MASS TIMES VELOCITY: With McCann-Erickson’s help, Momentum lives up to its name.

One of the things Boise Cascade Office Products marketing director Kevin Koertje likes best about Momentum is that the St. Louis-based agency has been “willing to take risks with us. But they’ve been the right kind of risks.”

Just how right are Momentum’s risks? The agency formerly known as Louis London resigned the Dr Pepper/Seven Up account last spring, after getting what was little more than a “feeling-out” phone call from Coca-Cola. “They spoke of an opportunity, and we were willing to roll the dice,” says chairman and ceo Mark Shapiro. Atlanta-based Coke could become one of the agency’s biggest accounts over the next 12 months, Shapiro projects.

That kind of occasional account gamble isn’t such a scary proposition when you’re taking in $1 million-plus in business from 10 different clients, or when you’ve been able to win more than a dozen new accounts – including Coke, Gateway, Powerbar, The Scotts Company, and Coldwell Banker – in the past year, as Momentum has. “We’re so much healthier than we were” a few years ago, when the Miller Brewing business made up the bulk of revenues, says Shapiro.

The shop’s net revenues jumped more than 50 percent in 1999, helping the agency to rank 33rd on the promo 100, after slipping in 1998 due to the Miller loss. Billings nearly doubled to $127.5 million last year.

Shapiro credits much of the rapid turnaround to his decision to sell the agency to Interpublic Group of Companies’ McCann-Erickson division in 1998. Louis London’s “horizons were somewhat limited by the pragmatic, very real boundaries of our resources,” he says. “The acquisition truly enabled us to expose our credentials to a much broader audience, and some of these relationships would never have worked without the [McCann-Erickson] network” to provide additional resources.

Some of those services are actually in-house now. McCann merged Louis London with U.K.-based sponsorship and event specialist Momentum last spring. Hollywood p.r. firm PMK (whose clients include Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Michelle Pfeiffer) was acquired at about the same time, because clients were interested in “getting closer to the entertainment business,” says Shapiro, who now runs Momentum’s North American operations.

This year, Momentum will absorb New York City-based Interpublic affiliate Diamond Group as part of a move to make its own Gotham office full-service – including creative. Plans are underway to establish full-service capabilities in San Francisco as well.

To Louis London’s foundation of “brand-centric advertising and sales promotion,” the reorganizations have “added sponsorship, event, sports, and presence marketing,” Shapiro says. Recent wins including Nortel Networks, Gateway computers, and Buick were direct results of the agency’s expanded resources and relationship with McCann, he says.

MAKING LIKE A FAMILY

It was a pair of older relationships, however, that helped Momentum celebrate its new name by taking home the most trophies from this year’s PMA Reggie Awards competition (May promo).

“They are fabulous business partners, they’ve become good friends, and they’ve really become a part of the American Express family,” gushed Nancy Smith, vp-global media and sponsorship at the New York City-based credit-card company, after Momentum’s 1999 campaign to launch the AmEx Blue card took this year’s Super Reggie. “And, they’re great brand-builders.”

Boise Cascade’s Koertje doesn’t need a public forum to be as effusive – although Momentum’s work for his company has earned Reggies in the business-to-business category two straight years.

Koertje credits Momentum’s efforts with a lot of the recent sales success at the company – which relies completely on supplier partners to fund its marketing budget and which, before 1996, did little marketing at all. “They have been a crucial partner. We feel very strongly about the value they bring.”

At the outset, Boise “had tremendous concerns that we were not a business-to-business agency,” says Shapiro. “But we’re an end-user agency. That relationship has produced some incredibly good work, and it has grown into one of our largest clients.

“We are not rote, note takers. We are not bag carriers. We are not a big design studio. That’s not what the client business is about these days,” states Shapiro. “We are a consultancy with executional ability.”

Momentum’s dice rolls are turning up sevens.