LONDON — Lenovo is running a competitive pitch for a new lead PR agency in EMEA, PRovoke Media has learned.

Archetype has held the technology giant’s EMEA hub account for the past 11 years. In late 2020, Lenovo issued an RFI for agencies in the region, but did not progress this to the RFP stage.

Lenovo’s executive director of global corporate communications Charlotte West confirmed that Lenovo was in the process of a competitive pitch for an EMEA agency but would offer no further details of the brief at this stage.

Zeno is Lenovo’s agency of record globally and in the US and the firm also works with its London outpost, 3 Monkeys Zeno, in the UK. Zeno also took over from WE Communications as Lenovo’s agency in AsiaPacific in May last year – an account that had previously been held by Archetype (then Text100). Archetype was also the incumbent agency in the US for 12 years until Zeno won the brief after a competitive review.

Archetype currently leads the EMEA hub from France – where it is also Lenovo’s local agency – and also works with the firm in markets including Sweden. Lenovo works with a range of other agencies across EMEA, including H+K Strategies and Canela in Spain.

During the 2020 review, West  told PRovoke Media: “From time to time we do RFIs for agency benchmarking purposes but no plans to run a RFP at an EMEA level at the moment. Our strategy is to work with best of breed agencies in the markets where we work and support with hub agencies mapped to our geographical business regions as appropriate.”

Elsewhere, in 2019 BCW picked up Lenovo's China account from BlueFocus, resulting in the first PRovoke Media Global Platinum SABRE award from Asia-Pacific. In India, The PRactice holds the account.