Media: Perspective - Initiative's success in recent pitches is more than just luck.

A couple of years ago, Initiative London put out a little promotional film to support its new 'expect more' positioning. It featured agency staff doing their stuff to the tune of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now.

Jerry Hill, the chief executive of the agency and, for the duration of the film at least, Initiative's very own Mr Fahrenheit, concluded the performance by belting out the 'expect more' line. Not as cringeworthy perhaps as MindShare Amsterdam's viral featuring staff butchering the Donna Summer song She Works Hard for the Money, but still pretty close to the boundaries of taste and decency.

Fast-forward to summer 2006: with Don't Stop Me Now appropriately riding high in the charts again thanks to McFly's cover version, Initiative's European management are closer to having a good time than at any moment since it lost Unilever in late 2004.

Last week's capture of the Burger King media planning and buying account across six markets, worth an estimated pounds 50 million, followed hot on the heels of smaller pan- European wins in the shape of Bang & Olufsen and Fujitsu Siemens. None of these are exactly on the scale of some of the mega-global reviews of recent years, but they are good solid wins given the recent paucity of large-scale international pitch action.

To beat Carat and MindShare is no mean feat, especially given the current speculation over the parent company Interpublic and ...