What do you do if you’re a glob­al cor­po­ra­tion that has hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to spend on your ad strat­e­gy and you want to get the biggest bang for your buck?

Well if you’re Microsoft, Yahoo, Burg­er King, Dis­ney or Coca Cola – you go to Star­com Medi­aVest, the media agency that will ensure that your mar­ket­ing bud­get is stretched as far as possible.

Star­com Media Who?

Star­com Medi­aVest is part of the Pub­li­cis Groupe with its head­quar­ters in Chica­go. It cur­rent­ly employs 6,000 peo­ple in over 100 offices locat­ed in 68 coun­tries across the globe, and in 2011 it was the World’s num­ber one media agency, with record­ed billings of just over $34billion. Six­ty one per cent of that busi­ness orig­i­nat­ed in the US, 10% in Asia Pacif­ic and 29% in EMEA countries.

The com­pa­ny was formed twelve years ago from the media divi­sions of Leo Bur­nett and D’Arcy and it still oper­ates under the sep­a­rate names of Star­com and Medi­aVest in some mar­kets. Cur­rent­ly the organ­i­sa­tion sits in the Pub­li­cis Groupe, along­side part­ner ZenithOptimedia.

Star­com MediaVest’s oper­a­tions are cur­rent­ly strongest in North Amer­i­ca, with slight­ly low­er rank­ing in oth­er mar­kets – Europe in par­tic­u­lar. In both 2006 and 2007 the busi­ness was named US Media Agency of the Year and in 2009 Star­com was named Media Agency of the Decade by AdWeek.

What do they do?

As a media agency the com­pa­ny devel­ops and deliv­ers mar­ket­ing cam­paigns for its clients, but where Star­com Medi­aVest dif­fers from ordi­nary media or mar­ket­ing agen­cies is its size and reach.

It’s mul­ti-plat­form, glob­al solu­tions are devel­oped in con­junc­tion with dig­i­tal giants includ­ing Google and Microsoft, along with oth­er Pub­li­cis dig­i­tal and media prop­er­ties such as ZenithOp­ti­me­dia, Den­uo, Dig­i­tas and the recent­ly pur­chased Razor­Fish, under the umbrel­la brand Viva­ki. This mod­el allows Star­com to offer its clients some of the most inno­v­a­tive and sophis­ti­cat­ed mar­ket­ing solu­tions avail­able. After all, what poten­tial client is going to say no when you have Google on speed dial?

That’s what you can do when your client list reads like a who’s who of plan­et Earth’s biggest and best-known brands, includ­ing Hon­da, Heineken, Yahoo, Walt Dis­ney, Coca Cola, Mars, Car­refour, Kraft/Cadbury and Glax­o­SmithK­line, as well as Microsoft, P&G and Burg­er King. If you aren’t in the Star­com Medi­aVest black book then frankly, you don’t exist.

As well as pan­ning and deliv­er­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced mar­ket­ing strate­gies Star­com Medi­aVest also deal in data. They have the capac­i­ty and capa­bil­i­ty to under­take research in order to inform their own cam­paigns and the mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties of oth­er busi­ness­es. An exam­ple of this would be the recent Luxe study, which looked into the pur­chase jour­ney of lux­u­ry prod­ucts in Chi­na. The study revealed that Chi­na has slipped ahead of the US as the world’s sec­ond-largest con­sumer of lux­u­ry goods after Japan and when you can sell infor­ma­tion like that, you’re going to be worth a lot of money.

Con­tin­u­ing success

Like many oth­er of the world’s largest com­pa­nies, Star­com Medi­aVest have seemed imper­vi­ous to the finan­cial woes that have affect­ed less robust organisations.

The com­pa­ny has recent­ly announced its reap­point­ment as media agency-of-record by Philip­pines phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal giant Uni­lab, which cur­rent­ly boasts a 20% share of the local mar­ket and has a port­fo­lio of med­ical and health­care brands includ­ing Myra, Ener­von and pH Care.

Star­com have also made key appoint­ments in Japan, with the employ­ment of Alfred Chen as region­al direc­tor of Hong Kong – a move designed to make more senior tal­ent avail­able to that arm of the busi­ness. The com­pa­ny also appoint­ed Bri­an Terkelsen to the post of chief exec­u­tive of Medi­aVest USA, while Matt Black­born will take over as pres­i­dent of emerg­ing markets.