Lionsgate Makes Mindshare Its Agency of Record

After an agency review, Lionsgate has chosen Mindshare as its media planning and buying agency, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group co-chairmen Rob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger announced Tuesday. Mindshare’s office in Santa Monica, Calif., will handle media planning and buys, valued at about $300 million annually, for all theatrical features and home-entertainment releases coming from Lionsgate, Summit, Roadside Attractions and Pantelion Films.

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Following last year’s acquisition of Summit by Lionsgate, the company found itself working with two agencies. Mindshare had been handling Summit’s account, while Initiative Media handled Lionsgate. Beginning in September, the merged company put its account up for review, with Mindshare, Initiative and a third agency, Horizon Media, taking part.

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The move is expected to result in savings worth tens of millions of dollars for Lionsgate. “By combining our media related services in one company, Lionsgate will immediately see significant savings which will impact the studio’s bottom line, achieve economies of scale that can be leveraged across our feature film entities and allow us additional resources to market and distribute our films in North America,” Friedman and Wachsberger said in announcing that they had decided to go with Mindshare. “Mindshare has a great track record in its field and we look forward to ramping up our efforts with them in support of our 2013 slate and beyond.”

As Lionsgate readies its upcoming slate -- which includes such films as Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas and Summit’s Red 2 and Ender’s Game -- it will begin immediately to move all its media planning over to Mindshare, with Lionsgate senior vp marketing Erika Schimik and Summit’s senior vp media Gail Heaney overseeing the transition. 

Mindshare, a global media agency network, is part of GroupM, which oversees the media-investment management sector for communications services group WPP. Mindshare has reported billings in excess of $29.2 billion and consists of a network of 113 offices in 82 countries throughout North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.