Just got some great news – we won the pitch for Lactofree – Arla’s range of dairy products for the lactose intolerant.

We’ll have a big drink of Lactofree milk to celebrate, then start right away on the development of a new campaign to support the brand in the UK.

This welcome news makes me think this is a good time to review how 2009 is going so far for new business. (Hard to believe it’s half way through the year already.)

At the end of 2008 we had won the Nokia Nseries and MFN (emerging markets) accounts. These two together were a big chunk of work to get stuck into at the start of 2009.

Our business objectives for 2009 were to continue to grow through new business on our own terms – good people, with the opportunity to do great work and to learn new things. We were concerned that the economic climate was going to mean fewer new biz opportunities, that would be likely to be harder to win and less financially rewarding if converted. In fact, after a fairly slow start to the year, we’ve been extremely busy on the new biz front, with several incoming enquiries a week.

We had a big win early on in the year with a successful pitch for a major chunk of global soft drinks business, where we pitched against some of the big networks. Still can’t be officially announced (though it has been unofficially rumoured) but it’s one of the world’s biggest still drinks and we’re developing a major international relaunch for the brand.

We also pitched and won a project to design the store windows for Selfridges 100th anniversary. Not a big money-maker but a nice opportunity to do some non-advertising creative work and satisfying to know that we beat some top designers and artists to win the project.

Then, after another competitive pitch, we bagged the Fairtrade Foundation account. We were delighted to pick this up. (And some of the team were particularly pleased, since they’ve already been over to St Vincent in the Caribbean to meet some of the Fairtrade banana farmers. They claim it rained a lot and was hard work all the way.)

Concurrently with that we did the pitch for the Arla international business. Unfortunately we heard last week that we’d been unsuccessful on this one. We had some good work but it didn’t work out for us. Shame. According to Campaign, that's down to a shoot-out between BBDO and Saatchi.

And, as noted above, now we’ve just learned that we’ve won the Arla UK Lactofree business, for which we pitched against Beattie McGuinness Bungay, Karmarama and incumbent Euro RSCG. Excellent result! And nice to be able to continue to develop our relationship with Arla UK, even though we lost out on the international brief.

So, in summary of 2009 so far: pitched 5, won 4, lost 1. Not a perfect score, and the Arla International business was a big disappointment, but an improvement on last year’s relatively disappointing pitch performance. Of course, you have to put these wins into context. In the current climate, with budget cuts and fee reductions all round, we have to win new business just to stand still. And most of these wins are relatively small, financially speaking. So there's no room for complacency or putting our feet up and relaxing.

Indeed, in many ways the last six months are probably the toughest we've ever experienced in ten years of W+K London. And all this pitching has brought in more work. So we're not slacking off but we are taking a bit of a break from further new biz for about the next month, so we can ensure that we cope properly. That definitely won’t be it for the year, though. 2010 will be the first full year in which the recessionary cutbacks kick in. Things are so uncertain right now that it’s very hard to make forecasts, but at the moment it looks as if 2010 could be more challenging than 2009. So we need to find that balance between keeping up momentum, maintaining quality control, looking after our people and proving the W+K love to our existing, much-valued (i.e. all of them) clients.