Acquity will be led by Richard Davies, the agency's head of integration who joined last year from rival agency Equi=media. He replaces former managing director Patrick Carew, a founder of Tri-Direct, who moves to head finance.
The agency's other founders, Barry Leeson-Earle and Andrew Higgs, remain in place, both as directors and major shareholders. Davies joined Tri-Direct in February 2008 from Equi=Media, where he was a board director.
The new company name suggests a desire to re-enforce Tri-Direct's positioning as the media agency that understands customer data. Tri-Direct, whose clients include Hiscox Insurance, HBOS and Vue Entertainment, was founded in 1989, but since then other agencies have claimed expertise in data and direct disciplines. These include MindShare, which in 2007 hired a former director of Tri-Direct, Lucy Stafford, as MD of its MindShare Direct division.
Tri-Direct has built a team of data analysts and Continuum, a 46 million-individual database with 350 variables on each. "All agencies claim to offer something special, but we've built on our unique data heritage with a significant investment into our people and our systems so we can rightly claim to ‘know your customer'," Davies said.
He continued: "We now have an analytics team boasting seven experts in all aspects of data - and the data insights generated enable us to be incredibly precise in our prospect targeting and execute every media channel with a high degree of accuracy and relevancy to generate the best sales outcome."
Davies said the ‘Acquity' name is a derivation of the word acuity, meaning ‘sharpness and perceptiveness of intellect' and acquire, meaning to attain or gather.
Acquity's board will be led by Davies and comprises Leeson-Earle, Carew, Higgs, David Easton and Steve Reid, who becomes commercial director of Acquity as well as Tri-Direct Sales, the agency's list and inserts business.
Leeson-Earle said the name Tri-Direct "was no longer relevant" in today's media landscape. "We're still doing planning and buying of media channels, including data and digital, skills we've honed over the past 19 years," he said. "But this name change reflects our move into the customer insight that drives the choice of media. The Continuum platform helps us derive where response is coming from - plotting the customer journey and allocating response to channels - to determine which channels work best."
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