Hasta La Creative!

Earlier this week we posted on an ongoing wave of executive departures at Cheil Worldwide’s The Barbarian Group in New York.

Today, as promised, we have more information on that development. The agency’s current CEO Peter Kim confirmed in an official statement that a restructuring has occurred.

“The evolution of the tech industry and its impact on consumer communications has transformed the agency landscape. In response, The Barbarian Group reorganized and refined its focus this week in support of client needs. We are confident that this strategic shift in business direction will make us a stronger company in the long run.”

Throughout the week, our sources gave us a bit more detail on this strategic shift. Many of Barbarian’s top executives and department leaders have left or will be leaving after they finish negotiating the details of their departures.

According to tipsters, these names include:

• Owner/CXO Keith Butters
• Chief creative officer Edu Pou
• Head of talent/HR Michelle Prota
• Head of account management Sherri Chambers

We also hear–again from multiple sources–that the restructuring included at least one round of layoffs beyond the names mentioned above, all of whom will officially be resigning from their positions.

Kim declined to elaborate on the scale of the layoffs or Cheil’s plans to remake the agency. But we do hear that the total number dismissed beyond the department leaders is in the double digits.

An inside source also tells us that our assumptions regarding an all-but-unrecognizable Barbarian Group that will emerge from this shift are accurate.

[Image via Clive Wilkinson Architects]

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.

It’s all over except for the laughter and the rose liqueur.

A few days ago we spoke to commercial director Daniel Sheppard about his Dannes Lions project, which sprung from a desire to celebrate comedy in advertising rather than, say, the perceived advancement of a given demographic or the fight against online bullying.

This morning, Sheppard announced the winners as promised on his site: 100 campaigns created by various and sundry agencies over the past two years that just happened to make him LOL.

Here is the list, which is searchable (SPOILER: it somehow contains more than one GEICO ad). Sheppard’s site is also “live-streaming” the event straight to your cubicle/phone/toilet from Dannes, France:

Those looking to turn the Dannes into a battle of egos may be disappointed to learn that the winners are not listed in any particular order–their numbers are simply for ID purposes.

Sheppard was more than a little overwhelmed by the response to his project; he tells us he received more than 700 submissions.

His quote:

Scrolling through 100 ads is a bit much, so here are three we picked at random:

Leo Burnett for Sprint, sad face:

Wieden+Kennedy New York for Southern Comfort:

…and GS&P for Sonic:

We’re told that the awards show itself went off without a glitch in Sheppard’s home and/or office; unfortunately, no intimate moments were caught on film.

Now argue amongst yourselves about who won and who SHOULD HAVE won. Unless you have more important things to do.

According to our sources, Mediahub, the media buying wing of newly-formed Mullen Lowe Group, has won the Royal Caribbean review.

Back in February, we discovered that the cruise line–like so many clients undergoing leadership changes–wanted to shake up its agency roster and refresh its brand with a creative review that marked a break with global AOR JWT.

Over the next three months, we learned that Mullen would compete against Deutsch NY, Droga5 and 22squared for the business. 22 and Mullen were the final contestants, and the latter won the account only a week after its merger with Lowe.

The media review followed, beginning approximately one month ago. Sources told Adweek that the three competitors would be incumbent Mindshare (WPP), Media Storm and IPG’s Mediahub. They estimated that the decision would come down in early June.

The act of assigning both its media and creative accounts to Mullen Lowe Group makes perfect sense for Royal Caribbean, which follows other large clients in simplifying its marketing operations by “bundling” agency relationships under one (rhetorical) roof.

The client has not yet responded to multiple queries regarding its media business; spokespeople also declined to comment on the initial review until our story went live.

Royal Caribbean spends approximately $80 million on media each year.

Sources tell us today that Goodby, Silverstein & Partners will soon be closing its New York City office.

GS&P has so far declined to give us an official statement after multiple requests this week, but more than one party close to the matter tells us that the change is already official within the agency.

The most recent news regarding Goodby’s Manhattan location concerned The New York Post: the agency won the classic Murdoch tabloid back in October of 2014, and its copy-heavy OOH ads adorned the subways for several months through late 2014/early 2015. They were really quite good, and the “If you don’t want it on Page Six, don’t do it” line was particularly fitting given certain stories that appeared in that very publication several months later.

The office made some staffing changes last year as well. Last May, GS&P NY hired Paul Caiozzo, a freelancer and creative director who’d been with Twofifteenmccann, CP+B and others to run the New York team; when the agency promoted Eric Kallman to ECD earlier this year amidst a larger shift in responsibilities, they indicated that he would stay in that role. Caiozzo replaced ECD Christian Haas, who left the shop last May and currently sits on the IAB advisory board while freelancing for various parties in the New York area.

On the cause of the closing, Caiozzo was hired in part to lead the Comcast/XFINITY account, and Jeff Goodby’s internal memo announcing layoffs in the San Francisco office last month specifically named the failed Comcast/Time Warner merger as the reason that the New York office “will now be smaller.”

When GS&P first announced its New York expansion in January 2013, Stuart Elliott gave it a full New York Times writeup. At the time, Goodby said, “I don’t think Rich and I felt we needed a New York office. In fact, it was more unique to not have one.”

Goodby would follow Leo Burnett, another well-established agency whose New York office never quite took off and officially closed in February.

Last week a source claimed that an untold number of employees who served as members of the New York-based VML/Y&R technology team had been laid off and that the agency’s tech operations would be subsequently relocated to another office in an effort to streamline the department.

A VML spokesperson refrained from commenting on any staffing changes today, citing an agency-wide policy against commenting on the status of individual employees.

The agency didn’t offer any specifics, but they did seem to refute the latter claim, stating that they will continue to run tech operations out of New York as before. So while the tech team may have experienced some downsizing (a claim which we cannot confirm at the moment), an untold number of the team’s members will continue to work in its New York office moving forward according to VML/Y&R.

This week we hear that Publicis Kaplan Thaler, born when Kaplan Thaler and Publicis New York merged in 2012, has nearly completed its rebranding and will soon go by either Publicis North America or its original name.

We don’t have much in the way of details because Publicis has not responded to our queries. The rumor has been floating around for some time, though. In late 2014, we received a series of tips claiming that the agency’s three offices would consolidate into the location at 1675 Broadway, that an official name change would follow, and that staffing shakeups were in the works.

The last part turned out to be accurate: three weeks after that post ran, President and CCO Rob Feakins stepped down. He has not yet been replaced, and Publicis never directly responded to questions about the rest of the story.

The best evidence we have to indicate that the renaming rumor is true: on PKT’s official Publicis homepage, the “click to learn more” link (as well as the original pkt.com URL) now leads right back to Publicis NA. The official Publicis North America Twitter account has also begun using the #PublicisNewYork tag again for the first time since late 2012, right after the initial merger.

All signs indicate that the office–whatever its official name–will continue to be “the U.S. flagship agency for the Publicis worldwide network,” which recently won Cadillac.

Team Detroit, Team Mazda, MAL, Commonwealth//McCann and Huge’s Elephant were each created to serve–or primarily serve–a single client.

We hear, though we cannot confirm at this time, that Havas recently joined that group by creating a unit dedicated to (or at least funded by) one account: RJ Reynolds, maker of Camel cigarettes and one of the largest tobacco companies in the world.

One thing is definitely true: Havas Chicago won the business in late 2014 but chose not to confirm that fact for obvious reasons. Before we ran a story about former AOR BFG Communications losing the account eight months ago, Havas said they’d get back to us on the RJR news. They did not.

But the rumors had been floating around for a while. Last July, Lewis Lazare of Chicago Business Journal asked Paul Marobella (who was then the president of Havas Chicago) for more info on the pitch and he simply said that “he expected to hear about the possible cigarette business by Aug. 1.”

In February, Marobella was promoted to CEO of the Havas Chicago Group, and he lists RJR as one of the agency’s top clients on his own LinkedIn page:

Another fact: last summer Havas Chicago launched a new initiative/unit/entity called Havas Annex. A quick Instagram search tells us that Annex has its own office space, which first appeared as a location in late August of 2014.

So while we don’t know whether the Annex is all about promoting Camel cigarettes, it did come into existence at the very same time Havas Chicago won the business.

Here’s Marobella’s description of what Annex does:

That’s very vague. But compare it to this passage from a study describing the work BFG and other agencies did for Camel:

“…RJR hired additional marketing firms brokering hipster aesthetics to young mainstream (hipster imitating) populations to smoke Camels, including BrainReserve (from 1996 to at least 2000), Gyro Worldwide, BFG Marketing and Kaart Marketing. Coordinating with these firms, RJR focused Camel’s image so its brand penetrated the hipster underground scene.”

In the early 2000s Camel was aligned with hipsters via several integrated efforts. Infiltrating hipster venues, creating an atmosphere of exclusivity and indulgence for hipsters and blanketing free alternative news publications with imagery invocative of hipster aesthetics all helped repackage Camel as an organic component of hipster culture.”

For the record, again, Havas tells us that they “don’t discuss clients,” which is not quite true. Coincidentally, they also can’t discuss Annex at this time.