Well, that came to a rather anti-climactic conclusion didn't it? 

The Unilever behemoth of a pitch has finally rumbled to the end of its tracks and delivered the unsurprising announcement that MindShare retains the business across Europe. Not a bad week for the GroupM shop after the group also picking up the COI media consolidation in the UK this week. So that's the little matter of a $billion confirmed billings, very nice and congrats to all. 

So Unilever chose MindShare. Is that the beginning or the end of the pain for the agency?

I had bemoaned a while back here the slightly farcical pitching going on across last year and many are already wondering how far the pants were dropped to secure this scale of billings in a post-recession marketplace. I'm sure some of the details will start to emerge but its scary to consider what media cost and (more importantly) fee savings might have needed to be committed to in order to secure Unilever's procurement approval.  

The top comment to this story reads "So basically nothing's changed, they just get a cheaper deal?"

Saying what we were all thinking? Probably. But perhaps that's doing a grave injustice to Unilever's procurement boffins. An advertiser of their sophistication should have been also looking to re-design the agency's scope of work and objectives in light of the changing shape of the media landscape and the increasing value the media agency can offer beyond media buying. I trust they took this opportunity and it wasn't entirely about cost cutting as this is one thing media agencies really don't need to be facing. For me, the smart brief would have been all about improving effectiveness of what you might be able to achieve with a $750m investment. And hopefully that's what meant MindShare beat off the competition.