Hasta La Creative!

Droga5 has resigned from the Motorola account, ending its relationship with the client after approximately 4 years together.

The agency won the business in 2012 and has created a range of work since then including this campaign starring elaborate set design and another effort promoting the client’s smart watch by mocking the entire “wearables” movement. (This is standard operating procedure for Droga5, of course.)

The decision was made last month. Droga5 will not be producing any additional campaigns for Motorola, and the two parties are currently winding down their relationship by completing some final production work.

From an agency spokesperson:

“Droga5 New York has resigned the Motorola account. The company has undergone many structural changes since Droga5 was first appointed and the agency felt it was no longer an appropriate fit. We wish them every success in their future.”

The agency’s PR department declined to elaborate on the reasons behind the move or to provide comment beyond this quote.

However, we hear from multiple sources that the key precipitating event was Lenovo’s 2014 acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google, which had purchased the company’s phone business in 2012 around the same time Droga5 won the account. That unit operates independently of what is now known as Motorola Solutions, and the parent company announced in January that it would be “phasing out” the brand name entirely. By 2017, Motorola Solutions will become Moto while Motorola Mobility will be merged into Lenovo’s existing phone business…so the Moto X and other products will soon bear the Lenovo name.

According to tipsters, the single deciding factor in the split was the recent departure of Motorola’s chief marketing officer Adrienne Hayes, who formerly ran the division’s communications for Google. The company has yet to announce the fact that she left or to name her replacement, but we hear that a top marketer from Lenovo stepped in to assume her role last month. We also hear that a campaign created by Droga5 and set to launch this summer was shelved due to this executive turnover.

At this time, Motorola Mobility has not responded to our messages regarding Hayes’ departure and Droga5’s decision to end the relationship. Given recent changes in the company’s structure, no numbers regarding the value of the account are available at this time.

One would presume that a creative agency review will follow.

Artificial sweetener brand Splenda appointed JWT Canada as its creative agency of record for North America, AdAge reports. J3 remains the brand’s media agency, with Publicis Health Media and BSTRO handling digital and LaForce & Stevens responsible for PR.

The agency will lead the account out of its Toronto office, beginning June 1. BBDO had previously handled creative AOR duties for the brand in North America, after beating out JWT, Mother and DDB in a 2007 review to win what was then a $35 million account. Heartland Food Products Group purchased the Splenda brand from Johnson & Johnson last summer. 

Splenda global VP of marketing Kim Holdsworth said the brand had an “immediate connection” with the agency, which stood out via its willingness to “challenge brands to push themselves.”

The appointment marks the first time (to our knowledge) that a JWT office in North America has won a creative review since JWT’s chief communications officer Erin Johnson filed a discrimination lawsuit against former JWT global chairman and CEO Gustavo Martinez. JWT New York was awarded creative duties for Nestlé-owned ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs back in March before launching its first work for the brand last month, and Holdsworth told AdAge the brand had “no concerns” over the discrimination lawsuit. 

JWT Toronto CCO Ryan Spelliscy claimed the agency’s goal for the brand is to “put sugar out of business” before admitting that this is a bit of a tall order.

JWT’s first work for the brand, a new product launch, is expected some time in the fourth quarter. It will roll out in the U.S. before expanding to Canada.

JPMorgan Chase confirmed today that it has chosen VaynerMedia to handle its social media business.

A client spokesperson told us that the banking giant has added Vayner to its agency roster but declined to elaborate on whether a review preceded the win or whether Vayner is now officially its social media agency of record.

This news marks the latest shift for a company that now works with Droga5 on its creative campaigns.

Chase sent its digital work to Publicis‘ Razorfish and Rosetta in a 2013 review that saw four holding companies battle for the business. mcgarrybowen had been the client’s agency of record since 2004 and also handled much of its digital business even after the Publicis decision, but that changed last summer when the company sent most of its creative work to Droga5 without a review. At the time, mcgarrybowen retained the corporate portion of the account while Saatchi & Saatchi handled payments (read: credit cards) and campaigns related to Chase’s partnership with Apple Music.

Chase then ended its relationships with those two shops, most recently sending the payment work to Droga in February before that agency’s first full campaign debuted last month. None of these changes involved RFPs or formal reviews.

The current status of Publicis’ ROAR, which was formed to handle Chase digital work and later planned to partner with Saatchi on that part of the account, is unclear as is the size of the business won by Vayner.

It’s also worth noting that Chase–which generally prefers not to publicly discuss its agency partnerships–has never, to our knowledge, officially named a social media AOR. And while the client spokesperson did not clarify when the company had begun working with Vayner, this Cinco de Mayo Snapchat promo does feel a bit familiar.

When current CMO Kristin Lemkau took the reins in January 2014, she told American Banker that the company planned a “digital, Twitter push” to combat recent negative headlines. Last year, a NetBase study found Chase to be the “most-talked-about banking brand” on social.

VaynerMedia representatives have not yet responded to our requests for comment.

WPP has declined to move forward in the McDonald’s creative review, leaving Omnicom (DDB) and Publicis (Leo Burnett) as the two remaining competitors for its business.

Unnamed sources told AdAge of the change today, though neither WPP nor McDonald’s would directly confirm the news.

We hear that the client’s unusual financial demands and calls for a rapid turnaround on the pitch may have played a role in WPP’s decision to bow out of the review.

Sources with knowledge of the matter say that the client told competing agencies to complete their respective pitches within 60 days in order to meet a June 30 deadline. McDonald’s has also allegedly developed a financial deal that led involved parties to “balk.”

Specifically, we hear that the agreement would prohibit the company’s agencies from turning a profit on base compensation as laid out in the resulting contract. This means the shops working on the business would effectively operate at a loss according to the details of the agreement, not counting other fees that may or may not be tied to performance. One source calls these particulars “ridiculous” while another states that only a legacy client would be able to make such demands.

The review is being run by Flock, a consultancy launched in 2013 by former Aegis EMEA media chief Simon Francis. It would appear that McDonald’s is re-examining all of its relationships with its various agencies in the interest reducing its overall marketing spend.

This latest development almost certainly means that the two agencies currently handling the McDonald’s creative will be competing against one another…just as they allegedly did last year when McDonald’s picked Leo Burnett over DDB to promote its All Day Breakfast offering. To our knowledge, the latter agency has not publicly released any McDonald’s work since then.

The review arrives just as the chain’s focus on All Day Breakfast offerings led to what Bloomberg described as “a scramble among its rivals to find new ways to combine eggs, potatoes and meat for a tasty breakfast.” Related campaigns helped the chain to bounce back from “its worst sales slump in more than a decade.”

WPP deferred to the client for comment. We have reached out to McDonald’s and both of its current agencies of record, and we will update this post if/when they respond.

Perhaps most importantly, CMO Deborah Wahl tells AdAge that “I’m Lovin’ It” will remain the company’s tagline.

MasterCard has further solidified its relationship with McCann Worldgroup by consolidating the digital and social media portions of its marketing business with the dedicated IPG shop McCann XBC.

A client spokesperson writes, “MasterCard regularly reviews and assesses industry resources, as part of responsible vendor and agency management,” adding, “At this time, we can confirm that our digital and social marketing activities in the U.S. have been consolidated under the integrated McCann XBC team.”

This means that the client will no longer work with R/GA or VaynerMedia, which previously handled its digital and social work, respectively. The client did not address whether it held a formal review, and our sources did not mention one. McCann representatives deferred to the client.

The larger McCann organization launched XBC or “ExtraBoldCondensed” in 2012 to collaborate with other IPG agencies on the MasterCard business. At the time of the launch, the McCann organization brought former chief creative officer Joyce King Thomas back to serve as president, and she was later promoted to chairman in July 2014 as Devika Bulchandani succeeded her in that role. Bulchandani, who was formerly EVP of global strategy at McCann, also holds the title of managing director of its New York office.

Tipsters tell us that the agency/client relationship between Bulchandani, Joyce and MasterCard CMO Raja Rajamannar helped facilitate this round of consolidation. In recent months, Rajamannar has joined many other clients in predicting that his company’s investment in digital marketing would soon “significantly outpace” its traditional spend, making the win all the more significant for the McCann network.

R/GA first began working with MasterCard back in 2009, when it replaced MRM//McCann in the U.S. after a review. Vayner has handled social for several years, recently winning a Shorty Award for its work on the “Priceless Reunions” project.

MasterCard’s last major agency shift came in February 2014, when it moved its then-$250 million global media account from UM to Carat.

Spending totals for the digital and social portions of the business are not available at this time.

We already know what makes a successful logo—remember, simplicity is key. But what about its color scheme? 

A Brazilian graphic designer, Paula Rúpolo, recently experimented with 22 major brand logos, swapping the colors of a brand’s logo with that of its competitors. The results are mesmerizing and, surprisingly, viscerally unsettling. 

“There’s something unbelievably awkward and uncomfortable about seeing globally-familiar brand logos wearing someone else’s clothes,” as Rúpolo puts it.

For brands like Dunkin Donuts and Sprite, where the design is minimal and the brand relies on color to make its logo pop, the outcome is especially off-putting. For others, like Amazon, where there’s very little color to begin with, the swap totally overwhelms the design. 

If anything, the experiment shows how ingrained the colors of major brand logos are in our perception of their designs—and the importance of balancing the two elements. 

Check out the rest below. 

Via Design Taxi