M&C Saatchi

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International advertising and communications group; joint-venture partner with Breakthrough Media in Horizon PR (used on the RICU contract); awarded large Home Office counter-extremism / Prevent communications contracts; CSSF creative services sub-contractor (Tunisia); bidder for UK-funded Iraq counter-extremism communications, including the 2019 tender to run the Yalla platforms; former head of Middle East operations later became head of RICU


M&C Saatchi

Logo M&C Saatchi logo.png
M+C Saatchi Group wordmark (mcsaatchi.com)
Type Advertising and communications group (49% floated on AIM in 2004)
Founded 1995
Founder(s) Maurice Saatchi; Jeremy Sinclair; Bill Muirhead; David Kershaw
Headquarters 36 Golden Square, London, W1F 9EE
Industry Advertising; public relations; strategic communications
Homepage mcsaatchi.com

M&C Saatchi is an international advertising and communications group founded in 1995. It has held major UK government contracts for counter-extremism and Prevent-related communications, was the joint-venture partner with Breakthrough Media in Horizon PR (used on the Home Office Research, Information and Communications Unit contract), and has provided creative services under CSSF-funded projects. A former head of its Middle East operations later became head of RICU.[1][2] In 2015 it bid with Adam Smith International and ORB International for UK-funded counter-extremism communications in Iraq. In 2019 it bid, unsuccessfully, to run the British government-owned Yalla platforms in Iraq.[3][4][5]

Background

According to the company, “M&C Saatchi is founded on the principle of Brutal Simplicity. It is the only agency to be international from birth. It was born in 1995 in London, Sydney, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.” In 2004 it floated 49% of the agency on AIM. It has maintained multiple offices internationally.[6]

In February 2009 Matthew Freud acquired a 3.3% stake, making him the largest individual shareholder after the four founders (each holding 6.44%).[7]

Prevent, RICU and counter-extremism work

In 2015 Breakthrough Media set up Horizon PR as a joint venture with M&C Saatchi. A Saatchi spokesman told The Guardian: “Horizon was created to support the public relations of civil society groups, voluntary organisations and NGOs who want to drive positive social change.” Horizon promoted the work of community groups as part of Breakthrough’s contract with the RICU. Journalists contacted by Horizon were not told that the company was representing the groups as part of the RICU contract; Breakthrough is reported to have said there was no obligation to disclose the government’s involvement. Horizon PR Limited was incorporated on 16 March 2015 and dissolved on 20 August 2019; its directors included figures from both Breakthrough and M&C Saatchi (including Scott Brown, formerly an M&C Saatchi account director).[1][8]

In May 2016 Campaign reported that the Home Office was set to appoint M&C Saatchi to handle a £60 million counter-extremism account. The brief covered the creation of up to ten campaigns a year, including awarding and evaluating community groups’ involvement as well as production of videos, websites and posters. The paper noted the existing Horizon PR joint venture with Breakthrough. A spokesman for M&C Saatchi declined to comment. Subsequent reporting has referred to a large multi-year communications-services contract with the firm (figures in the region of £50 million have been cited in trade and transparency coverage for the period from 2019).[2][9]

In February 2017 The Guardian reported that M&C Saatchi was working with the UK government to tackle racist myths perpetuated online by the far right, as part of a broader £60 million fight against extremism.[10]

CSSF and international work

In a 2018 parliamentary answer, the Cabinet Office stated that M&C Saatchi had been competitively appointed to offer creative services on a Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) project providing technical assistance to support the Tunisian civil service to communicate transparently with citizens. The value of the sub-contract was up to £275,000; Cabinet Office civil servants undertook implementation and M&C Saatchi did not work directly with the Tunisian government.[11]

In 2013 NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps hired M&C Saatchi to help counter terrorist propaganda on Twitter and increase online influence. Two of the firm’s consultants participated in a large-scale exercise at RAF St Mawgan involving a simulated Twitter environment (“Critter”).[12]

M&C Saatchi (UK) Limited has appeared on the CSSF Framework Agreement supplier list.[13]

The firm’s World Services division has described itself as delivering communications in fragile, conflict and climate-affected contexts for governments, multilaterals and NGOs, drawing on behavioural insight and data-led strategy.[14]

Iraq: the 2015 counter-extremism proposal

On 17 August 2015 a consortium of Adam Smith International, M&C Saatchi and ORB International submitted a technical proposal for "Countering Violent Extremism (C-VE) in Iraq – Strategic Communications", addressed to the British government's "ISIL Taskforce". The team leader was Paul Smyth, an M&C Saatchi strategic communications director who "holds UK DV clearance". The project director was named as Andrew Cummings, "a former Head of PREVENT Strategy in OSCT and Head of Middle East in National Security Secretariat".[3] Among the experience it offered, M&C Saatchi cited its "current position as retained PR Agency for RICU, helping develop highly impactful strategy, narratives and PR promotions across all RICU UK campaigns and communications over the last 15 months".[3]

The proposal set out two workstreams, "UNDERMINE" and "PROMOTE". It defined the project's role as countering Daesh "by a) weakening the Daesh narrative with disinformation that creates doubt, distrust and dissent". It proposed that "where information is not available for disinformation, mixed judiciously with facts may be developed", giving as an example a rumour "that the Air College is opening again in Tikrit and is looking for trainers and recruiting for the Air Force". It also proposed that "our high-quality content producers … mimic their style and format and feed content into the secondary echo chambers". The consortium said it intended to keep the profile of the project "confidential with no publicity".[3] These are proposals in a bid. The document does not show whether the bid succeeded or whether the proposed disinformation strand was carried out.

Iraq: the Yalla platforms and the 2019 ITT 2950 tender

In October 2026 the journalist Kit Klarenberg, writing on leaked documents, described M&C Saatchi as the "ultimate controller" of Yalla, a Baghdad-based youth news and social media platform. He wrote that "£4,300,000 [was] sunk into Yalla in 2019/20 alone, and a further £4 million allocated for the next year".[15] The passages Klarenberg quotes come from M&C Saatchi World Services' bid for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's 2019 Iraq tender, ITT 2950. They include the "far-ranging influence campaign" to "promote a sense of personal agency and increase community cohesion", the "separate business entity", and the use of "VPNs associated with Iraqi/Kurdish diaspora" to "add another layer of unattributability".[16][17] His figures match the ceilings in the Foreign Office's statement of requirement for that tender: "not more than £4,300,000 for year one (01 Jun 19 – 31 Mar 20), £4,000,000 for year two". These were maximum budgets for the contract being tendered, not recorded spending.[4]

The ITT 2950 papers, published by Anonymous, treat Yalla as a CSSF programme asset owned by the British government, which rival bidders competed to run:[18]

  • The statement of requirement told bidders that "the successful implementing partner will be asked to manage existing high profile online and social media platforms owned by HMG … (platforms are not HMG branded)". It asked for "a campaign approach that is not attributed to HMG", with the project "led and managed by the Iraq CSSF Strategic Communications Team" alongside the Counter-Daesh Coalition Communications Cell.[4]
  • M&C Saatchi World Services' consortium described Yalla's platforms as having "accrued significant reach and brand recognition, making them a valuable asset for the CSSF programme". It proposed "the Yalla online platforms which will be managed by the ZINC Network" (Zinc Network) as "the creative dynamo for the influence campaign".[16]
  • The bid by InCoStrat, with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and YouGov, said that "legacy and existing platforms, such as Yalla and Good Brothers, will be operational from the project start". It described the consortium's current CSSF project, "Avicenna", as "more than 20 online platforms" that reached "one in five Iraqis on Facebook", running "since its first year in 2015".[19]
  • Stratagem's bid said that "the key legacy platform owned by HMG and due to continue under the new project is Yalla". It added that staff of its partner IN2 had "conceived, designed, recruited for, and managed Yalla".[20]

InCoStrat won the contract. Call-off contract CPG/3355/2019, under CSSF framework CPG/2350/2018, capped payments at £7,997,331 for services from 1 June 2019 to 31 March 2021. It was countersigned for the Foreign Office on 17 June 2019.[5] On the tender evidence, M&C Saatchi was one of several bidders to manage a platform the government owned. Neither Klarenberg's article nor the tender papers identify a period in which M&C Saatchi ran Yalla.

Klarenberg also reported that M&C Saatchi had worked with "tribal leaders and religious clerics" to promote "Sunni Arab self-governance", and that it operates Imams Online. He placed this work within a wider British psychological-warfare effort in Iraq, citing a 2015 target audience analysis.[15]

People

Executives
Name Role
Moray MacLennan Worldwide CEO; one of the founding members; former President of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
Tom Dery Executive Chairman, Asia Pacific & US
Maurice Saatchi Executive Director
Jeremy Sinclair Chairman
David Kershaw Chief Executive
Bill Muirhead Executive Director
Molly Aldridge Global CEO (later)

Former executives

Political donations

Political donations recorded by the Electoral Commission
Date Name of donor Amount Donated to Subsidiary (parties only)
06/05/2010 M & C Saatchi PLC, M & C Saatchi PLC £60,000.00 Conservative Party Central Party
12/05/2009 M&C Saatchi, 36 Golden Square £2,281.75 The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP

[21]

Contact

Address: M&C SAATCHI, 36 Golden Square, London, W1F 9EE Phone: +44 (0)20 7543 4500 Fax: +44 (0)20 7543 4501 Website: http://www.mcsaatchi.com/

CSSF Framework 2023–27 and published CSSF awards

M&C Saatchi is one of the named suppliers appointed to the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund Framework Agreement (2023–2027) let by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, on Lots 1 and 3. The framework, procured under the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011, serves a fund described in the award notice as having "an annual budget in the region of 867 000 000 GBP"; the names of the 37 suppliers appointed to Lot 2 (counter-terrorism, countering violent extremism and strategic communications) were "redacted on National Security grounds".[22]


Leaked documents (Anonymous, 2018–2021)

Bid documents from M&C Saatchi (including its M&C Saatchi World Services arm) appear in the “Trojan Horses of HMG” release.[18]

  • Lebanon – Fostering Social Stability through Strategic Communications (ITT 2959) and the CSSF Framework Re-Tender 2018 (ITT 2315): the political-risk sections of these bids use deniability language, stating that local partners would be given “top cover” and describing an “air gap between HMG and the programme”.[23]
  • CVE and counter-terrorism strategic communications: bids for a CVE Communication Project for a Middle Eastern Country (ITT 2950, the 2019 Iraq tender covering the Yalla platforms; see above), Libya WARWICK CT CVE Strat Comms (ITT 3538) and a global Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning tender.[18]

Contracts Finder records no published CSSF award to M&C Saatchi, while FCO/FCDO transparency data record M&C Saatchi-named spending of about £10.4m (2020–2024); the leaked documents are bids and proposals rather than evidence of awards.[24]

Note on sourcing. The material in this section comes from leaked tender and bid documents of unverified provenance that were published online under the “Anonymous” name. The figures are the values proposed or tendered for in those documents (bids, Statements of Requirement and pricing schedules), not confirmed contract awards or payments; official award figures from Contracts Finder and FCDO transparency data are given alongside for comparison. The leakers’ own commentary is not reproduced here.

See also

External links

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Ian Cobain et al., “Inside Ricu, the shadowy propaganda unit inspired by the cold war”, The Guardian, 2 May 2016.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Maisie McCabe, “M&C Saatchi wins brief to counter extremism”, Campaign, 24 May 2016.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Adam Smith International, M&C Saatchi and ORB International, Technical Proposal: Countering Violent Extremism (C-VE) in Iraq – Strategic Communications, 17 August 2015, PDF pp. 3–6 and 10, accessed 22 October 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Iraq CSSF Strategic Communications Team, Statement of Requirement – Strategic Communications – Iraq Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), ITT 2950 Attachment 02 (amended), March 2019, paras 16, 23, 54 and 64, marked "COMMERCIAL-SENSITIVE"; in documents published by Anonymous.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Foreign and Commonwealth Office and InCoStrat, CSSF Framework 2018 – Call-off Contract: Information Campaign Services to Counter Violent Extremism in Iraq, contract CPG/3355/2019 under framework CPG/2350/2018 (call-off reference ITT_2950), clauses 3.1 and 5.1, with front page signed for the Authority on 17 June 2019; in documents published by Anonymous.
  6. ↑ M&C Saatchi website, Facts & Figures, accessed 27 February 2009.
  7. ↑ Katherine Griffiths, “Matthew Freud buys stake in M&C Saatchi”, The Daily Telegraph, 25 February 2009.
  8. ↑ Companies House and contemporary reporting on Horizon PR Limited.
  9. ↑ “Home Office’s secretive anti-extremism comms unit signs £1m media monitoring deal”, Civil Service World, 3 May 2022.
  10. ↑ “UK government hires M&C Saatchi to fight far-right threat”, The Guardian, 6 February 2017.
  11. ↑ Written parliamentary question, Tunisia: Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, answered 18 July 2018.
  12. ↑ “Nato launches Saatchi missile to fight terror”, The Sunday Times, 24 November 2013.
  13. ↑ CSSF Framework Agreement (2023–2027) supplier list.
  14. ↑ M&C Saatchi World Services written evidence to the International Development Committee.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Kit Klarenberg, Leaked: Britain's Covert Iraqi Psyops Network Kit Klarenberg (critical), 11 October 2026, accessed 22 October 2026.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 M&C Saatchi World Services consortium, ITT2950 Iraq MCS 1.2.1 Methodology and ITT2950 Iraq MCS 1.2.8 Project team, bid to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2019; in documents published by Anonymous.
  17. ↑ M&C Saatchi World Services consortium, ITT2950 Iraq MCS 1.2.4 Conflict sensitivity, bid to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2019; in documents published by Anonymous.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Procurement and bid documents published online in 2020–2021 as the “Trojan Horses of HMG” / “Op. HMG Trojan Horse” release, circulated under the “Anonymous” name; index and files mirrored at telegra.ph, avalonlibrary.net and pdf-archive. Provenance is unverified; the figures below are proposed/bid values stated in tender documents, not confirmed payments.
  19. ↑ InCoStrat consortium (InCoStrat, IWPR, YouGov), Iraq Narrative Transformation through Media and Action (INTMA) Project [ITT-2950], sections 1.2.7 Timeline (p.2) and 1.2.8 Project Team (p.1), bid to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, April 2019; in documents published by Anonymous.
  20. ↑ Stratagem consortium, ITT2950 Stratagem 1.2.1 Methodology, bid to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2019; in documents published by Anonymous.
  21. ↑ Electoral Commission, Donation Search, accessed 2 March 2015.
  22. ↑ Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) Framework Agreement (2023-2027): contract award notice 029743-2023 Find a Tender Service, 2023.
  23. ↑ “Op. HMG Trojan Horse, Part 3: Securing Lebanon I”, telegra.ph, 4 January 2021; Lebanon bid set mirrored at avalonlibrary.net. Leaked documents of unverified provenance.
  24. ↑ Contracts Finder and FCO/FCDO spend-over-£25,000 transparency data (M&C Saatchi / M&C Saatchi World Services), 2020–2024.
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