Hasta La Creative!

Back in March, BSSP made headlines for resigning the Mini account after more than 11 years.

It was the agency’s longest-held account, but the company’s reliance on procurement-mandated reviews and its assorted cost-cutting measures led to diminishing returns, and CEO Greg Stern told us that he couldn’t justify going through another review.

Several parties also indicated that parent company BMW had moved more of the creative work on that brand in-house after dropping BSSP for UM on the media side—and that it would continue to do so after the current review.

Now, we hear that the announcement will come in the next few days, with the final round pitting R/GA against 360i.

According to two individuals familiar with that matter, several of the agencies competing for some portion of the Mini business—along with that of its parent company—also took issue with the nature of the contract. These agencies allegedly included Anomaly, Huge, 360i and R/GA, at least two of which dropped out. The client then reportedly restructured the specifics.

There’s been a good bit of confusion on all sides as the specifics of the contract dispute and the nature of the assignments being considered are unclear. Some were initially called in to discuss the BMW brand, and it would appear that multiple briefs were involved. Others report a disconnect between the company’s marketing teams in Germany and the United States.

Beam of Boston has been Mini’s social and digital AOR for several, but we do not believe they were involved in the final rounds of the current review. According to one source, the client’s brief initially concerned “digital transformation” on BMW but later expanded to include the Mini brand as well.

For context, BMW will officially go into review next year, again due to procurement status. It is not clear whether global AOR KBS will defend.

Representatives from Anomaly, Huge, R/GA and 360i all declined to comment or did not respond to related messages this week.

When we reached out to Beam, a representative from the PR firm working on Mini responded, stating simply that the company would share more news “once the review process wraps in Q4.”

ESPN will soon announce a new partnership with Droga5, according to two parties with knowledge of the news who spoke to us anonymously today.

ESPN representatives have not yet responded to short-notice requests for comment. A Droga5 spokesperson declined to comment.

In January, Wieden + Kennedy made headlines across the ad industry by splitting with its former client of 25 years and signing with Fox Sports. According to several parties who later discussed that relationship, the shared contract ended late last year and both parties agreed to go their separate ways after hundreds of “This Is Sportscenter” ads. The company also has an in-house creative team in addition to working with other agencies such as 72andSunny. W+K produced fewer spots toward the end of its tenure.

One party who confirmed the win described the account as “super small,” and many media observers have also speculated on ESPN’s ability to survive declining cable subscription rates and ad revenue totals. Parent company Disney has suggested that the brand will not offer a direct to consumer service for several years, and in April ESPN laid off approximately 100 anchors, staffers and production team members.

According to Kantar Media, ESPN spent $26.3 million on paid media promoting its brand in 2016 and just under $9 million during the first half of this year.

The nature of the relationship between ESPN and Droga5 is not yet clear. It’s also not clear whether the appointment follows a competitive review. The agency’s most recent new business wins include Chinese gaming giant Tencent, Ancestry.com and Dos Equis, which had been with Havas for more than a decade.

We will update this post when more information comes in.

Multinational aerospace and transportation company Bombardier selected McCann Canada as its new agency partner, following a review launched this spring involving Canadian and international agencies.

The assignment includes strategic marketing and communications but does not appear to be an agency of record assignment. McCann will lead the account out of its Montréal office and begin work immediately. Bombardier’s headquarters are also located in Montréal.

“McCann offered extensive experience and created a custom-built team to meet our needs, including expert resources from their national and global network. Their collective passion for our brand, relevant experience and the high level strategic thinking that they brought to the pitch process was unmatched,” Bombardier senior director, corporate strategy Stéphanie Laforest explained in a statement. “The bonus was having all that talent and ability on the ground in Montréal coupled with insights and resources from the global network that we can leverage for our international business units. Their expertise, from brand strategy through to connections planning and integrated creative solutions, put them on top and won them the business.”

“We wanted this win more than anything. Our team is passionate about the brand and proud that Bombardier, a pioneer in its field, is a recognized global leader. Our agency’s longstanding heritage in Montréal and our access to experts and on-the-ground resources in the international markets where Bombardier operates, are the perfect complement to their business,” added McCann Montréal president Mylène Savoie. “We firmly believe that the intersection between global and local is a huge opportunity for our clients in Montréal. Brands now have access to the most innovative media, technologies, experiences and creativity from around the world through our increased access to the McCann Worldgroup network.”

The New York Police Department is seeking city approval to appoint Walton Isaacson to an assignment to help it diversify the city’s police force through recruitment, DNA Info reports this week.

The five-year recruitment outreach assignment is reportedly worth some $54 million.

“The NYPD has the intent to award the contract to Walton Isaacson, however, the contract award is not official until Comptroller registration,” a spokesperson for Walton Isaacson said in a statement. “The Public Hearing will be conducted on 8/17/17 to be held at 1 Centre Street, Mezzanine, at 10:00 AM.  The Public Hearing Notice was advertised in The City Record 8/4/17.”

The NYPD’s police force is reportedly around 50 percent white, while DNA Info cites that the  the city itself is 44 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. DNA Info adds that, according to NYPD statistics, “There are more than 9,980 Hispanic officers, 5,515 black officers, 2,692 Asian officers and 19 who are Native American.”

According to the request for proposal, the assignment to diversify the NYPD through recruitment practices specifically seeks black, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, female and LGBTQ + applicants.

Walton Isaacson has worked with brands including McDonald’s, Lexus, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Axe, Knob Creek, the Oscars, Basil Hayden’s, Cruzan Rum and Dove Hair. The agency was named creative agency of record for Spalding in November of 2015, following a review. Last year, Walton Isaacson welcomed Jeff Davidoff  as its first president and Christine Villanueva as senior vice president, head of strategy.

In March of 2016, the agency took on then-candidate Trump for immigrant rights organization CHIRLA Action Fund with “Turn Ignorance Around.”

Pic via

Get ready to flash back to your mallrat heyday: retailer Express has chosen VML as its new agency of record after a review.

We personally hadn’t thought of Express in at least 15 years, but the chain, which specializes in “targeting the 20 to 30-year old customer,” ended its recent review by picking the Kansas City-base WPP network.

Now that agency will handle “marketing, paid media, search, analytics and consumer sales optimization” while the chain’s in-house team continues with creative.

You may have forgotten Express like we did, but the company has been around for 35 years and survived the spinoff and re-absorption of its men’s-only sister chain Structure. It still maintains a design studio in Manhattan and employs about 18,000 people in more than 600 locations across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, but not Canada: in May Express announced that it would close all operations north of the border in a move equivalent to American bankruptcy.

Stock prices have also dropped quite a bit over the past year-plus as Express continues running headlong into the same problems faced by every other brick-and-mortar retail organization. The exact size of the account is unclear.

The brand’s campaigns usually include celebrity/influencer stuff and iPhone-style videos like this one, wherein some guys play big band music in New Orleans while wearing jeans with suits and ties.

Post Holdings selected Minneapolis agency Public Works as agency of record for its cereal brand Honey Bunches of Oats.

“Am I missing something? I guess I don’t get the whole ocean metaphor, Public Works creative lead Derek Bitter said in a statement contained in a press release entitled “Public Works pulls a cereal whale out of Breakfast Bay.”

“I mean, can’t we just say that we’re incredibly excited to be working with a great brand like Honey Bunches of Oats? Not everything has to be a big silly thing all the time.”

“Yeah, why are we on a ship? Can you just add that we are honored that Post Consumer Brands continues to find trust in us to partner with them on their biggest brands,” added business lead Jenny McDowell.

Public Works already works with a number 0f Post brands, including Pebbles, Honeycomb, Malt-O-Meal and Great Grains, but Honey Bunches of Oats represents the largest assignment from the client. The agency, which launched last year and employs around 13, also works with the NHL’s Minnesota Wild and Warner Bros.

Last month, you all heard about MillerCoors’ third agency switch in less than two years. But what about the brewing behemoth’s events marketing work?

AgencyEA, a 100-strong indie shop in Chicago, recently picked up that part of the business after a competitive review that included several other unnamed agencies. They won a two-year contract to handle event duties for the MillerCoors Distributor Convention, the annual gathering at which MC toasts its business partners around the country.

“We’re always looking to work with bigger brands that have perennial commitments to getting themselves out there to the public in various, experiential ways,” said AgencyEA CEO Fergus Rooney, who founded the company as Experience Architects in 1999.

He explained that the agency will be designing and building the event space, which includes “pavilions” dedicated to each of MillerCoors’ 16 brands. Agencies will be familiar with the sort of setup in which attendees make the rounds and meet representatives for each brew.

“There’s lots of competition between the 16 brands, and we have to highlight them with atmospheres that are reflective of their brand purpose,” said Rooney. There will, of course, also be digital elements integrated into the larger effort via AgencyEA’s in-house creative, digital and production departments.

The agency, whose most prominent client is Hilton but has worked with groups ranging from GE and Under Armour to the Obama administration, also recently won an ongoing contract with Clif Bar and managed that brand’s presence at last month’s Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

That event involved the very sorts of things you would expect from the former kings of indie rock creative writing, as per the photos in this post: attendees could sample Clif products while swinging in hammocks, charging their smartphones via solar panel and exploring the world of temporary (but longer-lasting) tattoos. The event was co-sponsored by old school environmental advocacy organization The Alliance for the Great Lakes.

“That relationship is in the building phase,” Rooney told us.

He also shared some thoughts on the widely publicized shift toward experiential work that has inspired several years’ worth of competing headlines. “It’s not just people standing outside and giving you vouchers,” he said, calling that sort of basic man-on-the-street practice “what used to pass for experiential.”

“The brands we’re working with are really rebelling against the 30-second spot,” he said, adding, “More and more it becomes a bit redundant because we tend not to pay attention unless it’s very, very unique. With experiential marketing, which is very pervasive now because more brands are putting more money into it, you get to engage and create a memory for someone who relates the brand to a place and time … it leads to brand loyalty, but it can’t just be something for the sake of it.”

We can tell you’re skeptical.

Yet Rooney said that more and more corporate clients like Hilton are looking to “unconference” their events; he mentioned one recent gathering at which employees answered questionnaires about their well-being and work environments that might do wonders for the ad industry. “The feedback was most incredible,” he said, noting that attendees “went to a conference and no one quoted a statistic.”

He also told us he’s witnessed a big upsurge in experiential RFPs and requests for related in-house digital services. That may seem a bit self-serving, but we’ve heard the same sort of thing from several agencies in this space. And given the fact that clients like P&G are making a big deal about cutting their overall ad budgets (especially on the “largely ineffective” digital-first side), “traditional” creatives are probably right to be a little nervous.

This afternoon Adweek broke the news that Nissan has chosen to move lead global creative duties on its Infiniti brand from CP+B to 72andSunny.

The details of the shift remain somewhat unclear, but according to two reliable sources, it has already happened. Only the legal details remain to be ironed out.

Infiniti PR simply said, “We continue to work with CP+B as well as other partners,” declining to comment directly on the 72andSunny decision. Spokespeople for that agency, CP+B, and MDC Partners all referred us back to the client.

The way we hear it, 72 snapped up international duties behind CP+B’s backs while a team from Boulder swept in to retain the U.S. AOR portion of the account. It is unclear at the moment exactly why the change was made and whether the two will work together moving forward. OMD remains media agency of record for Infiniti.

Regardless, the move is bad news for the Crispin organization. When they finally won the review way back in late 2014, some called Infiniti the agency’s biggest client. After the win, they opened a Shanghai office, hired new creative, strategy and account leads across locations and moved the center of operations on the global business to Los Angeles.

Nissan spent more than $171 million on marketing for Infiniti last year, and 2014 estimates had the brand spending around $450 million globally.

In our very humble opinions, CP+B’s best work to date for this client was the spot in which a nervous son comes out to his BMW-driving, Westchester-living, sweater-wearing dad. Unfortunately, it’s no longer on YouTube.

Fast food chain Church’s Chicken has named JWT Atlanta as its agency of record, effective as of August 1.

The appointment concludes an extensive review which lasted four months and involved researching agencies of all sizes across the country, pitted JWT against another large agency in its final stages, Hector Munoz who joined Church’s Chicken from Popeyes as executive vice president and chief marketing officer in March, told AgencySpy.

“We weren’t looking just for a creative agency,” Munoz explained, “we were looking for that partner that will help us identify that key insight that will make this brand great again.”

He added that JWT Atlanta “showed tremendous passion for our business, our franchisees, our customers, high level strategic muscle, and made us feel comfortable with what they could bring to the table.”

The agency will be tasked with all brand marketing efforts, including broadcast and radio advertising, which will be led by chief creative officer Vann Graves, who was appointed to that role last December.

JWT Atlanta will partner with Munoz, Church Chicken senior director of advertising Georgia Margeson and the rest of the chain’s marketing team on a brand repositioning effort. The agency’s first campaign for the brand is expected in early 2018.

Munoz credited Graves and JWT Atlanta CEO Spence Kramer, along with the agency’s head of strategy, as “two main reasons” the brand selected the agency.

“We’re excited about the people, the caliber of their thinking, their creativity and all the resources that JWT Altanta and their parent company can bring to the table,” Munoz said. “Spence has done amazing things putting together a strong team of dedicated passionate people. One of the first things we noticed was that there’s a lot of passion in that room. They hit an emotional connection with Church’s Chicken about our brand.

Church’s Chicken formerly worked with Boulder, Colorado’s Made Movement as agency of record, a relationship which ended in late 2016. Since then the brand has been working with Erich & Kallman on a project basis and will be using the San Francisco-based agency’s work through the end of the year.

Great spot. Great homage. Great production. And gee whiz, did I get a — wait for it — product benefit in there? I think I did. Thanks to Mumaw for pointing it out.