Layoffs. There’s a word you don’t want to hear at the start of a new year. Nevertheless, business realities creep in and staff reductions are often the result. WPP’s Ogilvy just laid off 80 employees across nine offices, amounting to 3.7 percent of its U.S. staff. Ogilvy’s chief creative officer Leslie Sims was one of […]
Brands are taking stronger and stronger stances today. But is anyone paying attention? IPG’s Graphene, the agency created to serve the LATAM Airlines account, wanted to make sure that travelers noticed the airline’s support for LGBT+ Pride month. To this end, they applied rainbow colored baggage tags to customer’s checked bags, complete with a call […]
The post LATAM Airlines Asks Its Customers to Fly Without Prejudices appeared first on Adpulp.
Inquiring minds want to know…why did David Droga agree to sell his creative powerhouse, Droga5, to Accenture? “You can have the best advertising out there, but if the e-commerce is not good or the relationship with the customer and the experience isn’t great, then that’s irrelevant,” Mr. Droga said. That’s advanced thinking, especially for an ad […]
The post Droga5 Powers Up; Rest of Ad World Remains Envious appeared first on Adpulp.
Advertising is a tough business that seems to get tougher by the day. One day you’re on top, enjoying long lunches and VIP invites to the best parties in Cannes. Then a new day dawns and you’re out the door just like that, left to wonder what happened and what’s next. Derek Thompson of The […]
The post WPP Lets Thousands of People Go; Calls Itself A Creative Transformation Company appeared first on Adpulp.
Perhaps the biggest legacy of the TV show “Mad Men” was how it prodded numerous ad industry veterans to write their memoirs and tell their tales of a business that’s changed immensely over the decades. But if you’re thinking, “When is the accountant going to write his book,” here you go: David C. Wiener’s From […]
The post From Brighton Beach to Madison Avenue Lets The CPA Have His Say appeared first on Adpulp.
The stock market is on fire. So, why are advertising agency stocks are languishing on the vine? According to The New York Times, WPP, which owns agencies including Y&R and Ogilvy & Mather, said annual net sales may be flat or grow up to 1 percent as it reported that the measure shrank in the […]
The post Is Adland A Risky Place for Investors? appeared first on Adpulp.
Holding companies are the bane of the creative agency’s existence. Sell to a holding company and become like the bean counters themselves—that’s the not totally undeserved rap. Thankfully, there is another way. Your agency can remain independent, like Butler Shine Stern & Partners in Sausalito. Then you can choose to do whatever the hell you […]
The post It’s A Free Country (Provided You’re Not Confined To A Cubicle) appeared first on AdPulp.
A recent article in Adweek wondered if independent ad agencies can thrive in the “merger era.”
The answer, of course, is yes. In the era of “storytelling” and “content” nearly anyone and their project manager can get into the advertising business. But it’s not a guaranteed path to success.
The weaknesses of upper management are more visibly pronounced and felt. Dysfunction can’t be covered up in layers of process or management. Plus, smaller shops need alliances and partnerships, which involve lots of trust since there’s always a subtext of fighting over the same slice of client pie. And no small agency wants to admit to a client, “we don’t do that” or “we don’t do that sort of thing well” even if they don’t, which in the era of a thousand digital and mobile tactics becomes quite obvious. It’s simply hard for smaller firms to do everything on behalf of a client, and even harder to turn down a piece of business when offered even if it isn’t the right fit.
It’s the subject of my new column on Talent Zoo.
The post Holding Companies Don’t Hold All The Cards appeared first on AdPulp.
In a quest to innovate and apply leaner methods to age old practices, agencies are increasingly acting like media and technology companies.
In one such move, Publicis Groupe—agency parent to DigitasLBi, MRY, Razorfish and VivaKi—is joining the NYC Media Lab as a corporate member. Other partners include AT&T, ESPN, HBO, Hearst, NBCUniversal, News Corp., Time Warner Cable and Verizon.
The Lab connects companies seeking to advance new media technologies with university labs, programs and talent in New York. It was launched in 2010 by the New York City Economic Development Corp., New York University and Columbia University.
According to Adweek, all Publicis Groupe agencies have the chance to participate in the Lab’s media research initiatives, covering areas like design, data science and engineering.
This development will likely benefit clients in the end, but in the near term it may help high quality talent choose between offers from an Omnicom- or WPP-owned shop, and a similar offer from a Publicis-owned shop.
The post Publicis Groupe’s Digerati Join NYC Media Lab appeared first on AdPulp.
Music moves people. Live music moves people deeply. The experience lingers for days, weeks, sometimes for years.
Naturally, brand marketers would love to gain some of this attention for their own purposes, and increasingly they’re turning to experiential marketing to deliver. Which is why it is not surprising to learn that WPP has ponied up $10 million for a share of SFX Entertainment, media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman’s recently revived company (he sold the company to Clear Channel for $4.4 billion in 2000).
In January, SFX Entertainment purchased the North American division of Holland-based ID&T Entertainment, the world’s largest dance music concert promoter.
Here is footage from 2012′s Tommorowland event in Belgium:
SFX also owns nightclubs and music download store, Beatport.
WPP “recognizes the power of dance music to coalesce and address an increasingly difficult-to-reach audience,” Mr. Sillerman said.
Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, compared the move to WPP’s investments in Vice, the Weinstein Company and others.
“Sillerman’s been extremely successful in consolidating fragmented industries which have untapped growth potential that generally have excellent marketing opportunities attached to them,” said Mike Principe, a former SFX attorney who is now CEO of The Legacy Agency. “He goes in, acquires en masse, and enjoys a leading position.”
The post Can Brands Dance? Sir Martin Says Yes appeared first on AdPulp.
I tend to view the advertising industry through an American lens. But over at The Guardian’s Advertising hub blog, Shuan Varga, Chairman and Creative Director of Ingenuity, talks about some problems the UK ad industry is facing in light of budget cutbacks. His arguments sound awfully familiar, except he calls the dismissal of experienced ad execs a “de-skilling”:
From the agency point of view, this experience deficit makes the entire industry vulnerable. Agencies used to claim routinely to be “custodians of the Brand”. I wonder how many of them can plausibly say that any more. Nowadays, while you might still find an agency that’s worked on a brand for a decade or more, if the most senior person on the account team graduated six years ago and has worked on the account for two, that doesn’t sound much like genuine custodianship to me.
Like many folks on this side of the pond, Varga points to cost-cutting and industry consolidation as the major culprits in the “de-skilling.” Downward pricing pressure has affected all businesses, worldwide. Clients force the ad industry to cut costs. And when the ad industry has to cut costs, we apply that to our vendors (Photographers, printers, freelance creatives). And so on it goes. Is anyone (or anything) going to finally make this come to a halt?
The post The “De-Skilling” Of The Ad Industry Isn’t Just Happening In America appeared first on AdPulp.
According to Adweek, Omnicom–the world’s largest advertising holding company, with BBDO, DDB, TBWA, OMD and PHD, among others on the roster–is making good money.
Omnicom’s fourth-quarter net income rose more than 13 percent to $314 million on a 12.7 percent increase in revenue to $3.62 billion, compared to the same period a year ago.
CEO John Wren during a conference call with analysts said clients were “a little bit nervous about the economy” but noted that no “major or serious cutbacks in spending” have been made thus far.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
