Mumbai: MullenLowe Lintas Group, India’s leading marketing communications group has announced the merger of its omni-channel agency, PointNine Lintas, with its flagship creative agency, Lowe Lintas. The merger combines the omni-channel expertise of PointNine Lintas with the creative strength of Lowe Lintas, to form one of the largest hyper-bundled (full-service) agencies of India, filling a need gap in the industry.
With a roster of well-established clients, Lowe Lintas is amongst the largest agencies in India that has created tremendous success for some of the leading brands of the country. It currently manages a portfolio of over 300 brands for clients such as Britannia, Flipkart, Google, MRF, Titan, TVS Motors, Unilever (HUL), and Zee amongst others.
PointNine Lintas was set up in 2017, to create a new model that bundled a wide array of marketing disciplines under a unified omni-channel agency offering. Built as a beta (version 0.9), the agency has tested its model over the last one year on a large portfolio of clients such as Liberty General Insurance, Naturell, Product Of The Year (POTY), SoundLogic, Marriot International (earlier known as Starwood International) and Zespri, amongst others. The merger aims to seamlessly integrate the operating model and skills of PointNine Lintas to the large client base of Lowe Lintas.
Responding to this development, Virat Tandon, Group CEO, MullenLowe Lintas Group commented “With PointNine Lintas, we’ve grown a new, future-facing strain and now it’s time to graft it into Lowe Lintas, which is already India’s best. Having seen the PointNine offering and skills develop very closely, and being familiar with the position that Lowe already commands, I am super excited about this move and am confident that this is a big leap forward for us. Our promise for clients with this merger is that in the increasingly fragmented and fast-evolving communications landscape, we will now be able to seamlessly extract more power from our big ideas. Lowe Lintas’ new Hyper-bundled offering means that our clients no longer have to settle for the fractured solutions of the past.”
The services that Lowe Lintas will now offer includes digital marketing & transformation, public relations, reputation management, activation, experiential & shopper marketing, and media planning & buying. The PR, Media and Experiential divisions of the group, GolinOpinion, Lintas Mediahub and LinEngage respectively, would continue to offer their services to their clients, while collaborating with Lowe Lintas.
Speaking about the merger, Amer Jaleel, Group CCO and Chairman, MullenLowe Lintas Group said “We are looking at a future where a lot of very carefully designed and yet differing messages will aggregate to form a stereographic brand picture in the head. We see this emerging need as very challenging and exciting. Our omni-channel incubation PointNine Lintas is now fully ready and positioned to understand these complex brand needs and it’s time to unleash it across the breadth of our vast brand portfolio”.
The merger is effective immediately and the leadership teams of both agencies are working on operationalizing the merged structure.
