From the editor of Media Week
The iconic communications planning agency Naked is set to embark on the next stage in its adventure, having been bought out by Australian marketing services group Photon last week for an initial payment of about £17m, plus deferred payments linked to future performance.The founders and key executives at Naked are tied in to four-year earn-out clauses, a relatively long period that signals the importance of the key people in delivering the essence of what Naked is all about.
Media Week’s agency of the year in 2002 and 2003 burst on the scene in 2000, threatening to completely reshape communications planning with its strictly media-neutral approach. It had a distinct impact on the way other agencies operate, but in recent years suffered familiar growing pains as a start-up business evolving to the next level without diluting its unique selling points.
Clients wowed by initial contact with inspirational characters inevitably grow disenchanted when they drop down the food chain as busy founders spread themselves more thinly. And a reliance on strategy and consultancy tends to result in more project work and fewer lucrative monthly retainers that are the meat and drink of traditional media agencies.
Times have changed since Naked emerged, and other agencies have caught on to the importance of Naked’s strategic approach and integrated it into their own offers. It was significant that Boots shifted its media planning from Naked into MediaCom last year, to add to the WPP agency’s existing media buying work. Boots seemingly no longer saw the need for a stand-alone comms planning partner, and was happy MediaCom could deliver on both counts.
Hence, the sale of Naked is not the greatest of surprises. It will allow the agency to invest and try to lever itself up to the next stage of its evolution. However, the identity of the purchasing company was somewhat unexpected. Photon has some presence in the UK, and was last week also being tipped to take a stake in Naked’s Farringdon direct marketing neighbour Kitcatt Nohr. It is the biggest indigenous marketing services group in Australia and is spreading its tentacles into Europe.
Naked’s founders are adamant that Photon shares the same radical, swashbuckling, independent philosophy as themselves. If this really is the case, maybe the acquired company can buck the lessons of history that suggest the media-neutral approach is on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin. But it won’t be easy.
