VMLY&R has partnered with security services company ADT in a remit entailing ecommerce, brand creative, inclusion experience and consulting.
The agency, which won the business following a competitive pitch, began its relationship with ADT in March of last year on its ecommerce business and started brand creative work in January of this year.
“We partnered with VMLY&R to accelerate our ecommerce growth. In addition to the technical and operational partnership, we leveraged the Inclusion Experience framework and its leadership to support the overall marketing transformation—a key enabler to the future commerce vision of ADT,” said DeLu Jackson, chief marketing officer at ADT, in a statement.
Nat Smith, director, client engagement, VMLY&R said that helping ADT with its UX and UI led to an opportunity to pitch for the content work, and it hopes to help the nearly 150-year-old security company build on its heritage while advancing creativity.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for telling the ADT story in a way that both resonates with consumers as well as their other lines of business,” Smith told Adweek.
VMLY&R will touch all aspects of the ADT business, from consumer residential and personal security to other lines of business, including health, commercial, small and medium sized businesses, to help tell a cohesive ADT story.
ADT formerly worked with McCann as its creative and strategy AOR. The agency won that business in 2019.
As ADT looks to become a more inclusive company in the industry, it tapped VMLY&R’s Inclusion Experience practice, helmed by chief integration officer, Myron King. The practice, which was launched in 2021, works with clients to support cultural change within their organizations.
“From our inclusion experience framework, we’ve been really helping drive some of that marketing transformation at ADT, not only as an enabler for commerce, but their vision and northstar for who they want to be as a company,” said Smith.
On the ecommerce front, the VMLY&R team is helping ADT deliver features and functionality to improve the consumer experience as well as the successful launch ADT’s latest self-set-up product solutions.
In its newly expanded role for 2023 and beyond, the agency will be responsible for all aspects of brand creative, from strategic approach through integrated production, and will utilize its content production studio The Vault, to lead day-to-day content production across channels and lines of business in support of ADT’s various partnerships and programs.
The value of the contract was not disclosed, but COMvergence estimates that ADT’s U.S. media spend in 2022 was $66 million, with 60% of that invested in digital media channels.
Overall, VMLY&R will be responsible for ADT’s experience strategy, experience design, user interface design, commerce strategy, brand strategy, creative, social media/community engagement, integrated production, inclusion experience and consulting.
The ADT business will be led out of VMLY&R’s Kalamazoo office but will utilize a network team approach to serve the client’s different disciplines, bringing in team members from Atlanta, Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit.
