Unilever divides its global and regional advertising business between Lowe, JWT, Ogilvy & Mather and BBH, while MindShare handles media.
Lowe, which is regionally headquartered in Thailand, will be moving 10 key leadership people, including business and planning directors.
Lowe, which is regionally headquartered in Thailand, will be moving 10 key leadership people, including business and planning directors.
Helen Bell, Lowe's global COO for Unilever home and personal care, said that the agency will evaluate the needs of its client before deciding on the number of people to relocate.
“These days we all work virtually. Not everyone needs to move. We will continue to use our teams based in Bangkok, Shanghai and Jakarta,” she said.
Lowe handles Unilever’s globally aligned laundry and anti-dandruff shampoo business. Regionally it services Close-up, Pepsodent, Sunlight, Wall's and Citra.
JWT, which manages four Unilever brands - Knorr, Sunsilk, Lux and Radiant - will be moving 20 senior executives from Bangkok to Singapore. The Singapore agency, which currently has 130 staff, will hire a further 20 people to service these brands.
Michael Maedel, JWT president, said the agency will not make any redundancies. “The process of relocation will start this month and will be completed by December. By January 2009, we should have everything in place. People who cannot move to Singapore will be absorbed in other teams in Thailand.”
MindShare has already moved three senior executives from a team of five that were working exclusively on Unilever. They include David Porter, managing partner of MindShare Asia and two other senior executives.
The move is not expected to have any major impact on Ogilvy, which services Ponds, Dove and Comfort regionally. Alan Couldrey, chairman of O&M Thailand, said: “Our regional teams working on Unilever brands are based in different parts of the world and have been working successfully on these brands, so this won't have a drastic impact on our operations in Thailand.”
BBH runs Unilever's Axe and Vaseline brands out of Singapore, so is less affected by the move.
Unilever began to move its brand management team from Bangkok to Singapore last month, prompted by political uncertainty in Thailand and incentives from the Singapore government, say sources.
