Leagas Delaney secures global Penfolds brief

Leagas Delaney will create an international communications strategy for the Penfolds master brand as well as individual wine brands within the portfolio, such as Grange, Yattarna, Thomas Hyland, RWT, St Henri and the Bin range.

The campaign will be fully integrated and the assignment is global in scale—a first for the brand and just in time for Penfolds' 170th anniversary in 2014, according to Michelle Terry, global marketing director of Penfolds.

Even though Leagas Delaney is an independent boutique agency, its managing director James Hayhurst said it has a global reach with luxury credentials that made it ideal to develop the Penfolds brand across the world. Estimates place the account's value at about US$5 million in billings.

The Penfolds account will be led from Leagas Delaney’s London office, while Humphrey Ho, business operations director at Leagas Delaney Shanghai, will manage the brand's activation activities in China. The agency will adapt creative work for the Chinese market until mid-2015.

There was no incumbent agency in China before Leagas Delaney. However, a drop in consumer demand due to austerity measures implemented by the Chinese government had dented the act of gifting with premium wine.

TWE will be reallocating wine volume to other markets in Asia to "provide profits optimisation", according to interim chief executive Warwick Every-Burns, as quoted by News Corp Australia. "Let us not forget however that Asia is much more than simply a China story," he said in the same article.