Starcom tops off year by winning £32m EMI account

by Mark Banham, Brand Republic 21-Dec-06, 15:00

LONDON - Starcom has won the £32m media planning and buying account for EMI Records after a five-way pitch, including incumbents Carat and Media Campaign, as well as MindShare and the7stars.

The account is currently split between Carat and Media Campaign. The agencies have held the account since 1997.

The record company is home to artists including Coldplay, KanYe West and Robbie Williams.

This is the second win this month for a regenerated Starcom, under the stewardship of chief executive Linda Smith. It also picked up the £15m media brief for Premier Foods.

EMI's media spend has increased in the past year on the back of major releases from Coldplay and Gorillaz. According to Nielsen Media Research, the record label's largest single media spend on an album release was £2.1m to support the release of KT Tunstall's album 'Eye to the Telescope'.

Earlier this month, EMI agreed a deal with music search engine Last.fm to create an online recommendation service called tuneglue-audiomap, which they said will accurately match other listeners' preferences to a user's favourite artists.

Tuneglue-audiomap will recommend particular artists to users based on their listening preferences and by matching them to the choices made by other music fans.

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