HONG KONG: Saatchi & Saatchi has challenged a Hong Kong 4A's China
ranking, which pushed his agency off the top spot for the first time in
six years.
According to the 4A's, Ogilvy & Mather is the biggest agency on the
mainland with capitalised billings last year of HKdollars 1.15 billion
(about USdollars 148 million), compared with Saatchi's HKdollars 1.11
billion. Saatchi's Asia chief executive Patrick Pitcher said that O&M
pipped his agency with an 84 per cent growth in production income, which
he questioned as being "extremely high when the industry average,
excluding O&M, is around 12 per cent".
O&M regional chairman Miles Young countered by saying: "The production
income category includes fees, as opposed to media commissions, and the
growth in fees was very strong last year with around 60 per cent of our
clients in China on fees, including IBM, Kodak and Motorola. And that
was on top of a large pool of interactive business."
Pitcher, however, is refusing to concede defeat until the publication of
a similar ranking by the China Advertising Association next month, which
he claimed is more accurate because all figures are based on taxes
paid.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, second-placed DDB has closed the gap with O&M
(dollars 1.29 billion) to just dollars 8 million.
