NEW YORK – Newly formed marketing services holding company Wiedemann & Lomasney announced here at DM Days its recent acquisitions to fulfill its vision of creating a marketing-services company for the needs of the 21st century.
With acquisitions of Lanyap Inc. and its creative director, Richard Koranda, combined with the acquisition of Fury Group and its expertise in analytics, W&L has incorporated the core elements it wanted in building its new marketing-services organization, named UMarketingLLC.
“This series of acquisitions brings to life and begins the vision we have of putting together the right resources to build a customer-centric, no-silo, 21st-century marketing-services organization,” said George Wiedeman, CEO of UMarketing and chairman of W&L.
Earlier this month Mr. Wiedemann, founder of Grey Direct, and Kenneth Lomasney, founder of Market Knowledge Inc., joined forces to invest in W&L. The Fury Group was founded by Ken Lomasney.
According to both founders, W&L, with offices in New York and Chicago, has a mission to create a customer-centric marketing-services firm in the next 10 years. The acquisition strategy focuses on this longer term, with plans to join complementary service companies into a unified, new model enterprise.
Jim Miller, co-founder of Lanyap has been named president at UMarketing. Steve Shaw, co-founder of Lanyap, has been named executive vice president.
“Agencies today must achieve an effective balance between traditional and digital media,” Mr. Wiedemann. “As we launch UMarketing we are also unveiling our latest development, a ground-breaking tool to help achieve that balance with each and every campaign. We call it the ‘Brand Interaction Personas’ or BIPs.”
BIPs are visually realized representations of typical customers and prospects. They are based on analytics, combined with customized client panels, measuring the attitudes, behaviors, motivations and interaction preferences of current and prospective customers.
BIPs have been designed to allow understanding and help emotionally relate to statistically based information about groups as easily as you might read stories about customers. As a result, decisions on who to sell to, what to say, how to say it and where to place your online and offline messages are more effective than ever before.
“They bridge the gap between science and art and most companies we’ve found need help bridging the gap,” Mr. Wiedemann said.
