Hi Richard!

Having been associated with the marketing space for a few years, and having worked extensively with iCrossing and Spannerworks, I believe that this is a monumental change.

Essentially I believe that the same umbrella branding approach would be adopted for Sharp and Proxicom. The parent brand is associated as the "best in breed" for search and increasingly for social media and indeed all things digital. The parent branding is critical to reinforce the fact that the firm is growing geographically while offering the entire gamut of organic and inorganic offerings/capabilities.

What this also means is that when iCrossing moves eastward to other large and growing advertising markets (Continental, Japan, BRIC)... they will be in a position to provide a global network on the lines of a DDB or a JWT etc to the mega global brands that they service currently.

At the same time, having the strength on their home ground, they can inspire clients in newer markets to rely on expertise in more developed markets to deploy best in class strategies for these more "local" brands. e.g.; Take the telecom industry - a China mobile, or SK telecom (Korea) or Airtel (India) or NTT DoCoMo or Optus/Telstra can definitely benefit from SEM/SEO, viral campaigns etc in their home markets esp. while exploring cross sell opportunities for their "convergence-driven" bundles....

A globally unified "iCrossing" brand would be a master stroke to showcase specific capabilities to clients and in fact lead to organic (A China mobile account can justify a mini-office! :-) )or inorganic spread (lots of fast emerging currently under-valued but potentially good buys in India/Malaysia/Korea in the Search Marketing space) into these as yet unexplored (for iC) markets.

Also building that kind of scale may have another advantage for clients... scale typically also brings some level of economies and hence increase relevance for a larger set of clients...

However, I do think that I may have just touched the tip of the iceberg on the implications... :-)

Cheers!
Aneesh

posted 5 months ago