Virgin hands brief to Wunderman

Wunderman has fought off competition from three agencies to land the Virgin Media business-to-business direct marketing account, including the incumbent on the consumer work, Rapp.
The agency, which has been on a major new business drive over the past few months – picking up global CRM briefs from Coke and Shell – beat off Rapp, Iris and TBWA to land the account. Rapp has handled the consumer business – estimated to be worth more than £60m – since 2011; Rapier had been the incumbent for over five years.
Previously Virgin Media Business activity was handled by a number of agencies on a project basis.
Launched in 2010, the company offers Internet and telecommunications services to firms, including broadband, managed Internet access, dedicated leased lines, VPN and ethernet. The company appointed Base One to handle its digital marketing account in 2012.
The pitch was run through Roth Observatory, formed from the merger of Roth Associates and The Observatory in November last year.
Earlier this month, Virgin Media Business secured a £1m contract to transform the contact centre services at City Link, one of the UK’s leading express parcels carriers.
The contract is designed to allow the City Link contact centre team, which handles 2 million calls from across the UK, to cut down on response times by seeing real-time customer information as the call arrives. They can also share information more easily via instant messaging or desktop-sharing, meaning callers no longer have to ‘start again’ when their enquiry is passed to someone else.