Unilever has pushed forward with its recent strategy to consolidate its media planning activity by awarding its global communications planning activity to Mindshare Media Agency, according to reports.

The move is said to facilitate Unilever’s aim to condense the number of global agencies it works with, while also cutting agency fee costs, with the company said to be looking to reduce costs through zero-based budgeting and achieving double savings in overheads and advertising by 2020. Indeed, the personal care giant already employs Mindshare to handle much of its global media-buying activity.

WPP-owned Mindshare is said to have been awarded the account from PHD, which incidentally took over the account from Mindshare in 2012.

According to a Unilever statement through Marketing, “In line with the digitisation and fragmentation of today’s consumer and media as well as our ‘Connected 4 Growth’ programme, which is giving Unilever more local agility and speed, we are evolving our media agency arrangements. We will be partnering globally for communication planning with Mindshare to increase our effectiveness and deliver greater global to local relevance, future proofing our marketing communication in a rapidly changing media landscape.
“We would like to acknowledge the value that PHD have delivered to our business and will continue working in markets with our current agency partners PHD, Initiative and Mindshare for local media planning and buying,”

Operations will take place from the Mindshare London office, and will cover operations in Singapore and Malaysia markets.