JDA Creative marches on

JDA Creative is targeting the Asian market as it seeks to harvest new opportunities following its split from JDA Advertising a month ago.

JDA Creative founder Ron Samuel, and former JDA Creative senior executives Mick Colliss and Spencer Battista, are directors in the company, which was previously owned and operated by JDA Advertising.

JDA Advertising owner Joan Davies announced she was closing JDA Creative on October 15.

The decision was made after a number of clients left the agency in search of an unbundled service offering.

It’s an increasing trend, according to Mr Samuel, and the reason JDA Advertising set up JDA Creative.

“What would happen was we would get small clients with small budgets that wanted one thing done for them, but the way agencies are structured means that it is not financially viable to do it,” Mr Samuel said.

“So we referred them to other people. We’d bump into those clients months later and their budgets had grown so we thought we would create a consultancy as a subsidiary.

“It was only for new clients that wanted specific work done, and once they had built up a budget we would refer them to the agency (JDA Advertising).”

Mr Samuel said the unbundling of marketing services was growing in popularity and JDA Creative was now pitching for and winning work in Asia.

“More and more clients have got their own people who are well trained in strategy and technical thinking and they can often do it better; they come to people like us knowing what they want,” he said.

“Our art director [Spencer Battista] is in Ho Chi Minh City at the moment for two weeks to do some work for Unilever. He’s been contracted by Lowe and Partners, who are Unilever’s agency.

“We sent some work to the agency in Singapore and they asked if they could send it to their Vietnam office and they asked us to come over.

“I’m going over to Singapore next week to talk to WPP Group about doing freelance work. We’re not sure how this will go but we want to go out there and see how viable it is.”

Mr Samuel said he and directors intended to change the name of the company next year.