Hasta La Creative!

Here’s a massive Friday News Dump from IPG: the offices of Mullen and Lowe and Partners around the world will merge to form Mullen Lowe Group.

That means no more Lowe Campbell Ewald and no more Mullen…as we knew them, at least.

The release, which describes the resulting Group as “a creatively-driven global agency network with a strong, shared entrepreneurial heritage and challenger mentality,” also tells us that Mullen CEO Alex Leikikh will be the new entity’s chief executive. Michael Wall, CEO of Lowe and Partners up to this point, helped “create the roadmap” for the move but will have no role in MLG because…?

IPG CEO Michael Roth, citing the groups’ “complimentary cultures,” says the goal of this play is to continue Lowe’s “global growth” in part by giving Leikikh “a global stage” and empowering him to lead “one of the industry’s outstanding creative networks.”

Leikikh himself says:

“We are only as good as the talent we can attract and we owe it to our clients to put the world’s best minds to bear on their brands.”

Of course, there’s also talk of MORE DIGITAL from Wall, who says “The US is the key piece to accelerating this performance.”

On the organizational front, this means:

• The new Mullen Lowe Group will oversee Mullen’s offices in Boston, LA, and North Carolina; they will now be Mullen Lowe
• New York’s Lowe Profero will “report into” MLG, which will open its own separate office in Manhattan
• Campbell Ewald will “continue to access the international network as required” and will “operate independently” within the MLG network
• MLG will also oversee all Lowe offices in the UK

The release contains no information on the most important aspect of the move: who will get hired and who will get fired. We also have no idea how the new entity’s logo will look, presumably because IPG was in such a rush to get the news out.

We would say updates to come, but we assume that this change will not affect Mullen’s inexplicable refusal to respond to our queries on anything.

Microsoft’s nearly four-month long agency review process is over.

Today brings news that the company chose IPG for ads and Dentsu Aegis for media. The release reads:

“At Interpublic Group, creative, localization and deployment will be handled by various agency teams throughout IPG’s global network.”

…which means a lot of work for a lot of people since Microsoft’s annual media spend totals more than $1 billion.

Last month the company’s RFP told the agencies involved in the review that they should be “open to change”, and VP/CMO Chris Capossela writes that both new parties fit that bill:

“We believe both groups will help us communicate more strategically and efficiently in a rapidly evolving marketplace.”

The company reportedly stuck with former Bill Clinton flack Mark Penn to handle the big decision. We can only hope its “Scroogled” campaign doesn’t have quite as many lives.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.