Hasta La Creative!

Applebee’s named Grey as its creative agency of record, following a review launched in December. The WPP network’s New York and L.A. offices will handle the account, the latter due to its proximity to parent company DineEquity’s headquarters.

Last month, we learned that the review was down to three finalists, with Grey apparently beating out BBDO and Argonaut to be named the chain’s agency of record, making it the third agency to hold that distinction in the past two years. According to an internal memo from Grey CEO Debby Reiner, 24 agencies responded to the RFP, with a group of six later reduced to the three aforementioned finalists.

Previous lead Barkley won the account after Applebee’s ended its relationship with CP+B in November of 2015. The Kansas City indie shop launched the brand’s “largest marketing initiative to date” with a campaign focused on the chain’s wood-fired steaks last summer, then went through a “staffing adjustment” that reportedly did not decrease its overall headcount.

“We couldn’t be more excited to begin working with Grey,” Applebee’s interim senior vice president of marketing and culinary Jeannine D’Addario said in a statement reported by Adweek. “In addition to their deep experience, capability and creativity, the team at Grey has a solid understanding of Applebee’s evolving consumer, the brand’s legacy and our goals to ignite change and deliver original and compelling work.”

Earlier this month, DineEquity named John Cywinski as Applebee’s new president. He previously spent five years as CMO for the chain, beginning in 2001, and will be tasked with reversing “sluggish” sales. According to Kantar Media, the chain spent around $160 million on measured media in the U.S. last year. No word on whether that total will change.

In today’s memo, Reiner wrote, “We will be responsible for creative development, market strategy and brand positioning, crafting engaging campaigns that resonate with their customers nationally. Our integrated communications effort will launch in July.”

“We’ll celebrate after the blizzard,” she added.

Today AdAge broke the news that Manulife, the Canadian financial services company that owns and operates John Hancock in the U.S., has launched a global creative agency review.

Incumbent Hill Holliday will not participate.

We received the following statement from CEO Karen Kaplan.

We are deeply proud of the work we have done and the partnership we built with John Hancock over the last thirty-two years. Together, we have built an unparalleled brand, created groundbreaking campaigns that are recognized worldwide, have earned our industry’s highest awards over three decades, and continue to drive business results.

Most importantly, our ideas, from “Real Life. Real Answers.” to “Life Comes Next” and “A Different Approach,” mattered – not just to the business, but to the consumer and the culture as a whole.

We are grateful for the opportunity to have had this journey together, and we wish the John Hancock team every success as we move forward on different paths. We look forward to building new relationships and creating influential work that matters with a new partner in this category.

As noted in Kaplan’s quote, the account had been with the Boston agency since 1985. Its last campaign “A Different Approach” debuted last September and highlighted such milestones as gay marriage and women in business leadership roles.

“We are working to establish an agency structure that enables brand integration, innovation and growth across our global enterprise,” wrote a Manulife representative. “As part of this effort, we are conducting a search for a lead global agency and reviewing options to ensure we select the best partner for our business.”

The specific reasons for the review are not clear, though the client did name Gretchen Garrigues as its new CMO last August.

According to the Age writeup, the company will most likely choose more than one agency on a regional basis.

KFC selected Mother as its creative agency for the U.K., following a review launched in January. The appointment ends the brand’s 15-year relationship with BBH London.

Campaign reported that other agencies in the review included the incumbent, AMV BBDO, W+K London and FCB Inferno.

“Firstly, we would like to say an enormous thank you to the entire BBH team with whom we have worked over the last 15 years, and for the professional way in which they have responded to our decision to call a review,” KFC U.K. CMO Meg Farren told the publication.

“Through the pitch process, we have been privileged to have some of the brightest and most creative brains thinking about the future of the KFC brand,” she added. “In the end, we have come to the conclusion that the strategic and creative teams at Mother will be the best partners to help us achieve our ambition for the brand.”

BBH London helped the brand celebrate the 50th anniversary of its arrival in the U.K. with its “Families” spot in 2015. Later that year the agency turned its attention to friends with a “Friendship Bucket Test” holiday campaign. Last year, BBH helped the brand with a visual refresh and launched an OOH campaign.

“It’s been a 15-year journey that we are very proud of. We’ve sold a lot of chicken together. But KFC is moving on and so are we. We wish them all the best,” BBH CEO Ben Fennell told Campaign.

Wolverine World Wide, Inc.-owned shoe and boot manufacturer Cat Work Footwear appointed Indianapolis-based Young & Laramore as its creative agency of record, tasked with digital and social duties and retail displays in addition to standard creative.

The agency will be responsible for an autumn-winter 2017 campaign for the brand launching this fall, which will include print, OOH and experiential/activation components designed to target millenial consumers.

“We see a significant creative opportunity to disrupt a category that’s become ubiquitous with its aspirational approach,” Young & Laramore principal and executive creative director Carolyn Hadlock said in a statement. “We are looking forward to creating work that is true to the Cat brand and not just the category.”

“We instantly had great chemistry with the team at Y&L; we’re looking to disrupt the industry, and Y&L’s history of doing counter-category work resonated with us,” added Cat Footwear, vice president of global marketing Dani Zizak. 

Office Depot OfficeMax has ended its relationship with Interpublic Group after approximately two and a half years and moved its entire account to Zimmerman Advertising without a review. According to several sources, the company did not issue an RFP and no agencies beyond Zimmerman were invited to compete.

McCann New York and UM had been handling the chain’s creative and media duties, respectively, since 2014.

The chain’s headquarters in Boca Raton is quite close to the Fort Lauderdale-based agency, and the two parties have worked together before: Zimmerman won the business in 2011 after Office Depot split with Y&R. As in this case, there was no review.

A Zimmerman spokesperson deferred to the client on the news today. We reached out to multiple executives at Office Depot, but none have responded to our queries.

A McCann spokesperson provided the following statement:

“We have enjoyed our relationship with Office Depot Office Max.  It has become obvious over the last few months that we needed to end our relationship. We are very proud of the work we delivered over the past couple of years. We want to thank ODOM for the opportunities they have given us and wish them every success.”

We hear that McCann and UM were not directly aware of the pending loss, though the end of the relationship may have been inevitable. Last summer, McCann’s production studio Craft Worldwide absorbed Staples’ creative production studio after that company dropped mcgarrybowen, thereby creating a potential conflict of interest with its other office supply chain client.

The two companies made plans to merge in 2015, but the FTC challenged the proposal that December, arguing that it would “significantly reduce competition nationwide in the market for ‘consumable’ office supplies sold to large business customers for their own use.” Both parties then abandoned the merger after a federal judge agreed with the FTC’s decision and blocked the deal.

Office Depot has been through some very significant changes since then. Last August, CEO Roland Smith announced his plans to resign, and the company named Gerry Smith, former EVP and COO at Lenovo, as his replacement last month.

We hear that the executive shift made the agency move more urgent and that Jordan Zmmerman’s existing relationship with the client’s svp of marketing played a role in the decision not to issue an RFP. The agency also often emphasizes its reputation for retail-focused work in pitches.

At least one sources claims that Office Depot has not been particularly active on the marketing front in recent months. But the agency did work on a holiday campaign, and the chain has increased its marketing spend in recent months.

According to the latest numbers from Kantar Media, Office Depot spent approximately $54.3 million on measured media in 2015 and $60 million from January to November of 2016.

This marks the second new business win in recent weeks for Zimmerman, which also took on a more prominent role on the Nissan business when the auto brand consolidated its ad business on the East Coast, moving away from TBWAChiatDay L.A. after more than three decades.

Earlier this week, Adweek reported that beauty giant CoverGirl had ended its 26-year relationship with Grey, picking Droga5 as its new creative agency partner after a review.

It’s true that Droga5 will be handling the business moving forward, but we’ve since learned that Grey resigned the account.

Representatives for Grey, Droga5 and CoverGirl’s parent company Coty declined to comment.

But sources close to the matter tell us that Grey officially resigned from all of the Coty brands it worked on (CoverGirl, Clairol, Wella, and various fragrances) on Monday Feb 13, just a couple of days before the Droga decision went public. At that point, the majority of the review had already been completed with Grey competing against Droga and other unnamed participants.

Last October, Coty acquired several key brands from P&G. Grey had been working on them for years under P&G and continued to do so. But according to our sources, the agency had significant disagreements with the company’s new leadership and also saw a potential opportunity arising with another major, unnamed beauty brand.

Coty is undeniably making big changes on most of its big brands. In a Q2 earnings call earlier this month, CEO Camillo Pane told investors that some of the key lines have not been performing as well as he hoped, and the company has responded by aiming to re-position them. We’re told that these revenue shortfalls and investor skepticism regarding the P&G integration increased the pressure to find new agency partners and sped up the process. In addition to CoverGirl, recent decisions saw Sally Hansen go to Anomaly and Rimmel/Bourjois go to BETC Paris. Coty has not yet picked a new agency to handle Max Factor.

Ultimately, the result is the same: the client launched a creative review that Grey seemed very likely to lose, and the agency opted to resign instead. We expect more news on this front soon.

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Last November, GoDaddy concluded a four-month creative review by naming TBWAChiatDay New York as its global creative agency.

It now appears that relationship will end by the time 2017 rolls around.

“We are winding down our partnership with TBWA by the end of the year. We appreciate the contributions they’ve made to our global organization,” a GoDaddy representative wrote in response to sources claiming that the two will soon part ways. “We’ll be reviewing other alternatives in the weeks and months ahead.”

The representative did not clarify whether that will entail a formal creative review, and TBWA declined to comment on the news. One source, however, tells us that the client plans to take more of its marketing work in-house and that TBWA may continue to work on certain projects outside the United States.

The development follows the June resignation of CMO Phil Bienert, who joined GoDaddy last year and promised to take its marketing efforts in a different direction. He was replaced by former CMO Barb Rechterman, who had assumed the chief customer officer role after Beinert came aboard.

GoDaddy characterized its last effort to find a creative agency as “an extensive review that included in-market meetings with GoDaddy country executives and agency teams in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the U.S.”

Prior to that process, the brand had worked with Barton F. Graf 9000. In January of 2015, the brand decided to pull a controversial Super Bowl spot from the agency after it met with online backlash.

According to Kantar Media, the brand spent an estimated $25 million on measured media domestically in 2014.

TBWAChiatDay New York launched its first effort for the brand, “Cats with Hats” in April. That campaign demonstrated the brand’s efforts to target small businesses owners … as well as the general appeal of cats in headwear.

Droga5’s newest client is The Paper of Record: our own hometown New York Times.

NYT reps told us today that they would not be able to help us in our search for more information regarding the relationship between the two, and Droga5 declined to comment.

But we can confirm, via multiple sources, that the agency has been working with The Grey Lady’s marketing department on a project basis. The nature of the work is not clear, but we hear that it ties into the paper’s larger strategic goals.

That almost certainly translates into increasing the NYT’s subscriber base and appealing to younger, more diverse audiences while maintaining its position as the dominant news brand in an increasingly splintered digital media ecosystem.

Last October, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post surpassed the New York Times in overall web traffic for the first time; as the latter org’s Lydia Polgreen put in a tweet at the time, “Meet America’s new paper of record.” The same month, the Times’ editorial staff sent out a 12-page internal memo titled “Our Path Forward” and announced a very ambitious plan: doubling digital revenues over the next five years.

The Times’ digital subscriptions have been growing as print advertising dollars dwindle, but it may struggle to reach the aforementioned revenue goal. A September Digiday report noted the NYT’s plans to localize its editorial and marketing efforts and the challenges it faces in both expanding its global audience and attracting international advertisers that have traditionally worked with local publications.

Droga5’s first work for The New York Times should debut at some point in the coming months.

We would also note that this development has nothing to do with a May Style piece that cast Droga5 employees as a self-contained fashion show in what should forever serve as a case study in PR mastery.

Absolut Vodka appointed BBH London as lead global creative agency, following a review, The Drum reports. Sid Lee formerly held creative duties on the account and is believed not to have participated in the review.

“We are thrilled to have the creative and strategic talents of BBH join the Absolut family as we bring to life the next evolution of the #AbsolutNights campaign,” Absolut vice president, marketing Craig Johnson told the publication. “We are confident that the approach BBH demonstrated through the pitch process will extend our legacy of bold marketing that made Absolut one of the world’s most known and loved brands.”

BBH London’s first effort will be an iteration of the #AbsolutNights campaign launched in 2014 across all markets. Sid Lee’s Amsterdam and New York offices teamed up last May for an #AbsolutNights effort centered around a 30-second broadcast spot documenting related events in cities including New York, Berlin, Sao Paolo and Johannesburg.

BBH London managing director Adam Arnold told The Drum that the agency was “deeply proud” to be working with the client, adding, “Our ambition is to live up to its rich advertising heritage and at the same time make the brand meaningful to a whole new generation of drinkers. Creative opportunities do not come bigger or better than Absolut.”

The news follows Uber choosing BBH London as its first official agency in the U.K. back in March and the departure of  deputy executive creative director, managing partner Caroline Pay, and subsequent promotions of Ian Heartfield and Black Sheep Studios CEO Anthony Austin to deputy executive creative director roles in July.