ZenithOptimedia, a fully owned media agency by Publicis Groupe has won Swarovski’s media rights for Asia-Pacific. The announcement comes from Swarovski, as part of its global alignment of creative and media agencies. The account was handed over to ZenithOptimedia without a pitch on the basis of their earlier relationships with the brand. Earlier Havas’ MPG was working on the account.

The agency will start working on the account from Jan 2010. Since 208, Swarovski has reduced the number its number of media agency partners worldwide in order to improve international coherence and media efficiency. The company has reduced the number of media agencies for the group from 14 to four in 2009.

“In order to continue the process of reducing the number of media agencies, we decided at the end of September to continue to work with only one partner – ZenithOptimedia,” Swarovski officials explained.

Over the next six months, India Media Exchange (IMX) will be transformed and renamed as VivaKi Exchange. The Publicis owned IMX is a consolidated media buying arm of Starcom MediaVest Group, Zenith Optimedia and Solutions Digitas.

The re-branding will be executed simultaneously in India, China and other parts of the world, where media exchanges are live.

VivaKi will focus on digital and will do a lot more of digital media buying as compared to IMX. Presently, digital comprises less than 10 per cent of the total media buying deals carried out through IMX, while 90 per cent of media buying is in the traditional media space.

The objective is to constitute more than 20 per cent of the total media buying from digital buying.

VivaKi will introduce a few search marketing tools to assist advertisers in paid search advertising; mobile advertising tools to place SMS and MMS ads; and social media marketing tools to help advertisers to place ads on social networking sites. Some analytical tools will also be made available to pull data from the online ad server to achieve better targeting.

All the tools will be launched under the VivaKi Nerve Center (VNC) banner, the research and technology development arm of VivaKi.