Looking to put a consistent brand personality on what’s been a disparate set of consulting offerings around the world, Lagardère is consolidating them under a new Lagardère Plus brand.
Additionally, Lagardère has acquired Brave, a London-based creative agency, with clients including Amazon Prime, Brown-Forman, Greenpeace and Panasonic.
The Lagardère Plus brand incorporates Lagardère Sports and Entertainment’s consulting businesses and adds akzio! and Zaechel International in Germany, and Sponsorship 360 in France — along with new strategic, creative, digital and analytics capabilities.
That adds to seven agencies and more than 300 employees globally.
The purpose, said Lagardère North America President and CEO Andy Pierce, is to have a more unified offering to compete with the likes of Momentum Worldwide, Octagon and IMG, and to have sports, entertainment and sponsorship marketing of all types housed in one group.
“We aspire to be the global solution for global brands, so this is a big step in that direction,” Pierce said.
Lagardère Plus will be led by its global consulting team: Pierce, global president; Jonathan Isaac, chief strategy officer; Kern Egan, president, Americas; Tim Frith, head of consulting in the U.K.; Hervé Bodinier, executive general manager in France; Olaf Bauer, managing director in Germany; and Malcolm Thorpe, vice president of business development in Singapore.
