Hasta La Creative!

Industry sources told Campaign that adam&eve founders James Murphy, David Golding, Ben Priest and Jon Forsyth, who collectively owned 85 percent of the shares in the agency, earned a massive payout for the agency’s sale to Omnicom, following a five-year, uncapped earn-out period during which the agency outperformed expectations.

Collectively, the earn-out netted adam&eve shareholders some £85 million, around $122 million. In addition to the £25.2 million at the time of the sale, that comes out to a total of £110 million, or around $145 million, roughly $4 million more than the Kansas City Royals’ opening day payroll.

According to Campaign, the earn-out’ scale “makes the agency one of the most financially successful, creative UK start-ups of the past decade.”

Upon the agency’s sale in 2012, Campaign predicted the earn-out would net adam&eve shareholders around £60m, but the earn-out “liability” rose well above estimations, including “by as much as £35m in the final 12 months,” according to the publication.

The agency is, of course, best-known for its John Lewis Christmas spots. Following the 2012 sale, adam&eve kept picking up new accounts, including Samsung, Virgin Atlantic, Waitrose and Lloyds Banking Group. Last year, adam&eveDDB also launched a Super Bowl spot for Skittles and a Wes Anderson-directed holiday spot for H&M.

In case you missed it, a certain election happened almost exactly 10 months ago and threw quite a few people for a loop.

Since then, we’ve heard a whole lot about how certain industries—you know, those that are largely based in coastal cities and employ people with college degrees, hint hint—somehow misjudged a large swath of their fellow Americans in thinking that things would turn out a little differently.

One publication even ran a long article on that very topic!

Ad agencies have unsurprisingly followed suit. Way back in February, Saatchi & Saatchi sent a team from Manhattan on a long drive through 13 states to figure out how all those “real” Americans feel about things. If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you: just over a decade ago, J.C. Penney hired the same agency to do pretty much the same thing.

This week, Y&R said they’ve come up with a new twist on that practice. The agency launched an 8-week “cultural immersion” project called Days Out: The Middle as part of its eXploring practice that aims to score some of those all-important consumer insights from Memphis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Phoenix.

Now get this:

“The program will follow the teams as they find jobs, join communities, get to know families and experience local life. In return, these insights will enable work that better reflects and connects with people across this consumer group.”

So the strategists will return in late October to produce a report that will then inform future creative work. There’s a corresponding website and “eXploring” Instagram account, which is already filling with images of people you might think you know.

This sounds kind of familiar, because it is. As Y&R North America chief strategy officer Dick de Lange told us earlier this year, the agency conducted a similar project before beginning its work on the U.S. Navy account by “embedding” teams across Texas to spend time with military families. They’ve been doing this sort of research for some time, as have other agencies.

We asked him how things are different this time, and here’s what he had to say:

“eXploring and insights through immersion have been a part of Y&R’s strategic practice for over 7 years—so this is a continuation of that practice. But this project reaffirms our commitment to a deep understanding of our clients’ audiences, and takes it to the next level. Our team has been reviewing all the work out there by journalists, researchers and agencies around the election and Middle America, and what we feel is missing is the authenticity. With eXploring, you’re not a passive observer or a tourist, you’re an active participant in people’s lives. You get to know them as friends. And by doing this with families in Middle America, we’ll unearth human truths that transcend the divisions and data slicing that have made it more difficult to see people as they really are.  This is about getting to know people as people.”

Authenticity is, indeed, difficult to find. Especially in advertising. And we do have to wonder how satisfying a relationship could be if one party discloses at the outset that it is primarily for research purposes, emotional connections aside.

But to be frank, we are also quite tired of reading “what we missed” profiles of Real Americans who voted a certain way.

Today Sid Lee, the formerly independent agency acquired in 2015 by Japan’s Hakuhodo DY Holdings, confirmed today that it will be shifting its U.S.-based creative operations from New York to Los Angeles and moving most staff to the West Coast as well.

According to the parties who reached out to us, the news arrived this morning in the form of an all-staff email from chairman Jean-François Bouchard, who announced plans to “amalgamate” in California.

“The L.A. office will become Sid Lee’s main hub in the US as we will be closer to both our clients and to an incredibly rich pool of talented women and men who, like us, seek to build brands for the modern age,” an agency spokesperson wrote today. “The majority of our current New York talent pool has been offered to relocate to Southern California before the end the year.”

The New York office will not be closing, however.

“The role of Sid Lee in New York will evolve,” the rep continued. “With kyu committed to fully rolling out its LABS, we will strengthen our partnership with SYPartners, IDEO and other member companies. We feel that Sid Lee will best evolve in New York within the kyu Collective.”

Kyu Collective is the New York-based strategic operating unit of Hakuhodo. It currently includes several creative businesses like the organizations mentioned above as well as consultancy BEworks, design firm Red Peak and creative agency Digital Kitchen (which recently promoted veteran Anthony Vitagliano to president and CCO).

Sid Lee L.A. opened in early 2015 before the acquisition went down, but ended up hiring its first creative leads earlier this year to work on the agency’s two biggest American accounts, The North Face and Netflix.

The spokesperson did confirm that a restructuring had led to a “few layoffs” in recent weeks but clarified that the core teams in each office remained intact. He then added that “most” New York staffers have been asked to relocate.

It’s unclear exactly how many people will be affected by today’s change or how many were let go in the aforementioned restructuring. The company’s LinkedIn page currently lists total staff across France, the U.S. and Canada at 600, but we don’t know when that number was last updated.

Last August, Sid Lee Amsterdam closed as the network consolidated its European operations in Paris. Multiple employees who worked there at the time told us that they received transfer offers that did not ultimately materialize.

One party who alerted us to the change this week said that there has been some uncertainty among New York employees due to that earlier move, but the agency spokesperson noted that international transfers are not comparable to cross-country moves.

Sid Lee has certainly been active in the U.S. in recent months. August’s “Walls Are Meant for Climbing” North Face campaign barely disguised its political messaging, and a trippy “Posters for Peace” effort by Sid Lee Collective and MASSIVart came in response to the violence in Charlottesville this summer. The shop also helped Hennessy launch its first tequila brand, Volcan De Mi Tierra, last month.

In June, Mimi St. Gelais, who formerly led the Samsung account at Wieden+Kennedy, became Sid Lee’s head of U.S. client leadership.

According to the parties who alerted us to the news today, the consolidation comes due to a lack of new business in New York. The spokesperson did not elaborate on the reasons for the move.

FCB Chicago acquired Columbus, Ohio-based global design agency Chute Gerdeman, expanding its retail marketing division, FCB/RED.

FCB/RED will add Chute Gerdeman’s design offering to its existing retail marketing, branded content/experiences, activation and digital capabilities. The agency began collaborating with Chute Gerdeman last year and collaborated on a number of new business opportunities . Tina Manikas, president of FCB/RED, will lead the newly-expanded division.

“We’re thrilled to have the Chute Gerdeman team come together with our retail and shopper marketing division,” Manikas said in a statement. “As a recognized industry leader, they bring a unique offering and distinguished track record of creating branded environments that, when paired with our capabilities, will allow us to deliver seamless experiences that that keep the shopper at the heart of everything we do.”

“Creating Chute Gerdeman and growing the company has been my life’s work,” Chute Gerdeman chairman Denny Gerdeman said in a startement. “The people here have been essential to its success and I owe it to them to ensure a path forward. FCB/RED acquiring Chute Gerdeman creates a way to do just that. This is an opportunity for our team to expand their already vast retail and restaurant knowledge all while exposing them to new methods of strategy and design.”

Since its founding in 1989 by Gerdeman and Elle Chute, Chute Gerdeman has become a leading retail environmental design agency and won some 175 industry awards.

“This partnership will allow for more opportunities to effectively and proactively engage and solve the challenges of retail today,” added Chute Gerdemen CEO Brian Shafley. “Chute Gerdeman’s proven ability to deliver best-in-class physical experiences connecting with shoppers corresponds perfectly with FCB/RED’s shopper marketing and insights expertise.”

Did you know that 64% of Millennials would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than make $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring? In other interesting news, there is a 44% underemployment rate among recent college graduates, yet only 9% of top-performing college students say they plan to […]

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The U.S. Army can’t quite seem to make up its mind on McCann.

Today, the government entity officially extended the IPG network’s contract yet again, modifying its existing agreement to add another 12 months or $524,100,000 to its relationship.

This development is the latest in the long and dramatic story of the Army’s creative review, which officially began with an agency outreach effort in 2014 and could—according to a client spokesperson—be worth up to $4 billion over a decade. (Three years ago, a rep placed overall spending on the Army’s marketing efforts at around $200 million per year.)

Approximately one year after that initial news, the Army extended McCann’s contract by 18 months in what looked like a vote of confidence after a 10-year relationship.

The official RFP went out in January, and six months later the Army surprised everyone involved by officially disqualifying McCann due to a couple of technicalities that, according to our sources, involved document formatting and the agency’s status as a certified contractor despite its 11-plus year relationship with the Army.

McCann responded by filing an official complaint with the Government Accountability Office.

Now here’s the official Army take from today:

McCann World Group Inc., New York, New York, has been awarded a $524,100,000 modification (P00023) to contract W9124D-11-D-0036 to extend the performance period for services in support of the Army Marketing and Advertising Program. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Sept. 28, 2018. U.S. Army Contracting Command, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, is the contracting activity.

Given the context, that’s good news for IPG, and some financial analysts noted the development this morning.

But it also hints at the opaque nature of the relationship between public entities and their advertising partners. The extension would certainly seem to support McCann’s work, and the disagreement that led to the agency’s elimination was handled by the Army’s contracting department rather than its marketing and PR division.

But McCann remains shut out of the review. According to parties who spoke to us about it earlier this summer, that leaves Omnicom and WPP as the final competitors.

However, if we’ve learned anything from Y&R, Navy, Campbell Ewald and decades of federal contracts before them, these sorts of challenges tend to take a very long time. Y&R, for example, didn’t start working on the Navy business until about a year after winning the review. And even if/when McCann’s official complaint is resolved or dismissed, the agency could still theoretically take its case to court in arguing that it was unfairly disqualified.

A McCann spokesperson declined to comment on the news. We reached out to both the Army’s marketing rep and the head of its contracting division this afternoon, and neither have responded.

WPP’s AKQA has expanded its global presence with the acquisition of a majority stake in Danish digital agency DIS/PLAY.

“It has been a long held aspiration for AKQA to have a studio in Denmark, and thanks to our partnership with DIS/PLAY, that aspiration has become a reality,” AKQA CEO Ajaz Ahmed said in a statement. “In the conversations that led to this partnership it quickly became apparent that DIS/PLAY’s ethos mirrors the values of AKQA.”

“AKQA leads globally in creativity and innovation, and DIS/PLAY’S strong technical capabilities make this relationship a natural fit. We are incredibly excited about the opportunities this partnership will create for our clients and team,” added DIS/PLAY CEO Steffen Blauenfeldt Otkjær.

DIS/PLAY employs over 100 people in its Copenhagen, Aarhus and Cologne offices and counts ECCO, Amnesty International and Vestas among its clients. Its annual revenue last year was around 105 DKK, or nearly $17 million.

With the acquisition, AKQA now has roughly 2,100 employees across 23 offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

Sarah Thompson, the global and New York chief executive of Droga5, lives in the deep end. She’s led Droga5 to ten Agency of the Year wins since 2008. Go back and read that sentence again. Now, The New York Times is featuring Thompson in their “Corner Office” column. That’s the real Big Time. Here’s an […]

The post At The Top, Advertising Is A Daily Test of One’s Endurance appeared first on Adpulp.

As you may already know, the long-rumored news of a new CEO at CP+B dropped today. It’s Erik Sollenberg of Forsman & Bodenfors.

AdAge first broke the story this morning, though we’d heard murmurs of a Swedish man taking over for Lori Senecal for a couple of months. And of course we’d prefer you read the Adweek version of the story.

Anyway, Sollenberg is moving to Boulder to take over for Senecal as of January 1, and in the meantime they will serve as co-CEOs. The key takeaway there, as we see it, is that the two agencies now speak of being in a “strategic partnership” based on their shared dedication to great creative work. Make of that what you will.

The shift on the Forsman & Bodenfors side is pretty interesting too, though. The agency, which got bought up by MDC Partners more than a year ago for a few million bucks, has promoted longtime art director Silla Levin to replace Sollenberg. She starts on September 1.

Levin has been art director at F&B for more than 16 years. She also sits on its board of directors and, until the MDC acquisition, held partner status as well.

Here’s her quote:

“To take over the leadership of Forsman & Bodenfors, Sweden’s and one of the world’s most renowned agencies, is an incredible honour. It’s also a big responsibility to leverage on what has made the agency so unique and successful. My focus will be to ensure that F&B continues to deliver great creative work for our clients. I’m looking forward to continuing to develop our strong position in Sweden, while at the same time expanding our global offer and strengthening the strategic partnership with CP+B.”

You caught that last part. From Sollenberg himself:

“Silla Levin has for many years been a driving force at Forsman & Bodenfors, and I’m happy that she now takes over the leadership. Forsman & Bodenfors and CP+B have many similarities, most importantly our unwavering commitment to great creative work. I’m looking forward to my new assignment and to bring what I’ve learned at Forsman & Bodenfors into more of a global context. It’s also a chance to strengthen the strategic partnership between F&B and CP+B.”

So what will CP+B and F&B work on together? Emoji ordering for IKEA? And what will Lori Senecal do in her next life?

[Photo by Lars Ardarve]

MRM//McCann has been on something of a winning streak lately.

This morning agency’s chief operating officer, Kate MacNevin, sent out an internal memo congratulating employees on five new business wins, all of them recent.

GSK appointed the agency as global digital and multichannel marketing agency of record for “Respiratory and other assignments,” with MRM//McCann leading the assignment out of its London and Princeton offices. BASF named the agency as customer experience agency of record for North American agricultural products, following “an intensive six-step pitch process.” Benjamin Moore tasked the agency’s Princeton office with its paint, color and coating search marketing business. Mitsubishi Electric is entering into a partnership with MRM//McCann Salt Lake City to “help the company establish brand awareness for their holistic building solutions.” Finally, the agency’s Princeton office has been appointed digital agency of record for Sunovion new Parkinson’s treatment.

MacNevin notes all of this “comes in addition to what we’ve been experiencing with existing clients and goes on to congratulate employees while stressing “it’s important that we maintain our sharp focus on creative excellence and business expansion” through the second half of the year.

The wins provide a timely boost at the digital wing of the larger McCann network. CEO Michael McLaren left about 15 months ago after Verizon consolidated its FiOS business with indie agency Rauxa, and the Salt Lake City office also went through a round of downsizing earlier this year upon losing the Sam’s Club account.

Here’s the memo in its entirety:

Team,

Looking back at the first half of this year, we have much to be proud of. Adding to the significant recognition we’ve received that you know about – both earlier in the year from Gartner Inc. and across a wide range of creative shows – I’m pleased to announce that the following major global companies have begun to partner with us in a variety of capability areas:

• GSK has named us Global Digital and Multichannel Marketing AOR for Respiratory and other assignments, which includes driving a digital-first framework approach through creative, channels, performance and innovative solutions. Our offices in London and Princeton will take the lead on this global healthcare giant’s business, with our operations in Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Italy providing local market support.
• BASF has named us Customer Experience AOR for their North American Agricultural Products after an intensive six-step pitch process. We will help them enhance their customer experience through new processes, technology and data, developing a new engagement platform to power marketing and salesforce enablement.
• Benjamin Moore has assigned our Princeton team to handle their paint, color and coating search marketing business. We will help drive their paid and organic search marketing, while working to utilize search behavior and linguistic learning to accelerate buyers through the decision journey.
• Our Salt Lake City office will be partnering with Mitsubishi Electric to help the company establish brand awareness for their holistic building solutions. In addition to focusing on branding, advertising and sales enablement, we will be integrating multiple product sites into a streamlined, one-stop solution. The team will be working directly with the U.S. division of Mitsubishi Electric in California, and partnering with MRM//McCann Tokyo on overall brand strategy.
• Additionally, our Princeton office has been awarded the Digital AOR business for a breakthrough new treatment for Parkinson’s disease from Sunovion.

This new client growth, which comes in addition to what we’ve been experiencing with existing clients, goes hand in hand with a number of breakthroughs for us this year. Our agency-first Cannes Lions Grand Prix awarded to MRM//McCann Spain – not incidentally, the most awarded Spanish agency of the festival – was game-changing, and was accompanied by 12 additional Lions won by our teams across the globe.

As you know, this year was also the first time we were designated as a Leader in Gartner Inc.’s important and influential “Magic Quadrant for Global Digital Marketing Agencies” report. Additionally, there was a groundswell of creative recognition for MRM//McCann agencies around the world, including at the North America Effie Awards, the global One Show, the El Sol Festival for Latin America and Spain, the Grand Prix Advertising Stratégies Awards in Paris, Marketing Magazine’s awards in the Asia Pacific region, and more.

Congratulations to our teams for bringing in these new clients and for achieving impressive industry recognition this year. As we move through the second half of the year, it’s important that we maintain our sharp focus on creative excellence and business expansion. We have incredibly strong momentum to build upon.

Thank you for your hard work and ongoing commitment.

We are Better Together!

Thanks,
Kate