50 per cent.

Mediaplus has held the international De’Longhi account since February 2020; the agency won the pitch for Asia in March 2021 – how was this account expansion achieved?

De’Longhi first kept a very close eye on how the collaboration proceeded during its first year in the European countries we had been allocated at that time. So we had a year to gain the client’s trust. But then De’Longhi saw that everything was working very well, especially with regard to our strategic recommendations. When the invitation to bid for the APAC account was issued, we benefited from this prior working relationship, from the strategies we had already developed, and above all from our centralized global dashboard: we basically just had to integrate our new Asian markets. This was very convenient for De’Longhi. It is easier to dock an additional region to an existing dashboard than having to start everything from scratch. Nevertheless, gaining the Asian markets is a great success for us and a sign of the client’s trust, especially when you consider the fact that we aren’t even represented there as Mediaplus but instead work with our partner agency Hakuhodo.

Wasn’t this risky for such an important account?

Our partnership with Hakuhodo has been in place for several years now and De’Longhi has also previously worked with Hakuhodo on other projects. So there is a bedrock of trust there. This is a truly vibrant partnership, capable of jointly servicing such multinational accounts. Of course, it’s no use just to call something a partnership without actually working together properly – you may both gain in good will, but nothing substantive will ever come of it at the operational level. The key factor to success is the intensity and professionalism of the collaboration. We work hand in hand with Hakuhodo and have weekly calls with them; the partnership thereby becomes a properly close one. Nevertheless, it is still incredible that, together, we were able to impress the client and gain the APA account. Equally, it can only work if you have a central division such as Mediaplus International to coordinate everything – otherwise, you just can’t do it.

We were successful with the De’Longhi account in Japan but not the USA – why is that?

The USA is a very autonomous market and De’Longhi decided to go down a different route there. Admittedly, we have also only just begun to massively expand our media agency in the USA; the dominance of the American networks is still very strong over there.

But this is set to change thanks to our partnership with Stagwell, isn’t it?

Absolutely. Our partnership with Stagwell means that we will be in an extremely significant position when it comes to these kind of client relationships in future. Yet the De’Longhi campaign has already allowed us to prove that we are an international player that deserves to be taken seriously. Managing a campaign of this scope across so many different countries is unprecedented, including for other agencies. As an agency, this has helped us to permanently cross a threshold into the top league.

Contact: Matthias Brüll, Managing Partner Mediaplus International