Barclays has kicked off a review of its agency roster for direct marketing activity – an account estimated to be worth more than £10m – as part of plans to slash the number of agencies it works with.
The bulk of the account has been held by EHS 4D since September 2010, when the agency was handed the retail bank brief previously split with Rapp.
The current roster includes Balloon Dog, Soho Square and Iris. VCCP me also picked up some Barclays business when the senior management team of Presky Maves – who had worked with the bank for nearly a decade – switched over to the Chime-owned agency two years ago.
Just like most high street banks, Barclays’ reliance on high-volume solus direct mail campaigns has waned over the past few years – at one time it spent nearly £30m a year on this activity.
Driven by head of CRM Richard Zanetti, the company introduced a programme called ‘Next Best Offer’. The scheme linked hundreds of disparate datasets and embraced state-of-the-art printing technology to promote products to its customer base, using bank statements. The programme picked up a Data Strategy Award in 2010, in the category “best use of data for a financial institution”.
The roster review is being handled by Barclays’ procurement team, which is also overseeing a shake-up of the bank’s global digital account, held by a number of agencies including Dare, LBi, Ogilvy & Mather, Profero and SapientNitro.
