Hasta La Creative!

Looking for a chateau
Twenty one rooms but one will do
I don’t want to buy it
I just want to rent it for an hour or two – Hunter/Garcia

Omnicom will pull creative out of the L.A. branch of BBDO West.

“It’s not difficult to have a large office in L.A.,” said Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, New York. “All you have to have is a car account or Apple. However, if you don’t have one of those, then you need to decide where to have your West Coast talent center of gravity, in L.A. or San Francisco. We’ve chosen to concentrate our talent in San Francisco.”

BBDO’s move is only the latest example of a business trend that is nearly as perplexing and frustrating to locals as why the nation’s second-largest city can’t field a pro football team. In just two decades, agencies that once dominated L.A.’s advertising landscape have disappeared or diminished significantly. In the last five years, many once-giant network offices along the Wilshire corridor — JWT, FCB, Grey — have pulled out entirely or been reduced to shells of their former selves.

[via Adweek]

If I read the press release correctly, Los Angeles agency 86theonions is now calling itself ecopop.

In Chad Rea’s own words, “ecopop is about merging capitalism and global responsibility with a populist/iconic slant. Unlike the current trend, which involves corporate grandstanding and asking consumers to change, ecopop is committed to creating demand, influence, social currency, and profitability for businesses interested in social change. We do this by creating, marketing, advising or owning products and services, ranging from consumer goods to entertainment properties and media initiatives.”

In the wake of the recent green flood, Chad recognized it would be ridiculous to think that the majority of people in the U.S. really care about the green movement. In fact, it has become abundantly clear that the very word ‘green’ is enough to make most non-vegan Californians go out and buy a Hummer wrapped in non biodegradable fiberglass. The green community has succeeded in branding themselves as an elitist group, which is not in the best interest of our planet. Chad determined that green was just one color on the ecological spectrum, ecopop is the whole box of crayons.

This is what happens when you have bored employees who are willing to humiliate themselves, and some time to spare with the high-definition camera you just rented for a shoot.

By the awesome Action Figure studio.

Via: TrendHunter.

Well that was quick.

“Part of the Midwestern psyche is you do the work and that should speak for itself.” -Michael Hart

In its latest issue Creativity profiles mono, an agency in Minneapolis that is partly owned by Canadian holding company MDC.

mono is the creation of Michael Hart, 40, and his creative partner Chris Lange, 36—both Minneapolis natives who have spent most of their careers there— and managing partner James Scott.

I bring this shop to your attention because I like the way Hart talks.

“We don’t subscribe to the model that the world’s blown up and everything that used to be doesn’t work anymore and you have to reinvent the whole agency model. We’re in a state of evolution here. We’re just at the beginning of change. We’ve got to have a lot more arrows in our quiver, and we’ve got to be able to use them all equally well. To not be great at TV is just as bad as not being great at something else, and there are plenty of agencies that don’t know how to do TV. That’s a problem, too.”

Herman Miller, the Michigan-based furniture designer and manufacturer which makes chairs for 90% of the agencies in America, recently named mono agency of record.

Tribal DDB bought a full page ad in the May issue of Creativity. It’s a long copy ad full of dense prose that leads nowhere. Which, given the clincher, is clearly the point: Nobody Forwards Print

Oddly, this message comes inside the new Creativity, a magazine that has upgraded it’s packaging considerably with this latest issue. Stranger yet that Tribal DDB would leave this clue in the text: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOpxzp4PEUg

Said clue leads to the video embedded above. Which in turn leads to Size Monkey, a site I know nothing about.

So, where are we? Creativity has a new look and feel. Tribal DDB used the occasion of the redesign to lampoon the print medium and long copy ads. I think. Perhaps there’s something else happening here, something I’m too dense to get.

Occasionally, important events present themselves which call for the entire advertising industry to band together as one unstoppable force with the sole mission of advancing a worthy cause and doing good for all human kind.

The new WPP-created agency to service Dell gets a new name. From Ad Age:

he new WPP Group agency designed to handle Dell’s marketing-services business is expected to be named Synarchy Worldwide, a reference to a utopian political system coined in the 18th century.

WPP could change direction if the name doesn’t pass legal muster or translate well into the various international locales in which it operates. But according to executives familiar with the matter, it looks like the holding company will lean on a relatively obscure political theory to describe one of the ad world’s most closely watched experiments.

In the context of political theory, synarchy means a lot of things. The Wikipedia entry for synarchy runs through a history of its use including applications in Mexico, China and France. The entry quotes from a book on Vichy France that had an account of French industrialists who saw Nazi Germany as alternative to Communism: “Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.”

I kind of like DaVinci. Synarchy sounds like one of those made-up words that branding firms come up with.

Or possibly just turn it into a thumb.

Looking at 2007 earnings reports, Ad Age notes the health of the industry’s top indies—Richards Group, Doner, Wieden + Kennedy, RPA and Cramer-Krasselt in particular.

In terms of U.S. revenue, the hardest-charging independent is Chicago-based Cramer-Krasselt, which grew domestic revenue more than 16% last year to $137.2 million, thanks partly to account wins such as Porsche, Zantac and Bissell.

C-K’s revenue grew 42.3% since 2005, and if the trajectory holds, it would likely catch Richards and Doner within a few years, an oft-stated goal of the agency. Los Angeles-based RPA, the No. 4 U.S. independent, also posted double-digit revenue growth, rising 10% to $116 million.

“(Larger) independents ought to have a leg up in this environment,” said C-K CEO Peter Krivkovich. “We’re all getting to the point where you have enormous resources, so [having success] is really just a question of vision.”