MullenLowe attributes 2017 success to “Pure Growth”
MullenLowe Sri Lanka, the fully owned operation of New Yorkbased Inter Public Group ( IPG), completed 2017 on a record high. In a tough economic climate in 2017, where market trends were contrary to growth, the company said in a media release that its top-line revenues grew sharply almost two-anda- half times the accepted global average with a significant contribution coming from new business.
MullenLowe’s significant growth in 2017 came despite the company not handling any lucrative government businesses, which many companies are very dependent on and secondly it operates as a single entity at present and does not have multiple sub-units to manage conflicting businesses.
Thayalan Bartlett, Chief Executive Officer of MullenLowe Sri Lanka, attributed the company’s growth to doing creatively effective work across multiple plat- forms and making significant gains in new business. “With accelerated growth through 2017, we have been able to further cement our position as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost integrated marketing communications agencies. We now handle brands representing 80 per cent of the top 10 and 50 per cent of the top 20 most advertised categories in the country. This position significantly improves our knowledge and expertise across categories,” he said.
The outlook for 2018 looks extremely promising for the company but comes with its own sent of challenges. “Finding quality talent to resource the agency as it expands and to have adequate external support to cope with the increased demand for TV productions remain our biggest challenge. In fact our 2017 growth was somewhat muted by this limitation or else we would have recorded much better figures than what we closed on,” said Mr. Thayalan.
Established as LDB Lintas in 1993, and thereafter referred to as Lowe LDB, the agency has a vibrant creative legacy. It came to be known as MullenLowe as a result of a merger with US- based network Mullen in 2015.