This morning Noreen O’Leary of Adweek and her sources (which are not our sources) report that the MetLife account has gone into creative review…and incumbent CP+B will not participate.
A client spokesperson did not offer details but said:
“MetLife is currently reviewing its roster of marketing partners. We expect to finalize our decision this summer.”
Crispin beat Havas, Y&R, and Venables to win the business back in 2010, and its most recent work for the client celebrated something called National Life Insurance Month by asking customers to discuss the people they “live for”:
According to the RFP, the client seeks an agency “capable of transforming ‘a slow-and-steady, US-focused life insurer to a top-tier global, diversified financial services company.’”
Five years ago, MetLife told agencies competing for its business that it wanted to be known as a “less conservative” company, but an anonymous source tells us that this plan never came to pass.
The new RFP sounds very familiar in pointing to MetLife’s “critically underleveraged” digital presence and website redesign as evidence that, like other insurance companies, it is “stuck in the 1950s” with campaigns that “rarely mention the products being sold.”
The client’s overall spend, however, has decreased since it launched the last review from $63 million to $56 million to “more than $50 million annually,” so it’s unclear how, exactly, MetLife looks to get more hip.
We have no word on how the news may affect CP+B staff. The agency recently hired Creative Director Robert Lund (formerly of Barbarian Group) to run “a small team serving client Met Life in New York City” based in a shared MDC Partners space.
CP+B did not offer comment on the news.
