Hasta La Creative!

Food production giant General Mills has launched a closed review across all of its creative and content agencies in the United States.

The client, as per its usual practices, is not being particularly forthcoming. From a spokesperson:

“As a standing practice we do not comment on details of agency reviews. However, we can confirm that General Mills has embarked on a closed review of its creative and production/content agencies in the U.S. We have a responsibility to ensure we have the right agency partners to continue growing our business and agency reviews are a routine part of running a successful business today.”

GM’s main American agencies are Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann. The former has been working with the company for decades, but it has lost several brands to other shops in the past few years: McCann picked up Pillsbury in 2013; W+K won Yoplait last year; 72andSunny has been AOR for Totino’s since May 2015, when Fallon also won Old El Paso; JWT recently scored Häagen-Dazs (which is co-owned by Nestle and GM), debuting its first work in New York this April.

It’s not clear at this time which shops will be participating in this review, though GM’s statement certainly implies that all of its brands will be affected. Reps for all 6 agencies mentioned in the list above declined to comment or did not respond to our emails today.

One thing, however, is very clear: General Mills wants to cut expenses. Last week, the company announced plans to eliminate more than 1,400 jobs in the U.S., China and Brazil in order to better compete with such rivals as Mondelez. It has also cut its overall marketing spend: according to Kantar Media, its totals were $850 million in 2014, $700 million in 2015 and $186 million in the first quarter of this year.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter told us that the closed creative review would probably include McCann, Saatchi and an unnamed WPP agency.

[Pic via CBS Minnesota]

Oh hi, readers struggling through the trials and tribulations of working in that industry we call advertising. You having a good week so far? Cool. We’ve got some good ones for you today.

• First, a tale that has become something like an urban legend around these parts. According to many, many sources who have repeatedly asked us to post on this, a certain agency that may or may not be located on the West Coast of these here United States (allegedly) paid its debts to a departing employee in the most inconvenient way possible: with pennies. Millions of pennies. As we understand it, an art director left this shop for another job a few years ago, but at the time he made the announcement he had yet to be paid for his last few weeks of work. As multiple people tell it to us, the agency’s founder and CEO went to the trouble of turning the $5,000 they owed him into five million pennies, which they proceeded to place in a series of boxes. They then watched him as he removed these boxes one by one and took them out of the office to his car. We have no word on where this art director went, but one has to assume that his next job was a better fit. We certainly hope so.
• Our next two blind items concern bad behavior on the client side. First, we hear that a certain company best known for making the sorts of things one might put atop an ice cream cone is a little indecisive. Said company recently launched a digital agency review, and we hear that the client agreed to award its business to a certain New York-based digital shop owned by a certain massive holding company. But — like a kid who suddenly decides that he didn’t want sprinkles on his cone in the first place and proceeds to beg his mom to pick them off — the client pulled out and reneged on its offer in the middle of negotiations. Now, who wants to work on that account?!
• Finally, we have a very interesting item today regarding some IRL agency spies. We hear that a certain company that may or may not produce automobiles is losing confidence in the agency that works on its business. This company is so concerned about sustaining a healthy agency-client relationship that it has begun sending staffers to monitor and photograph the agency’s parking lot so as to record employees arriving to the job after 9 AM. In fact, a source tells us that the client has gone so far as to present agency leaders with photos of unnamed team members showing up late to work as a formal complaint about morale. In response, we hear that the agency cancelled its Summer Friday program, because strong relationships are built on a shared sense of trust.

The New York Times on Thursday said its digital ad revenue in the second quarter fell 6.8% from the quarter a year earlier, combining with a 14.1% plunge in print advertising for an overall ad-revenue drop of 11.7%.

Across the industry, legacy publishers like The Times are banking on gains in digital advertising to help make up for declines in the print advertising and circulation revenue that once gave newspapers enviously high margins.

Display ads on the homepage and elsewhere on the Times website were singled out as a big reason for the digital advertising drop. On a call with analysts, Chief Revenue Officer Meredith Kopit Levien took a glass half-full approach, pointing out that the company’s digital advertising “growth areas” — mobile, programatic, branded content and video — exceeded traditional display in the quarter.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

This book is Donald G. McNeil Jr.’s take on a virus that went from being associated with a corner of Brazil to what is now a worldwide concern.

International professional services network PricewaterhouseCoopers promoted Juan-Carlos Morales to the position of partner, making him the first creative ever to have that distinction.

The former graffiti artist currently serves as chief creative officer at PWC’s digital services division, a role he has held since  November of 2013. In that time he has built the creative department from a team of twelve to one of the business’s fastest growing departments, with a team of hundreds of creatives around the world.

ICYMI, Digital Services is PwC’s $750 million in-house ad agency.

Prior to joining PwC, Morales served as executive creative director at BGT Partners for nine months, working with clients such as Carnival Cruises, ADT, Ryder and FPL. That followed nearly five years as an executive creative director with SapientNitro, managing a team of 78 while working with brands including Coca-Cola, Powerade, Visit Florida and the XGames. Prior to that he served as executive creative director at iChameleon Group, the Florida agency he co-founded in 2005, after his leaving his position as an art director/flash developer at CP+B Miami. He spent nearly two years in that position, working with such clients as Virgin, Burger King, Truth, Ikea and Mini.

“As I got into middle school, a lot of other kids started to rebel and I rebelled through graffiti,” Morales explained to AdAge today. “That’s where I found my ability and graffiti became a big passion for me growing up.”

Regarding how his creative side led to his career path, he added, “I first started out doing print for an ad agency and then web work and freelance. I never thought in my career this is where I would end up.”

Viacom is spending plenty of time playing up its past as it tries to figure out its future.

In the latest efforts by the media group to tap into nostalgia, Viacom is changing VH1 Classic from a network of concert performances and old music videos into a home for well-remembered MTV favorites including “Beavis & Butt-Head” and “Daria.”

VH1 Classic will become MTV Classic on Aug. 1, the 35th anniversary of MTV’s start. The revamped channel will focus on hits from the 1990s and early 2000s. It will also air music series like a “Total Request Live” retrospective called “The TRL Decade” and memorable episodes of “MTV Unplugged.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Melissa Bell, who is filling a job that has been open since early 2014, will help develop Vox Media’s brands and identify ways to build its audience.

Of the fascinating trends we’ve seen come and go in 20 years of honoring the best of the internet at The Webby Awards, one strategy we see time and time again in Webby-honored work is risk. Whether it was eBay betting that it could get people who had never met to trust each other; Wieden+Kennedy convincing its client Old Spice to let it produce online personalized commercials in real time; or Pokemon Go launching a global augmented reality game to a world where only a small percentage of the population had even heard the term AR, the internet’s biggest sites and moments appear, from the outside, like high-stakes gambles that at times seem more lucky than planned.

But when you dig further into these cases and dozens more, what you find is not luck at all, but people who, when confronted with challenging ideas, didn’t run away, but opened up and put in place plans and processes to make the riskier parts of their idea, well, less risky. To offset its trust risk, eBay created a way for users to review each other; W+K built a strong relationship with its client and put processes in place for client approvals in real time; and Niantic (creator of Pokemon Go) built a global game experience based on data and behavior it had been collecting since 2009 from a lesser-known product, Ingres.

When I look back at this year’s Webby-winning work, there are countless stories that speak to the different ways digital and creative professionals were brave enough to take big, calculated risks and — because they did a lot of hard work to offset that risk — were able to achieve big, unanticipated rewards.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The company said severance costs from closing some operations in Paris weighed on its bottom line. More troubling was a decline in once-strong digital advertising.

Nearly all Major League Baseball parks and around half of pro football, basketball and hockey arenas are dotted with beacons and other technologies that communicate with mobile devices to track fan footpaths, encourage them to upgrade seating, and connect with them on behalf of sponsors during and after the game, according to proximity sensor research provider Proxbook.

The company’s new quarterly report shows that 93% of MLB parks, 53% of National Basketball Association arenas, and 47% of National Football League stadiums deploy location trackers.

The quarterly report is an extension of the Proxbook directory of proximity technology firms organized by Unacast, a firm that partners with those tech firms, connecting the location information they glean to ad exchanges.

Continue reading at AdAge.com