Hasta La Creative!

London-based VCCP signed a “don’t call it M&A” deal with San Francisco’s MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER in order for the two agencies to form an international creative partnership, Adweek reports.

The newly formed network will include VCCP’s London, Berlin, Madrid, Sydney and Prague offices and MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER’s San Francisco headquarters, with plans for MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER to open a New York office in the coming months. In the long term, the agencies hope to collectively expand to expand to markets in South America and Asia. 

While VCCP has been looking for a creative partner on this side of the Atlantic for some time, MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER has dismissed offers from holding companies to form such partnerships in the past.

“We never gave it much thought. It wasn’t something we needed or were looking for,” MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER executive creative director John Matejczyk told Adweek. 

But VCCP, he said, is “ambitious in the same way that we are. They’re trying to help clients, look for business opportunities, and look for creative ways to figure out solutions. We thought we could go further together. It feels like the start of something cool.”

“We wanted to find a partner in the U.S. who had the same focus on creative work, the same challenger mentality. We spent two years looking for that agency, and when I met these guys, I thought, I wasted two years of my life,” said VCCP CEO Adrian Coleman. “It’s the coming together of two agencies that can help grow each other.”

“From a client perspective, on a global level, it’s giving the market an alternative from typical holding companies,” he added.

None of the details regarding the financial structure of this deal have been made public, so feel free to be confused.

Former Wieden + Kennedy ECD Jamie Robinson has partnered with Lisa Clunie of lifestyle site Refinery29 to launch a creative agency in New York.

The new shop is called Joan, and it officially opens today with General Mills as its first client.

According to the release, Joan will offer clients “big brand thinking and high end creative with a modern understanding of culture, distribution and content creation.”

This is familiar territory for Clunie, who is herself an agency veteran. Last March, she stepped down as senior partner and director of creative management at Ogilvy, allowing CCO Steve Simpson to joke about “assaults upon her optimism” in the internal memo. She spent just over a year as COO at Refinery29, which is often cited as a new media success story earning an outsize share of coverage for its approach to that thing we call “sponsored content.”

“This is an exciting yet challenging time for brands to connect with their audiences. Speed and agility are key ingredients, but brands need more,” said Clunie in a statement. “Jaime and I are excited to combine audience development, distribution planning and content strategy with big, game changing brand ideas. Our process of co-developing content with clients, testing and learning will make working with us more effective and frankly, more fun.”

This is indeed a challenging market, but W+K’s Mark Fitzloff thinks Joan will be OK. The pair have already begun working on unspecified yogurt, snack and meal-focused projects for General Mills–and the client’s chief creative officer Michael Fanuele called them “what the industry has been waiting for,” adding, “They’re ten tons of talent in a nine ton bag of joy.”

Regarding the inspiration behind this new agency’s name, Robinson said:

“Our name was inspired by all of the Joans throughout history who have brought big changes to the world–from reshaping rock and roll, transforming comedy, putting a new face on protests in the 60’s and, of course, the Joan who triumphed on the French battlefield. Lisa and I want to commit all of our positive energy to creating a different kind of client relationship–one of listening, understanding, collaborating and making the best work possible, together.”

Joan will also focus on select causes, establishing a Foundation of Diversity that will dedicate a portion of total profits to select groups and providing each employee with an unspecified financial stake in the company. (The release calls that approach “the smartest way to deeply connect people with the work and its outcomes.”)

Prior to joining Ogilvy in 2011, Clunie held various accounts and management positions at Fallon, BBH and Saatchi & Saatchi New York, where she was managing director.

Robinson left W+K last October after approximately eight months along with fellow ECD David Kolbusz, who now leads Droga5 London. She previously spent six years in the creative department of San Francisco’s Pereira & O’Dell.

As soon as Tamara Ingram became JWT’s new global chairman/CEO following the March resignation of Gustavo Martinez, she let the world know that “diversity and inclusion will be at the top of my agenda … [because] companies don’t value women enough.”

According to AdAge’s sources, she already made good on that promise by planning a Diversity and Inclusion Council.

AdAge’s report includes several interesting details:

• Ingram announced the Council in an internal video
• The agency has partnered with consulting firm inQUEST to act as an objective third party reviewing its efforts on this front
• Ingram will also launch a “talk to me” hotline for employees who feel threatened or uncomfortable about “certain issues”

Perhaps most surprisingly, JWT chief talent officer Laura Agostini–who played a central role in the Erin Johnson lawsuit and allegedly declined to act on Johnson’s repeated complaints about Martinez’s behavior–will retain her position.

JWT also hired former Y&R chief talent officer Celia Berk to fill the newly-created role of chief employee engagement officer while simultaneously acting as group talent partner within the larger WPP organization. Her LinkedIn profile describes the new gigs as such:

As Chief Employee Experience Officer, reports to the CEO and focuses on ensuring the work lives of JWT employees are as rewarding as possible.

As Group Talent Partner, reports to WPP’s Chief Client Team Officer and works with the company’s 45 global account teams to advance WPP’s strategic focus on “horizontality.”

According to the AdAge story (and yes, they definitely scooped us on this), Ingram released an internal video in which she essentially repeated the same points in the U.K. appearance linked atop this post regarding the importance of “represent[ing] all people,” including every member of JWT’s own staff.

An agency spokesperson referred us to WPP’s PR firm Finsbury, which has not provided any comment at the time of this post. It would certainly seem like someone within the agency spoke to AdAge, but there’s no official statement or rollout yet.

Expect to hear more next week.

San Francisco agency Heat is adding an office in New York, its first expansion since being acquired by Deloitte Digital in late February.

For now the New York outpost, which launches in June, will be run out of the agency’s San Francisco headquarters; a permanent location for the New York office will be announced later this year. To lead the new office, the agency is bringing on industry veteran Tim Maleeny as general manager and chief strategy officer and tasking him with injecting the agency’s culture into the Manhattan ad world.

Maleeny joins the agency from Havas New York, where he has served as managing partner and CSO for the past three years. Prior to joining Havas, he spent over three and a half years at Ogilvy & Mather as head of strategic planning. Before that he spent eight years as director of strategy for Puclicis & Hal Riney, following four as senior vice president, group account director with Hal Riney & Partners, during which time he worked with Heat’s principals, John Elder, Steve Stone and Mike Barrett.

“We have to bring our culture to New York as best we can but use a truly New York City-centric approach,” Barrett, who serves as Heat’s managing director, told Adweek. “I think the difference is the San Francisco ad environment feels like a more collaborative partnership which I think New York clients will like.”

“With West Coast agencies, it’s about creative first and it’s very idea driven. New York is more process oriented,” added Maleeny. 

“You could argue the last thing this industry needs is another new ad agency,” he said. “What it is yearning for is a new kind of agency.”

“As we go into New York, it’s not just Heat—it’s Heat plus Deloitte Digital,” added Elder,who serves as president of Heat.

Former CP+B executives Jeff Steinhour and Markham Cronin launched a full-service agency in Miami called Markham & Stein.

The pair, who have over 50 years of industry experience between them, spent 10 years together at CP+B, with Cronin handling creative and Steinhour accounts, before Markham left for West Wayne in 2000. Following a stint there and at Carmichael Lynch as a creative director, and two years as CCO at BrightHouse, he decided to launch Markham Unlimited in 2005.

“I was spending 20 percent of my time doing the valuable part of my job for clients and the other 80 percent actually running the agency,” Markham told Adweek. “So when the opportunity came to talk to Jeff about maybe doing this, there was no question it was something we should try and do together.”

Steinhour was one of CP+B’s four founding partners along with Chuck Porter, Sam Crispin and Alex Bogusky; until recently, he served as partner, vice chairman and managing director of the agency’s Miami office. He says Markham & Stein is “A new kind of shop … that brings the strategic and creative power of a big agency in a more nimble and tenacious package,” adding that “Clients are looking for groundbreaking branding solutions that once upon a time required a large agency.”

International boat engine maker Mercury Marine became the agency’s first official client, but Steinhour and Cronin have been working together on clients such as Markham Unlimited’s H & H Jewels, Coconut Grove Business Development District and Oriental Bank for several months. (The new agency inherited Cronin’s clients and his 21 employees.) The first work for Mercury Marine, for which M&S won global AOR duties after a review involving at least five other agencies, will launch in the fall. 

“As we’ve grown, we talk to bigger and bigger clients which are talking to smaller and smaller agencies,” Cronin told Adweek. “The old model of dumping every piece of marketing activity into a big agency is at its end: We’re seeing more project-based work and work split into separate disciplines. This benefits a shop of our size as the nimbleness and lack of overhead gets us talking to national and global clients.”

Regarding the formation of this new entity, Steinhour added: “After I decided to leave CP+B last fall, Mark called me and said, ‘I could use your help with a couple of pitches. That went well, one thing led to another … and we said, maybe it’s time to do something more formal. We formed a new LLC and called all of his clients, none of who had any issues. It felt pretty natural.”

The duo chose to launch the agency in Miami, Cronin says, because “It’s one of the most vibrant, thriving cities in the U.S. with heavy South American and Latin American influences. Both of us have lived in Miami for the past 25 years, and selfishly I believe that [the city] deserves a handful of good agencies.”

The agency also has a couple of clients based in Puerto Rico, with a small number of employees based in the U.S. territory focusing on those accounts.

On Monday, we wrote about Deutsch parting ways with senior vice president, director of diversity Felicia Geiger and eliminating the position altogether. 

We’re not generally ones to “beat a dead horse,” but we missed Campaign’s recent conversation with Geiger, who said: “I was told that the agency was no longer going to invest in diversity. They wanted to put their efforts behind other initiatives, such as technology.”

After news of Geiger’s dismissal became public, Deutsch positioned the decision as a strategic move to shift responsibility for diversity efforts away from a single executive.

Before leaving the agency, Geiger told Campaign that she suggested the agency fill one of its recently vacated CCO roles with a diversity candidate: “I had suggested this would be a great way to infuse diversity at the most senior levels, and that suggestion was not taken up.”

Those positions were filled at the end of last month by creative veterans Dan Kelleher and Jason Bagley. 

Geiger’s job at one point included a budget “well over six figures,” which included investments in programs such as the Multicultural Advertising Intern Program and nonprofit TORCH, which exposes New York high schoolers to a range of career opportunities, but that budget was slashed considerably around 2014. She was told in January that the agency’s diversity budget, and in all likelihood her position, would be eliminated.

“I said I would like to keep this confidential, because as the agency cheerleader, people would flip if they found out,” she said. “And we agreed that we would keep this under wraps,” she added.

This week’s reaction shows she wasn’t exactly wrong about people flipping out.

Last week, the value of holding company MDC Partners stock dropped after activist short-seller Daniel Yu and his Gotham City released a report claiming that the company has “understated debts” and that its accounting practices are “highly disturbing” nearly a year after the resignation of CEO Miles Nadal amid various reports of financial improprieties.

The move was designed to depress the company’s stock prices ahead of yesterday’s earnings call, but MDC’s new chairman and CEO Scott Kaufman strongly disputed Yu’s claims during the call.

He opened by saying, “I’m as confident as ever in MDC Partners and our long-term competitive advantage.” Here’s the full press release for the call, during which Kaufman said Yu’s report was “filled with inaccuracies” and that the issues it raised had “long been addressed in a clear and transparent manner,” as per Campaign’s coverage today.

Kaufman also specifically defended the decision to hire CP+B CEO Lori Senecal’s husband Bill Grogan, stating:

“The fact that they’re married to one another in no way diminishes the fact that they are each highly acclaimed global executives, who have been in the network for many years.”

In a MediaPost story that ran after Yu dropped his report on Monday, analyst Richard Tullo also questioned its reliability, stating: “We think the media did not properly vet reports on Friday and was used by the blogger who is good at social media.” Here’s the most interesting part of that post:

“The report stated that MDC paid senior leader Lori Senecal’s husband some $1 million for 5 months’ work. Tullo’s group spoke with MDC and was told that William Grogan has actually been with MDC for five years.”

It’s true that Grogan has worked for various MDC agencies since 2010, but Yu’s report seemed to specifically reference his time spent as global president of brands for the larger holding company.

MDC reported an overall loss of $23.3 million for Q1, but the results beat Wall Street expectations according to CNBC. The company’s stock price has recovered after hitting a low point just before noon today but has dropped by more than $5 since last week.

Holy aggregation engine, readers: We woke to news of a masterpiece of New York Timesery and simply HAD to share the very hottest of takes.

So, Droga5 is an agency filled with “admen (and women).” You wouldn’t know it from the staff shot above, but some of these men (and women, parentheses!!) happen to have very particular taste in clothing (read: hipster, and sorry but there’s no more accurate way to describe it). The Times thought this worthy of a full multimedia feature under the URL “Men’s Style.”

Opinions, people have them!

i just threw up in my mouth a lothttps://t.co/j0sgmi6bAm

— Jason Ferguson (@JasonPFerguson) May 4, 2016

Man, am I cool enough to work for @droga5??? https://t.co/CFHGGWZhTe

— Marianne (@mabmoney) May 4, 2016

If you have to ask…

Oh, the omission of @ChetG! The Stylish Admen (and Women) of Droga5 – The New York Times https://t.co/TkfVSfm0UK

— Colin James Nagy (@CJN) May 4, 2016

Dude undoubtedly got robbed.

Some of the more fascinating tidbits from this cultural snapshot, as it were:

• David Droga promises reporter John Ortved that he doesn’t know which brands he’s wearing.
• Junior art director Tobias Lindborg is a huge Adidas #brand advocate, but he doesn’t have any of the Kanye stuff, which might be because of its prohibitively high prices!
• Art director Gage Young–who definitely looks more like ourselves and our colleagues than anyone else in the piece–argues that art directors dress better than copywriters. This would seem to make sense?
• Andrew Sawyers is an analytics analyst who swears by beard oil. We second that, because it really does make a difference what with the chafing and the dryness and the unbrushability.
• COO Susie Nam describes Prospect Heights as “where aging hipsters go to breed,” and she is absolutely correct. Please add Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts Gardens and Ditmas Park to the ever-expanding list … but not Windsor Terrace as that shit is way too expensive and it’s all retired cops. No, really. Go to Farrell’s on a Sunday afternoon and report back to us.

Account manager Chris Hill definitely makes the strongest impression, dressed as he is in a shirt reading “Ghetto” along with a (silver?) shark’s tooth necklace. In describing his fashion choices, he says:

“Ghetto fabulous. Health gothic. Unless I have a client meeting, then I turn it down a little bit.”

He then clarifies that “health gothic” does not mean that he’s a gym addict, simply that he often chooses athletically themed clothing.

Also, this exchange with creative director Devon Hong:

“You don’t seem like a guy trying to fly under the radar.

Oh, really? I try so hard.”

THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

Some inevitable questions: how was this piece organized? How did the NYT choose which employees would be featured? Does Droga5 still believe it to be a good idea, generally speaking?

We should mention here that we read the NYT regularly because it is still a great paper.

On an unrelated side note, though, you might be less than surprised to learn that two older black women who work in the paper’s advertising department filed a lawsuit last week alleging discrimination. They claim that they were “repeatedly passed over for promotion by younger white employees despite their greater experience” because–according to alleged statements by executives–the ideal NYT employee is young, white and single.

Did we mention male? And does that sound maybe possibly somewhat familiar??

[Image via Droga5. File name: “davidSelectCreativeGroup.”]

It’s been a while since we posted on StrawberryFrog. We hear the agency has been working on some projects based in Dubai after making this year’s Super Bowl spot for Sun Trust, but the 50-plus employees in its New York office are quite busy.

The Frog’s latest work is blatantly self-promotional, but in a good way: the company has positioned itself as an ad agency friendlier to working mothers.

We think you’ll agree with ECD Shayne Millington, who notes that advertising can be “an intense career.” (We hear media can sometimes be a bit much as well, but what the hell would we know?)

Before people start talking crap about this project, you can at least acknowledge that the matter at hand can present some very real challenges for “almost 50 percent of those working in the advertising industry,” thank you The New York Times.

This is obviously not to say that all women are mothers or that they should be expected in any way to play that role. But Scott Goodson does make some valid points in the Adweek writeup about the agency world being especially difficult for people with children, not to mention agencies hiring young hip folks to tell clients what moderately older people with completely different schedules, responsibilities and concerns might want to buy.

The project’s homepage is also a marketing effort for SG and its founder, what with the links to his podcast and the profiles of employees who are also parents.

But remember, this is an advertising agency working to stay competitive in an economy where this kind of thing gets attention for good reason, because quite a few companies across industries don’t even try to pretend that working moms do face a very different and specific set of career challenges despite the fact that–generally speaking here–they can do your job just as well if not better than you can.

And you got to look inside the office!

Now can we discuss how even the best companies usually don’t have any form of paternity leave? A friend of ours just had his first baby, and he was forced to use up a year’s worth of sick/vacation days just to get two weeks off. (It still wasn’t nearly enough time.)

As we first reported nearly a month ago, JWT has lost its status as lead creative agency on Macy’s holiday campaigns.

The client, which was typically tight-lipped in responding to our queries in April, confirmed to AdAge that it had in fact issued an RFP late last year–meaning that its decision to seek other agencies predated the lawsuit filed against now-former CEO Gustavo Martinez.

The news does coincide with the departure of Martine Reardon, who is stepping down as the chain’s CMO after five years. Today she gave AdAge a statement:

“F&P and BBH have delivered some exciting and creative concepts that will further cement the magic of our fashion and entertainment brand with consumers.”

The client provided a bit more information to AdAge about how the holidays are its most important time of the year retail-wise, but you already knew that.

Reardon did not clarify which agency will create which portions of the account, but based on their past work it would seem that BBH will be handling the TV campaigns.

The news marks a pretty big win for Figliulo, which has been recovering from its 2014 Sprint loss in recent months by picking up Virgin Atlantic, Seaborn Cruise Line, AC Hotels and, most recently, Pete and Gerry’s Organics.