Hasta La Creative!

The New York office of Mother announced some changes in its leadership today.

According to several parties who reached out to us, the agency held a town hall-style meeting this morning to announce that director of business development Chris Roan and experiential creative director Piers North would be leaving the agency.

In the same meeting, staffers learned that strategy director Marissa Shrum had left on a four-week sabbatical.

One source currently employed by the indie agency tells us that Roan was let go while North left in a separate move. The purported reason for the changes was a lack of new business wins in New York.

Mother, headquartered in London, remains the UK’s biggest independent shop—and the larger network has won several pitches in recent months including Nokia and, in a significant coup, KFC. (The latter had been with BBH for 15 years.)

We do hear that the New York office recently brought in some new business in the form of Boots No. 7, which has been a client of Mother London for some time. But according to two employees, the agency has not won a formal pitch in months and spent significant capital pitching E*Trade and General Mills (the latter for project work).

Mother New York also went through a round of changes last November that primarily affected creatives just after Ogilvy veteran Corinna Falusi came on to lead that department. The network then began recruiting to staff its new Los Angeles office, launched to serve tech clients like Headspace (which our sources claim was Mother’s last new business win in 2016) and pitch for related pieces of business. According to the same sources who alerted us to the L.A. move, rumors of today’s changes have been in the air since leaders announced in February that the New York office would not be giving out standard bonuses or taking its annual all-agency ski trip.

Mother’s PR firm declined to comment for this post, but we do expect to hear more from the New York office in coming weeks.

With its wretched Kendall Jenner ad, Pepsi famously hit a new low among brands paying lip service to social causes. So, where does the brand go from here? At the most basic level, it can stop pretending to make the world a better place–or start genuinely doing so. Two agency creatives have come up with…