Man from the Pru picks adland's comeback kid: Roger Ramsden and Robin Wight aim to return the Pru to the top. (Newsmaker/Roger Ramsden).

Advertising's most excitable comeback kid has done it again. In characteristic style, WCRS's chairman, Robin Wight, and his team of seasoned pitch professionals pulled out all the stops to triumph over rival BMP DDB and lure the 20 million [pounds sterling] UK Prudential account back home after an absence of eight years.

The sense of victory at WCRS is tangible; winning a pitch that also included TBWA\London, D'Arcy and Publicis, in an environment suffering a dearth of big new-business opportunities is no mean feat.

WCRS's appointment is seen by a new Prudential management team as a crucial step in improving the company's performance. Central to this vision is Roger Ramsden, the marketing director of Prudential UK and Europe, who arrived from Safeway last October. Ramsden must reinvigorate a brand that has suffered from low visibility and growing customer confusion recently. "We haven't been particularly active in recent years," Ramsden admits. "But we have gone through a major reshaping of the way the UK business is run."

It is cultural changes that lie at the centre of this reorientation. In 1995 Prudential staff numbered about 18,000; by 2003 the figure will be down to about 6,000. A major contributor to this decrease comes from the disbanding of the sales force, the lynchpin of Prudential's acclaimed "man from the Pru" advertising heritage which built on the years when the company was oriented around door-to-door sales.

The direct sales force was ideally suited to the manner in which people expected to buy long-term savings products in the past. However, the company couldn't sustain the margins that could justify such an expense, so the direct sales force, along with the personal customer relationships that it enabled, was terminated. Subsequently the six million people with Prudential pensions interact with the company via call centres, online and through independent financial advisers.

Arguably, as a consequence of this, Prudential's statistics show that awareness of the brand has dropped. With a direct correlation between awareness and likelihood to purchase in the pensions market, pitch insiders were under no illusion as to the importance of this.

Ramsden argues that the brand is seen "with great affection and a considerable understanding of what Prudential represents". However, with insiders reporting a refocusing of the company around medium- to long-term savings, it seems there are still important changes to explain. "The Prudential needs advertising to get it front-of-mind and illustrate how it better empathises with its consumers," one source close to the pitch says.