A new brand commerce agency, Le Shop, has opened in London and Dublin as part of the Publicis Groupe. The agency will work across 20 brands from launch, including BT/EE, Ovo and Nomad Foods, owner of brands including Birds Eye, Findus, Goodfella’s, and Aunt Bessie’s.
Acting as a hub for CRM, brand activation, retail experience, and omnichannel marketing, Le Shop opens with a team of 80, led by CEO Amanda Farmer, former chief client officer at Publicis London (previously Publicis.Poke). She moves alongside 25 of her colleagues including ECD Gabriela Lungu and operations director Maria McDowell, while chief strategy officer is Mark Jenkins comes from Publicis Groupe UK.
The move comes only a couple of weeks after Publicis Groupe acquired the world’s biggest independent brand commerce agency, Mars United, which has offices in the UK, Germany, the US, Canada and across the Asia-Pacific region. Mars United has been used to help bolster capabilities at Publicis Media and rolled into the group’s data technology company, Epsilon.
Farmer said: “We’re in a new frontier of creativity where commerce isn’t just the transactional end of a traditional marketing funnel; today, everything can be a commerce experience. Our mission with LeShop is to bring creativity to build brands that are not just existing in commerce, but are designed for it.”
Publicis has had considerable success pooling its talent via Le Pub, which works on putting cultural relevance into brands like Heineken, Barilla, Heinz, Oreo and Philips. It looks like there’s a similar “power of one” principle at play here, with Le Shop sitting in the Publicis Commerce practice led by Steve Ricketts, chief commerce officer.
