Hasta La Creative!

GSD&M Idea City took some punches but it isn’t going to take a knee.

Adweek reports that the Austin-based agency has picked up duties on the $30 million L.L. Bean account.

The agency was also re-hired on the U.S. Air Force account last month following a review.

According to Ad Age’s annual U.S. Ad Agencies Ranked By Revenue report, 537 U.S. ad agencies reported income in excess of one million dollars last year.

I must admit I’ve always enjoyed looking at this report. It’s simple in structure, but it offers lots of things to ponder.

“Are these real numbers?” is one thing I ponder. I also like to read all the names and wonder what type of firm lurks behind them. Initials only doesn’t offer much to go on. Whereas names like Avrett Free Ginsberg or Duffy & Shanley give a hint. Then there are the creative names like Periscope and Modernista.

Naturally, I also take note of the US headquarters column. Get past New York at the top of the list and find cities like Akron (home of Malone Advertising), Oklahoma City (home of Ackerman McQueen), Little Rock (home of Cranford Johnson Woods) and El Paso (home of Sanders/Wingo). All good candidates for AdPulp’s “Agencies in Strange Places” series.

Finally, it’s daunting to think of starting one’s own agency. At the same time, consider that 537 teams made more than a mil last year. Just in the ad agency category. There are many more agencies making good money in marketing services, digital, direct, search and media.

I’m a creative. Accounting might as well be rocket science, because that’s about how familiar I am with it. Despite this personal inadequacy, I bring you this from Ad Age, a story on accounting practices gone wrong at McCann.

Interpublic Group of Cos. and its global agency network McCann Erickson Worldwide today said it will pay $12 million to end a longtime accounting probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Resolution of the charges, while anticipated, brings to a close a long-running federal investigation into the company’s accounting practices that began in the fall of 2002 and prompted turmoil including a slew of financial restatements to fix its improper bookkeeping and a revolving door of senior leadership.

“We are very pleased to have settled with the SEC and we believe this matter is now behind us,” said Interpublic Chairman-CEO Michael I. Roth.

Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Here’s a little contrarian piece on Portfolio.com (the web site of Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine):

Sure, the U.S. could be in a recession. Consumer confidence is declining. Food and gas are so expensive it’s more cost-effective to stay home and diet.

But the advertising business (of all things!) is actually benefiting from the painful spectacle of the traditional media landscape fragmenting into shards. The internet is continuing to oust broadcast TV, print, and radio from their once-secure position as the automatic repository for ad dollars, and the complex environment that’s been rattling the advertising and media industries could actually function as an economic buoy during these hard times.

Here’s how it works. Advertisers and the companies that service them now need a multitude of ways to drill their messages into the public consciousness. That desperation plays right into the hands of the giant holding companies that now own everything from traditional ad agencies to media planning and buying businesses to PR firms to promotions specialists to digital advertising agencies with expertise in hot, new areas like search-engine optimization.

So what’s going on at your agency? Are clients cutting spending? Are they just moving it around? Do you feel the effects of the recession where you work?

Ad Age looks into the glaring Fort Lauderdale sun and sees Zimmerman Advertising, a bright spot in South Florida’s agency lineup.

Zimmerman Advertising launched in 1984 in a 400-square-foot space in a strip mall with used office furniture. Its expertise was pretty much limited to car-dealer ads. Mr. Zimmerman slowly grew his business, taking on bigger clients and acquiring area firms. Two decades later, Zimmerman is a beast of an agency under the Omnicom Group umbrella, with 22 offices; more than 1,000 employees; a burgeoning roster that includes Nissan, Six Flags, Crocs and Friendly’s; and projected billings of $2.5 billion in 2008.

AdAge ties this company’s success to its flamboyant founder, Jordan Zimmerman.

Jordan Zimmerman, 52 years old, tan and barrel-chested, is about to bench press 225 pounds. This is the self-imposed, militarylike ethic with which he starts each day just before 4, when his alarm clock goes off and he hurries to one of two gyms in Boca Raton. The onetime competitive bodybuilder, who was “Mr. Florida,” eats the same breakfast every day: oatmeal with fruit, scrambled egg whites and a juice made of leafy green kale and seaweed.

When he pulls into the offices of the ad agency he founded at around 7:30, he is usually the first to arrive.

“If I told someone 20 years ago that I was going to build a company like this in South Florida, they would have said I was crazy,” Mr. Zimmerman told a bleary-eyed reporter while grunting his way through a rigorous workout. “But you have to be a bit off in order to succeed in this business.”

And succeed he has…

This cowboy-boot-wearing registered Republican is known to friends as “JZ,” and while you wouldn’t confuse him with the rapper, he is every inch the mogul — he owns a stake in the NHL’s Florida Panthers — and he knows a bit about the good life. He collects Bentleys and Ferraris and flies only by private jet. He summers in the Hamptons and rubs elbows with the likes of Don King. He has even hosted President Bush at his waterfront home in a Boca Raton gated community. And he has a personal chef named Dudley, who wears a uniform with the letter Z emblazoned on it.

One of the keys to Zimmerman’s success–other than the drive of its founder–is the agency’s reliance on metrics. “JZ” dreamed up something called “Brandtailing” while in business school. His method purports to build brands for the long haul while driving purchase today.

[UPDATE] Adweek’s 25th annual Agency Report Cards segment gives Zimmerman a “B-“. Which might not be great, but it’s better than Wieden’s “C+”.

The Barbarian Group launched a new self-promo site. It’s good.

Rick Webb, Co-Founder and COO, explains:

Taking six months to make a website is pretty ridiculous, but we were doing several things during that time. building a whole publishing platform. This site has a full, rails-based custom, multi-level blogging platform. Each employee has a blog, and then posts are bubbled-up to the Barbarian Blog, and the most important information is elevated to the Barbarian Homepage. We’ve also introduced a whole topical-taxonomy thing, aggregating content around various topics to give many different windows into our content. Finally, the site is fully integrated into our sales, production and staging systems. Finally, finally, after six years, no more entering the same data into multiple databases. We are now running on a fully-integrated, custom-built project management platform.

Webb also says he almost cried when he saw Modernita’s new minimalist “site,” but that approach would not have worked for Barbarian. “We’re more than an idea shop, more than a branding shop, we actually have to execute some pretty serious stuff, so our website needs to be representative of that.”

[via Ken Wheaton]

Random Culture is pointing to interactive agencies with reels. The following reel is from Reflex Group.

Interactive or no, I like an agency willing to share on YouTube. Who wants to ask to see a reel anymore? Googling for it is the natural state of things today.

Bob Greenberg, CEO of R/GA told Adweek why his agency is opening an office in San Francisco.

“We opened in San Francisco not based on business but based on talent,” he said. “Talent is the biggest issue facing agencies today. It’s the biggest open creative and technology talent pool other than New York.”

“It’s not so much the agencies but the Yahoo!s and Googles,” he said. “All the technology companies have many potential hires for us.”

R/GA is looking at office space in San Francisco that could house as many as 80 employees. By the end of 2008, the shop expects to employ roughly 25-30 workers in San Francisco.

One of them will be Mauro Cavalletti, who is returning to R/GA as executive creative director after three years at Organic and most recently AKQA, where he was group creative director.

Louise Story of The New York Times takes the robe off Naked, the communications planning agency with offices in London and New York.

Here’s a bit about how the firm is structured and the role they play in clients’ lives:

Unlike many ad agencies, Naked does not create ads or purchase the space for them from media companies. Executives at Naked say that they are “media neutral,” meaning that they are indifferent to where the advertising dollars of their clients are spent; this, they say, distinguishes them from agencies that might tend to steer clients toward television, for example.

“We do not have any predisposition to recommend any channel,” said Paul Woolmington, a founding partner of Naked New York. “That is something that cannot be underestimated.”

Naked usually does not replace a company’s lineup of creative agencies and media buyers. Instead, Naked works like a consulting firm, advising how to use the regular agencies.

In other words, Naked disrupts the apple cart. I’m sure the “partner” agencies just love that.

Story’s story also gets to the shop’s attitude, if one can call it that. She says Naked’s planners regularly tell clients “that their ad campaigns have been failing miserably.” And Paul Woolmington, a founding partner of Naked New York, uses words like “transformation” and “movement” to describe Naked’s work. At Naked, staff are “brilliant misfits” who want to “liberate marketing,” he said.

The firm has even published a limited-edition book with a list of its principles, called “naked truths.” I’d like to read that book. This firm clearly has balls.