World: Analysis - Naked gathers its forces as it prepares for launch in the US.

Are US advertisers ready to embrace the Naked style of planning, Lucy Aitken asks.

Naked has been busy spreading its gospel. It has officially opened in Oslo and Sydney, complementing offices in London and Amsterdam. Naked in North America is under way and rumours about Naked Paris are circulating.

Last month, John Harlow, the co-founder of Naked, was in Beijing for the International Advertising Association Congress. His speech, entitled 'The Agency of the Future', included a comparison between existing agency structures and black-and-white television.

Naked was not the first London agency to separate communications planning from media buying: it followed examples set by Unity and Michaelides & Bednash. It is taking a similar approach towards its North American launch, where it does not see first-mover advantage as the be-all and end-all.

'We don't want to bundle in there and make tits of ourselves,' Jon Wilkins, another co-founder, says. 'It's a big, scary market.'

Naked's strategy has been to launch in cities that have a creative heritage and provide an entry into a specific region. So Sydney, for instance, can pick up business from Asia, Amsterdam from mainland Europe.

The overseas operations also provide a means of keeping the London office, which has grown from three people at launch in August 2000 to 33 people, at a manageable size. According to Wilkins, Naked has developed a 'small but virulent niche'.