MEDIA: BEHIND THE HYPE - Manning Gottlieb expands to planning specialism.(Company Profile)

Does The Source offer more than a repackaged MG OMD service, Alasdair Reid asks.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Manning Gottlieb OMD's new initiative is actually called The Sauce. Not so much a reflection that its real name, The Source, is phonetically identical, but rather in recognition of the feeling that its launch bumf aspires to the cheekiest bit of marketing hyperbole the industry has seen in a while.

The Source (as the obligatory PowerPoint presentation says) is a 'pioneering initiative', unheard of before in the annals of the marketing services profession.

Well, yes, up to a point. That point being the fact that, since the launch of Naked Communications (or, to be more precise, since Naked became a cause celebre), just about everyone in town has been toying with the notion of launching their own Naked-style unit. Many have gone ahead and done something about it already.

For the record, The Source is to be a communications planning resource that will work on all new-business briefs and give additional input (it will be invoiced as an add-on service) to client groups.

Nick Manning, the chief executive of Manning Gottlieb OMD, makes a decent fist of defending his claims. 'Everyone talks about integrated communications planning but hardly anyone really does it and hardly anyone executes it,' he insists. 'We are going to do both and it will come from The Source.'

Unfortunately, we've heard this sort of thing a couple of times before. This has been the year in which mainstream communications agencies have decided that it was time they eroded the unique selling proposition of planning specialists such as Naked.