Hasta La Creative!

In news that we missed last week, Jägermeister appointed Opperman Weiss as its lead global creative agency, tasked with launching a heritage campaign for the brand next year. Deutsch New York has handled the brand’s U.S. creative since being awarded those duties following a 2014 internal review.

Opperman Weiss was selected “based on prior relationships it had with the spirits brand,” co-founder Jeff Weiss told AdAge. 

Jeff Popkin, CEO of Sidney Frank, the company that imports Jägermeister in the U.S., said Opperman Weiss was able to “connect with and immediately look into the brand and articulate the story that has yet to be told.” 

That language hints at what Jägermeister and Opperman Weiss have in store for next year’s campaign. While the brand, which Popkin said was “built in North America” on Jager bombs, will not completely shy away from its party image, the campaign, he said, aims to “reintroduce Jägermeister to current consumers and introduce it to a new generation of consumers who will be surprised by the level of detail and meticulous planning that goes into the brand.”

The work will mark Jägermeister’s first national brand campaign in five years. While more recent spending information doesn’t seem to be available, the brand spent around $5.6 million on U.S. measured media in the first nine months of 2013, according to AdAge, and Popkin told the publication the current budget is “easily double that.” The effort will include broadcast, digital, mobile, OOH, experiential and influencer marketing initiatives and is expected in the first quarter of 2017.

Food production giant General Mills has launched a closed review across all of its creative and content agencies in the United States.

The client, as per its usual practices, is not being particularly forthcoming. From a spokesperson:

“As a standing practice we do not comment on details of agency reviews. However, we can confirm that General Mills has embarked on a closed review of its creative and production/content agencies in the U.S. We have a responsibility to ensure we have the right agency partners to continue growing our business and agency reviews are a routine part of running a successful business today.”

GM’s main American agencies are Saatchi & Saatchi and McCann. The former has been working with the company for decades, but it has lost several brands to other shops in the past few years: McCann picked up Pillsbury in 2013; W+K won Yoplait last year; 72andSunny has been AOR for Totino’s since May 2015, when Fallon also won Old El Paso; JWT recently scored Häagen-Dazs (which is co-owned by Nestle and GM), debuting its first work in New York this April.

It’s not clear at this time which shops will be participating in this review, though GM’s statement certainly implies that all of its brands will be affected. Reps for all 6 agencies mentioned in the list above declined to comment or did not respond to our emails today.

One thing, however, is very clear: General Mills wants to cut expenses. Last week, the company announced plans to eliminate more than 1,400 jobs in the U.S., China and Brazil in order to better compete with such rivals as Mondelez. It has also cut its overall marketing spend: according to Kantar Media, its totals were $850 million in 2014, $700 million in 2015 and $186 million in the first quarter of this year.

A source with direct knowledge of the matter told us that the closed creative review would probably include McCann, Saatchi and an unnamed WPP agency.

[Pic via CBS Minnesota]

Yesterday brought some interesting news on the general business front as insurance giant MetLife announced that it would be spinning off the U.S. retail portion of its business under the name Brighthouse Financial.

On the simplest level, this means that the company has shifted a large part of its business from a B2C model to a B2B model. As chairman/president/CEO Steven A. Kandarian put it in the press release, “Brighthouse will benefit from greater focus and more flexibility in products and operations … Our goal is to complete the separation process with both the separated business and MetLife well-positioned for success in the years to come.”

So what happens to Snoopy, who has defined the brand for decades? We hear from an inside source that he and his fellow Peanuts characters will soon disappear from all MetLife marketing campaigns. Quite a few media outlets have pondered the future of the relationship between the cartoon dog and the insurance giant, with Bloomberg asking “Who gets the dog in the divorce?” back in February.

A MetLife spokesperson declined to elaborate on the status of that relationship today beyond telling us that the company would be reconsidering its various partnerships moving forward.

While the current contract between the two parties ends in 2020, we have very good reason to believe that the two will part ways well before that date arrives. A month ago, the always-reliable New York Post (which did predict Adweek’s acquisition but got the end result totally wrong by predicting that we would be bought by MediaPost, of all people) noted that “MetLife has started leaving the ‘Peanuts’ characters off marketing materials sent to clients” and that a related “branding center” was recently “dismantled.”

Here’s what we heard back in March from a source within the company’s marketing department: “Met started advertising with the Peanuts in 1984. They’re done with the Peanuts now. It’s over.”

According to this source, insurance advisors had never cared for the Snoopy association, which they said made them feel “silly” even though consumers obviously made a connection. “Internally, we’re already getting ready to wash all of our collateral materials to get rid of Snoopy,” the source wrote in March, adding, “I think it’s a mistake” a la Chick-fil-A’s decision to move away from its signature cows.

The major precipitating factor here was MetLife’s decision to hire Esther Lee, formerly of AT&T and Coke, as its global CMO in late 2014. According to pretty much everyone, Lee does not believe the Peanuts partnership to be worth the investment despite the fact that related expenses amount to “a drop in the bucket” for a company that earned more than $5 billion last year.

On the creative agency side, San Francisco’s Argonaut won the MetLife business (which had been with CP+B) last September after a review — but that agency has not pushed out any subsequent work that we’ve seen since hiring creative directors Shane Fleming and Anders Gustafsson to lead the account back in March.

The spokesperson told us that MetLife worked with a consultancy to develop the Brighthouse name and that it has yet to determine whether it will reach out to creative agencies for work on that brand moving forward.

According to our source, MetLife’s new branding work will arrive in late summer or early fall. And it won’t have anything to do with a certain albino beagle.

Fast food chain Chick-fil-A ended its relationship with The Richards Group after 22 years, picking McCann and the newly launched Erich & Kallman to handle its business after a review.

McCann New York will be the lead agency on brand strategy across the Chick-fil-A business while Erich & Kallman handles project-based work. “This is a great opportunity and a very exciting time to be working with Chick-fil-A as they grow and expand their business nationwide,” said McCann North America president Chris Macdonald.

Sources tell us that Richards founder Stan Richards announced the change in an all-staff meeting this morning. AdAge first broke the news via an exclusive interview with the client’s CMO Jon Bridges, who said of the agency’s iconic cows, “They’re our mascot, if you will. But they aren’t the brand. The brand is bigger than that.”

The Richards Group provided a statement from its founder:

After 22 years of partnership of course we are sad to say goodbye, but we have a lot to be proud of. We never would have guessed that Chick-fil-A would pass KFC as the #1 chicken chain in the country.  Especially with our 1800 stores and their 4660. And we never would have hoped to surpass McDonald’s on a per unit sales basis. And the growth just doesn’t seem to slowing. That’s something both Chick-fil-A and The Richards Group did together.

The cows are core to the brand’s success and certainly we are protective of them — we think we know them pretty well having given birth to and nurtured their unique personalities for more than two decades. We hope the cows live on and continue to thrive with a new family.

When Steve Robinson retired as the only CMO we had ever worked with, and then David Salyers was replaced as vice president, we had a sense things would go in a different direction. That said, we believe that brand is a promise. It’s not a logo, a founder, a CMO, or an ad agency. It should be bigger than all of that. This is a brand we love. And have loved for a very long time. We will continue to love it long after its stewardship has left this building.

Erich & Kallman, which was recently founded by former GS&P creative director Eric Kallman and CP+B executive Steve Erich in San Francisco, beat out five agencies to win project work on the brand. (This was the pitch mentioned in the release announcing the launch of their agency.) Its first campaign, which debuted today, promotes the chain’s new egg white breakfast offering, and Kallman wrote, “We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Chick-fil-A on such a big campaign.”

The Richards Group first won the account in a 1994 review. A recent Adweek piece outlined the history of its relationship with one of its core roster clients and its development of the iconic cows that eventually appeared on billboards across the country.

Chick-fil-A has yet to respond to our requests for comment or to provide more information today.

The retail division of White Castle (think frozen sliders) has appointed New York’s Merkley+Partners as its new creative agency partner, tasked with providing strategic guidance, as well as creative and production services for broadcast, print, social and digital advertising programs.

Creative duties for the main White Castle fast food brand will presumably remain with Resource/Ammirati, which was appointed AOR in November of 2014 over incumbent Zimmerman.

“The retail division has grown significantly in the last few years,” said White Castle CMO Kim Bartley. “Our future plans are to grow the business even more dramatically, and we need a strong advertising partner to do that. Merkley+Partners understands the White Castle brand and they have deep experience in the CPG food category. This makes them the right partner for us.”

“White Castle is a brand we have admired for a long time,” added Merkley+Partners CEO Alex Gellert. “They are one of America’s iconic brands, and that gives us tremendous marketing opportunities to help them grow.”

Back in October 2015, a Bloomberg column suggested that Volkswagen should return to its classic 1959 DDB “think small” campaign as the scandal called “Dieselgate” threatened to damage the company’s reputation and its bottom line. Various marketing and PR experts told Bloomberg, “Volkswagen should use simple ads that hark back to those early days to rehabilitate its tarnished image.”

The company will probably not take that advice.

We come to that conclusion primarily because VW reported its best-ever quarterly profit today. This happened despite the fact that the FTC filed a complaint against the company (which has been with Deutsch in the U.S. since 2009) for false advertising in March and that three state Attorneys General filed suit against the company this week for breaking the law with the full knowledge of executives in a multi-year scheme that was allegedly “orchestrated and approved at the highest levels of the company.”

VW also recently announced that it would pay an additional $2.42 billion in fines related to the scandal, which felled its former CEO Martin Winterkorn.

From the WSJ: “The German car maker’s shares jumped more than 6% after it said first-half operating profit was €7.5 billion, boosted by an improvement at the Volkswagen brand between April and June.” Some analysts have doubts about the future health of the company given the scope and seriousness of the scandal, which will remain in the headlines thanks to the aforementioned suits. But that’s an impressive profit that was down

New York’s attorney general Eric Schneiderman made several big accusations, chief among them that the company’s new CEO Matthias Muller knew about the scandal 10 years ago and that the company “destroyed incriminating documents.”

Back in February, VW made some “very minimal” cuts to its Deutsch team, but we hear that the relationship between client and agency will continue for the foreseeable future.

Deutsch declined to comment for this post, and a VW spokesperson has not yet responded to a related email.

Call it a hunch, but we have a general sense that American consumers simply don’t care all that much about the fact that VW conspired to beat environmental performance standards. We’re more concerned about faulty airbags.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the pharmaceutical behemoth which paid out what was then the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history in 2012, followed up last year’s media review (itself resulting from the $20 billion joint venture deal in which GSK absorbed Norvartis’ consumer brands) with a review of global advertising, marketing and PR for all its brands.

This week, GSK concluded that review by consolidating with nine agencies: Advertising will be handled by Grey, Saatchi & Saatchi and Weber Shandwick; GSK’s digital account will be split between WPP Digital, Havas and Weber Shandwick; Content marketing goes to WPP Digital, Havas, Edelman and Weber Shandwick, with the latter two agencies also handling PR; McCann Health and Ogilvy Commonwealth will handle expert marketing, while Geometery will be responsible for shopper marketing. 

“We will tailor agency capability category-by- category to meet their unique business needs to more effectively reach consumers with the brands,” GSK said in a statement. “The transition to the new model will take place over a period of time and we are currently working through the specific allocations of work by area and brand.”

According to The Drum, the review included the four holding companies previously working with GSK: Omicom, Havas, Publicis and WPP, resulting in Publicis and WPP ultimately splitting most of the assignments. Since WPP previously “almost owned the  majority” of GSK’s advertising and marketing accounts and was seeking to keep Publicis off the roster, The Drum characterized the consolidation as something of a loss for the holding company. More About Advertising, however, characterized WPP as “the biggest winner” in the review, while pointing out that Omnicom’s DDB and TBWA and CHI/The&Partnership lost work on sports nutrition range Maxinutrition, which spends nearly $1 billion domestically, according to the publication. 

In the U.S., meanwhile, the big winner agencies appear to be McCann (which won expert marketing) and Grey, which retained all four of the “global power brands” it held going into the review  — Sensodyne, Poligrip, Parodontax and Panadol — while adding Otrivin. The two remaining such brands, Theraflu and Voltaren, remain with Saatchi & Saatchi, which won work on the then Novartis brands back in December of 2004.

An internal memo sent out this morning by Grey CEO and chairman Jim Heekin reads, “We now serve 5 out of 7 of GSK’s most important global brands including Sensodyne, Poligrip, Parodontax and Panadol. This is a tremendous vote of confidence in our partnership that began in 1955.”

RB or Reckitt Benckiser Group plc has made some changes in its global agency roster, most prominently moving creative and strategic work on the massive Lysol brand from Havas to McCann in what amounts to a consolidation with the IPG agency. (This also applies to the Dettol brand, which is essentially a different name for the same product as sold in various international markets.)

McCann previously only handled creative and strategy Dettol in India while Havas worked on the brand across the rest of the world. McCann will now be the Dettol/Lysol brand’s global creative and strategic agency of record.

This decision followed a standard internal review at RB. Havas will retain a significant portion of the larger company’s business, but its focus will shift, in part, from promoting these particular cleaning products to acting as “lead strategic and creative partner for new strategic initiatives” for the parent company.

We hear that the shift occurred, in large part, due to McCann’s work for Dettol in India. It first won the business back in 2014 and went on to make ads like this one:

In the press release, EVP of global category development Roberto Funari says, “Dettol and Lysol are iconic brands and the quality of the strategic thinking and creativity we have seen from McCann has been outstanding. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Havas WW for their contribution to this brand over the last few years.”

In addition to the strategic initiatives assignment, Havas will continue to promote some of RB’s other unnamed “global power brands” as well as their local variations.

RB has been gradually sending more work to McCann. Early last year, the company consolidated much of its vitamins and supplements business with the IPG agency due to the work McCann New York did on the Mucinex brand, which it won in May 2014 (see internal memo).

RB spent about $36.5 million on measured media for the Lysol brand in the U.S. for 2015, but given the global reach this is a far larger win for McCann than that number might imply.

Walmart ended its relationship with The Martin Agency today after nearly a decade. CEO Matt Williams announced the loss in all all-staff meeting this morning.

A Martin Agency spokesperson writes, “As of September, we will no longer be working with Walmart on their advertising. We’ve worked with them since 2007 and are very proud of the work we’ve done together and wish them the best.”

This news supports an AdAge report from earlier today indicating that Publicis Groupe has created a new, as yet unnamed entity to handle all of the monster retail chain’s creative and in-store advertising.

The Martin Agency first won the Walmart business in January 2007 as part of a review that also saw the media portion of the account go to Publicis Groupe’s MediaVest.

There was no review in this case, and the decision did not concern Walmart’s media account, which went to WPP’s GroupM in March after the arrival of CMO Tony Rodgers (who had run the company’s business in China). MediaVest subsequently laid off more than 80 employees in a move that representatives strongly implied was not related to the Walmart loss.

Saatchi & Saatchi will now apparently inherit the majority of Walmart’s creative work. The Publicis agency became a Walmart roster shop after winning a review in late 2013 and launched its first campaign in February 2014 as part of an Olympics tie-in.

That news came only months after Andy Murray, founder and former CEO of shopper marketing division Saatchi & Saatchi X, joined the Arkansas-based company as SVP of creative. He currently retains that title. Walmart initially brought on Saatchi & Saatchi X in 2006 to handle in-store and shopper marketing, with the agency eventually becoming something resembling a dedicated shop.

Representatives for Walmart and Publicis Groupe have not yet responded to our requests for comment.

The chain spent nearly a billion dollars on measured media last year according to Kantar Media.

Governor Andrew Cuomo defended the “New York Open for Business” marketing initiative promoting his Start-Up New York project amid criticism from local government reps who claim that the advertising for the program is costly and ineffective.

The “New York Open for Business” marketing initiative with BBDO initially covered a series of Empire State Development campaigns, but its scope was widened in 2013 to include ads promoting the Start-Up New York program. New York spent some $251 million on the contract with BBDO before signing another $150 million contract with Campbell Ewald to continue “New York Open For Business” for two more years last fall.

In the wake of a report finding that Start-Up New York created just 408 jobs in its first two years, New York Senator Terrence Murphy called for the suspension of the advertising contract, saying, “The way to show we’re open for business is by reducing New York’s burdensome regulations and cutting taxes, not buying television commercials. I…never fully understood why New Yorkers were seeing ads about why they should come to New York…We have to put the brakes on these commercials until a system of accountability is in place, and if our targets cannot be met, we should scrap the whole thing.”

“It costs us nothing – zero – because all the program says is if you come here, we won’t charge you tax,” Cuomo explained to reporters in response to the criticism. “But they weren’t here to begin with, so it doesn’t cost us anything. It just saves them on the income tax.”

Cuomo characterized the “New York Open for Business” ads as “generic,” rather than specifically promoting Start-Up New York, adding, “‘Come to New York and we will help your business grow if you come to New York and New York is not the frightful place that you thought it was. We’re not a high tax state. We’ll eliminate taxes.’ So that’s what the advertising did.”