Advertising agency Poulters to close
POULTERS, one of the region’s oldest advertising agencies, whose work spans five decades, is to close with the loss of 42 jobs.
The Leeds-based advertising, marketing and public relations firm which is one of the best known in the industry in Yorkshire and was founded in 1969, is to be closed by its parent company Bezier which bought it only 18 months ago.
Bezier, which has its head office in Wakefield and is Europe’s largest in-store marketing company, said that the move was part of a restructure of its creative division and it would no longer offer services such as advertising and public relations.
Poulters’ managing director Gary McCall, who had been with the firm since 1990, was made redundant in February.
Bezier specialises in offering consultancy and design for point of purchase advertising, which is the displays and signage which encourage consumers to choose particular brands on store shelves.
Poulters offers what is known in the marketing industry as ‘through the line’ services such as brand design, public relations, design, sales promotion and direct marketing services for clients such as William Hill, United Utilities, Kelloggs and Kleenex.
Bezier is backed by London-based investment firm MidOcean Partners and currently has turnover of around £130m with a target of hitting £200m by 2009.
It said that its restructure followed the acquisition of London-based Coutts Retail Communications from Media Square in March. Its new creative arm will now be called Coutts and focus on retail marketing with offices in Soho, Leeds, Bristol and Leicester. The new division will have a turnover of more than £20m.
A spokeswoman said that the business would “keep a presence” at Poulters’ offices at Rose Wharf, across the river from the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
In a statement Bezier said: “This means that Poulters broad, integrated communications proposition, including advertising and public relations are no longer core service offerings and unfortunately as a result of this we are proposing the closure of the business. We will therefore be entering into a period of consultation with colleagues from Poulters.”
Bezier chief executive Mark Shaw, said: “The acquisition of Coutts prompted us to review the structure of our creative division. We felt that the number of agencies we had that were operating in similar market spaces was not the best structure for us. Instead, we thought it more important to respond to our clients’ and the market’s requirement to understand shopper motivations, needs and actions. We believe that one specialist agency with around 100 colleagues of different disciplines and expertise split over the country is the right model for servicing our existing, and future clients.”
Bezier said it will be launching enyanga, a stand-alone digital agency with a retail specialism. Within the bezier group currently there is in-depth experience in developing both business to business and business to consumer digital solutions. This breadth of experience will now come together under the enyanga brand to offer a range of digital expertise and services from website design and online marketing to e-commerce and campaign management tools.
Mr Shaw added: “The new structure of a strong, industry leading creative retail marketing agency and specialist independent digital and research agencies is a model that we believe will best serve our customers. These agencies, coupled with Bezier`s strong heritage and proposition can provide genuine benefits to our customers in terms of creativity, speed to market and cost savings.”
Julian Kynaston, chairman of Leeds-based creative agency Propaganda, said the closure of Poulters was a sign of a rapidly changing industry.
“Their demise was slow and painful but in the end it’s a hard lesson for the Leeds agency scene. They failed to evolve – this industry is changing fast and the leviathans of advertising will not survive.”
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