Hasta La Creative!

Wexley School for Girls and Creature are out of business. Wong Doody just sold to foreign investors. Meanwhile, Seattle agency, Copacino+Fujikado is going strong at 20, and raising glasses in celebration. The agency with a large wine client is also sending glassware to their friends, so we can all raise a glass. When your agency […]

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Spotify was named Ad Age’s “In-House Agency of the Year” in February. Once upon a time, no one paid attention to in-house agencies. Today, the designation is a real honor. Let’s take a look at some of Spotify’s creative output… The brand turned popular playlist RapCaviar into a sub-brand “that could meaningfully connect with artists […]

The post Spotify’s In-House Creative Team Is Raising The High-Bar appeared first on Adpulp.

Townhouse, the production unit of Grey that officially launched in late 2016, went through a round of layoffs this week; around ten employees were affected.

A Grey representative confirmed that the company had parted with a small number of employees, but declined to elaborate further. Our sources claim that the move is in keeping with budget cuts by unspecified clients.

Townhouse first appeared on our radar in early 2016 when the Screen Actors Guild’s issued a complaint alleging that Grey cast non-union actors in its ads and used “Townhouse 23,” as it was then known, to get around the conditions in SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contracts.

The entity continued handling work, with WPP later naming Kristen Martini as Townhouse’s first CEO in November of 2016, with president Bennett McCarroll reporting to her. (In keeping with our spies, he resigned less than a year later to accept a job as co-director of video production at, you guessed it, Apple.)

At the time of Martini’s appointment, WPP explained that Townhouse would offer additional client services in addition to production, while primarily servicing Grey accounts such as P&G. Townhouse has about 200 employees.

The news comes at a time when clients are increasingly moving production duties in-house while agencies try to offer their own such services in the interest of keeping a greater share of the work. Unilever claimed to have save 30% on production costs in 2017 by doing just that, but the matter of whether they really did that, or whether they still relied heavily on WPP for work in that capacity, depends on who you ask.

Patrick Coffee contributed reporting to this story. 

Toby Barlow, who left WPP’s Ford-dedicated agency GTB a little over a year ago, is launching a new venture in Detroit called Lafayette American.

The agency seems to be following industry trends away from the traditional agency model, with the Detroit Free Press reporting it will be made up of a small team from various industries seeking to solve “interesting riddles and puzzles” for clients. Lafayette American launches with a team of 6-8, including head of design Meg Jannott, and a small roster of clients including Ralph C. Wilson Foundation and Kelly Services. Barlow plans to keep his staff small while leveraging a team of freelance creatives and designers, and work with clients on specialize projects.

“We don’t want to parasitically stick to clients,” Barlow told Detroit Free Press. “We want to come in and help clients come up with creative and interesting solutions, and when we’ve helped solve the problem, we’ll sail away and on to other adventures.”

“A lot of large agencies when new technologies emerge they sort of say, ‘Yeah, we can do that, too,’ and they build a new wing onto their agency and just start charging the client for it,” he added. “Our thesis is that you just can’t keep slapping those Lego pieces on without it collapsing at some point. What we want to do is stay small and then add those pieces as needed and then snap them off when they’re not needed any more. It’s a much more nimble model that’s built for the complexity of our times.”

That doesn’t mean Barlow’s shop would decline a longer relationship with a client as long as they “keep bringing us interesting problems and interesting riddles,” as Barlow put it, just that it won’t overstay its welcome.

One day after news of the sexual harassment suit filed against Innocean and chief creative officer Eric Springer broke—and nearly two whole months after the suit was initially filed—we have yet to receive any sort of formal response from the CCO, the agency, or its parent company Hyundai.

We have, however, received a lot of follow-up information from both current and former employees who are unhappy with the way management has dealt with the news.

Multiple parties tell us that the vast majority of the 300-plus employees at the agency’s Huntington Beach headquarters had no knowledge of the suit before Adweek’s story went live yesterday.

We also hear from two different sources that staffers are extremely unhappy with management’s apparent decision to stand behind Springer. There have been no announcements about the case, and speculation holds that the CCO will remain in his job unless executives at Hyundai choose to act.

(While Innocean became a publicly traded company in 2015, the Chung family of South Korea, descended from Hyundai founder Chung Ju-yung, remain its largest shareholders.)

One current employee expressed disbelief that leadership has not moved to fire or discipline Springer. Another said that Steve Jun, who became CEO in 2015 when his predecessor suddenly moved back to South Korea, was seen standing in line for happy hour yesterday while his employees all talked about the case around him. (We are aware that this incident was mentioned on Fishbowl, but we have discussed it directly with a very reliable source.)

Two other parties tell us that staffers are threatening a mass walkout on Monday if the company does not act.

Since the story first broke, multiple women have reached out to say that they, too, went through some form of harassment while working under Springer. A former junior employee says that she experienced “belittling behavior” from management but felt powerless to act during her time there. An individual who briefly considered joining the agency says she was “warned about Eric,” while another says news of the suit was unsurprising given his “reputation.”

A male Innocean veteran wrote, “I worked in that office and can verify that everything Victoria alleges is true, and more. Eric is the epitome of the overly confident and overly empowered frat boy-turned executive who’s never been held accountable for his actions in any arena. The only thing that surprises me about this reporting is that it took so long for it to become public.”

He also described as “tone deaf” the fact that the shop ran an International Women’s day post celebrating female employees on its Instagram account approximately two hours after the story first broke.

The post has since apparently been deleted.

Another interesting note brought to our attention by an anonymous tipster: Victoria Guenier, the producer who brought the suit against Springer, received a production credit on “The Force,” the Deutsch Volkswagen spot on which Springer served as group creative director. So the two parties have known each other for some time.

Innocean is reportedly holding an all-staff meeting late this afternoon to discuss the case with employees.

Updates to come.

Independent agency RPA recently went through a round of layoffs which the agency claims were caused by shifts in client spending.

“RPA is proud to report strong organic growth across multiple clients which created the need to fill approximately 75 positions over the last six months. Shifts in client spending toward digital in areas such as web development and programmatic necessitated staffing adjustments, which are never easy decisions to make,” an RPA spokesperson said in a statement. “Less than 2 percent of RPA’s current staff of 725 were affected. At the same time, RPA has more than 40 open positions many in the areas of digital and technology, reflecting growth in the areas of client needs.”

While RPA didn’t address the specific areas impacted, sources claim they were focused on media and production departments in response to budget cuts from key RPA client Honda.

A recent report in Digiday noted that the company’s U.K. marketing operation has moved away from buying ads based on clicks or impressions in favor of those that will “drive people into showrooms” within two weeks.

RPA promoted a pair of executive producers to vice president, director of video production roles last November, several months after Honda awarded its U.S. media account to the Santa Monica shop following a review.

Today Adweek broke the news that Kimberly-Clark, the personal-care monolith behind everything from Huggies to Kleenex to Kotex, launched a global creative review in early January.

That’s a big one for WPP, whose agencies have long handled the vast majority of the company’s marketing business in the U.S. and abroad. The lineup includes Ogilvy, JWT, VML, VSA Partners and probably a few more.

According to a spokesperson, the client is “assessing the current agency landscape for creative services,” which means it’s looking to restructure its international agency lineup.

This doesn’t necessarily mean consolidation with one network. Back in 2015, the company’s old CMO told AdAge that he would rather go for an “Uber-style” agency of choice model that sounds a lot like a jump ball pitch.

It’s not quite clear what K-C wants to do in terms of agency structure, but the company has already cut its spend with WPP over the past year-plus, so we have to believe it has savings on the brain like its chief rivals Unilever and P&G. One month ago, the company also announced plans to cut some 5,000 jobs and close factories around the world, attributing the move to a desire to be “leaner, stronger and faster.”

At this time we don’t know who, exactly, is pitching against Team WPP, because PRs at all the major holding groups declined to comment.

Multiple sources do tell us, however, that this review is especially critical for Ogilvy and JWT. And while the former remains in all-hands-on-deck defense mode with an international, multi-office pitch led by one Tham Khai Meng, JWT has already been eliminated—at least in the U.S.

The agency worked on Kleenex and various Family Care brands while Ogilvy had Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex, etc.

More to come on this review, which arrives at a particularly sensitive for WPP after stock prices took their biggest dip in almost two decades yesterday.

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More than five years after acquiring Hyper Marketing for an estimated $460 million dollars, data marketing juggernaut Epsilon has folded Westport, CT-based Catapult Marketing into its larger ad practice, Epsilon Agency.

“Epsilon and Catapult have combined into one entity, strengthening and expanding our full agency services offering,” said a company spokesperson. “The alignment provides clients with more robust capabilities across data and insights, analytics, branding, digital, CRM, shopper/retail and cross channel advertising and marketing. For the time being, the brands will continue to operate under the Epsilon and Catapult names.”

Richard McDonald, Agency president at Epsilon, will be running the combined entity.

“We bought Catapult as part of HMI back in 2012, and 6 years later it made sense from a couple of angles to bring the groups together … to bring Catapult closer to the mothership of Epsilon to benefit more from data, analytics, and digital media [services],” McDonald said. “It started as a shopper marketing agency, and had aspirations to spread its wings further.”

He added that Epsilon Agency will now serve all existing Catapult clients and that the decision was not related to Catapult’s recent performance.

“It was more based on our belief and ambition to harness the horsepower of Epsilon,” he said, “And the best way to do that is to lead Epsilon’s growth through agency relationships: Using data to define growth opportunities and change up the agency landscape a bit.”

McDonald also noted that the organizations have been fully integrated into one structure with a single P&L and unified creative, accounts and strategy teams. “We will still keep the Catapult brand around for historical reasons … they had a good reputation in the marketplace,” he said.

Sources tell us that several longtime Catapult leaders have departed in concurrence with this shift, including CEO Paul Kramer and CMO/former Ogilvy VP Peter Cloutier. President Joe Robinson also recently left the Minneapolis office along with an unspecified number of additional staffers for a job at Nordeast Marketing Group.

We don’t believe there will be other major staffing changes to come for the agency, which was born in 2005 as a subsidiary of D.L. Ryan Companies. That organization later became HMI in early 2012, 10 months before the Epsilon acquisition.

Epsilon remains one of the smaller consultancies allegedly coming for your business (or not), but it has gone up against creative shops in pitches like the 2016 Del Monte review.

Clients include Kraft-Heinz, KitchenAid and Burt’s Bees.

Do you want to apply for an agency internship without devoting more than five minutes to the process? Minneapolis-based independent agency mono is introducing what it’s billing as “the fastest internship application process, ever” for all your limited attention span needs.

The timed application process takes under five minutes, with the agency choosing to  emphasize honesty and immediacy over grammar and long-winded responses.  After uploading a resume and cover letter, and providing contact info, applicants are given 60-seconds to provide a bio. Then they go through a series of questions for which they have 30-seconds to respond, for a total of 3 minutes, which range from what they’d do if a client had spinach stuck in their teeth to crafting a personal tagline.

The agency is looking to fill seven full-time paid internship positions, including copywriter, art director, design director, digital designer, producer, project manager, strategist and video editor.

JWT announced some big changes today, most prominent among them the hiring of mcgarrybowen’s Simon Pearce as its new North American CEO and the departure of his predecessor Lynn Power, who is leaving “to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity.”

A little further downtown at the Southern District Court of New York, last week saw the latest set of filings in the ongoing lawsuit filed by the agency’s still-current global chief communications officer, Erin Johnson.

In short, Johnson’s lawyers have accused the WPP team of stalling by refusing to release documents related to the resignation of another top JWT PR executive, director of global comms Christine O’Donnell—as well as the attempted cultural training of former global CEO Gustavo Martinez, the man she sued for harassment and discrimination.

Last Wednesday, the law firm of Vladeck, Raskin & Clark requested a meeting with Judge Robert Lehrburger to discuss why the parties have “reached an impasse” in their efforts to resolve “certain discovery disputes.”

Repeated claims of “pariah” treatment

The letter recalls 2016 claims that agency leadership began retaliating against Johnson as soon as she returned to work after filing suit against the holding company, the agency and now-former CEO Martinez by subjecting her to “humiliating treatment,” pressuring her to resign and turning her into a “pariah” by assigning most of her previous duties to O’Donnell. The latter employee joined the agency several months after news of the suit went live.

According to the latest filing, O’Donnell told CEO Tamara Ingraham and others last November that she planned to resign … but they withheld that information from Johnson.

Johnson and her team then requested documents related to JWT’s attempts to replace O’Donnell with another individual who would handle most of the work previously assigned to her. WPP refused, arguing that “they are not obligated to produce information” beyond a cutoff date.

That date, the letter states, is unrelated to information that Johnson and her lawyers did not know about at the time.

Johnson’s lawyers also add that they’re only interested in “documents concerning a single recent development: O’Donnell’s departure and defendants’ efforts to find someone to perform some or all of her duties.” Why? Because “such materials could reflect further retaliation; documents may show that defendants failed to consider plaintiff to assume what previously had been her duties.”

The letter goes on to claim that, in December 2017, Johnson received a “handbook” outlining JWT’s communications department and its responsibilities. She had reportedly never seen this book at the time even though it was more than a year old—and while it listed O’Donnell as head of communications, it did not include Johnson’s name or position.

“The failure to identify plaintiff is evidence that defendants retaliated by removing her from her job,” the letter reads. JWT has claimed that it never produced any such memo because no draft can be located in its electronic records. But Johnson’s lawyers argue that this is simply a delay tactic, writing, “Defendants’ production obligations, however, are not limited to electronic searches.”

Additionally, Johnson’s lawyers demand notes from sessions that resulted from WPP hiring lawyer Merrick Rossein to provide Gustavo Martinez with “equal employment training” after the lawsuit was filed. While they’ve provided Rossein’s conclusions, they argue the notes themselves are privileged.

“That argument is nonsensical,” the letter reads, asserting that these training sessions were largely intended to bolster WPP’s argument that Martinez cannot be held accountable for his own confirmed or alleged harassment and discriminatory behavior due to “purported language problems and cultural differences.” Their argument holds that the defendants must, as such, be required to produce all relevant notes.

Seeking more info on Martinez’s role

Finally, the lawyers state that WPP is trying to minimize the fact that Martinez still works for the company in an executive role by “improperly refus[ing] to run searches using approximately 11 terms intended to locate documents regarding Martinez’s current work for WPP.” WPP claims that this information is irrelevant to the case at hand.

“Documents concerning Martinez’s current work for WPP may show that corporate defendants treated Martinez more favorably even though he harassed plaintiff,” the letter reads in countering their position. “Indeed, corporate defendants may have appointed Martinez head of Spain for WPP.”

It is undeniably true that the holding group has repeatedly refused to discuss Martinez’s current role.

Last October, he made a public appearance at a Barcelona WPP-sponsored event and stated that he would be managing efforts to reorganize the company’s presence in Spain. At the time, this news seemed to contradict his lawyers’ claims that he had only been working for WPP on an “ad hoc” basis thanks to a deal negotiated with Martin Sorrell when the lawsuit was first filed.

The letter written last week notes that Martinez “has received and/or sent 47,000 emails since moving to WPP around the Fall 2016” and that “there have been several articles reporting that Martinez is Country Head of Spain.”

Sounds like a pretty sweet gig.