Hasta La Creative!

As you know, today Ogilvy eliminated 10% of its is staff across the U.S. We’ve gotten reports that:
“Ogilvy Chicago let 20 people go today. That place is in absolute shambles.”
“Ogilvy L.A. was 10% which is 13 people.”

And then, there’s the reports that staffers in New York were not allowed to pack up their desks. Instead, some anonymous hands will be packing up their personal belonging for them. Fired staffers will receive these items through the mail. Come on. Really? We contacted Ogilvy representatives, but received no response to our queries.

Layoffs happen. Since the bottom fell out on the economy, it seems like an almost weekly occurrence. As the sweep of Ogilvy took place today, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of mother ship WPP, was in Athens with a select group of 250 staffers and other “smart people” to brainstorm about the future of the business.

Well, what are these high level thinkers doing? According to Business Week, there are jugglers to get people’s creative juices flowing. There games of Nintendo Wii manned by ad execs and others are listening to an executive from Britain’s Guardian newspaper give a presentation entitled “Oh My God, the Internet Ate My Business!”

Your mouth went try at the mention of jugglers and by now, you are probably gagging a little bit. Anyone in the trenches of the ad industry should be appalled and dismayed right now. Can you believe that the guys in charge are just now getting a lesson about the internet? CEOs of digital agencies? Don’t feel bad about that shit eating grin you’re sporting. That’s right. You’re going to be golden for a very long time. Clearly, the death star agencies are farther behind the curve then we all thought.

What’s Sorrell’s plan? ” Sorrell is now pushing for every one of his 133,000 employees—along with the 15 heavyweight members of his board—to embrace digital technology like there’s no tomorrow.”

Fucking christ. You fucking joker. As you spend, what a hundred thousand dollars taking some crap thinkers to Greece and god knows how much encouraging your staffers to embrace digital, the laid of employees of today are getting drunk at the local pub, cursing your name. Embrace digital! You should be ashamed! Come on. For how long has there been internal pressure at WPP do just that? How many staffers have left to join digital shops or head into the tech sector because you guys have been asleep at the wheel? Buying up digital agencies isn’t going to save you.

“WPP has set up digital training courses for 3,000 managers to find ways to engage customers with tools like Twitter and Facebook, among other new channels.”

You’re already too late on this on, papi. If you get myopic and just focus on digital, mobile and gaming are going to leave your ass in the lurch in just a few short years. Lets not even talk about real world issues like identity, expression, feminism and race in the US that are going to catch you out in the cold in the same amount of time. Lets not talk about the ever present need to do good that continues to face down your clients. Are you ready to confront all these issues as well?

In the article, the writer goes on to discuss how Marty wants more cooperation between his firms. Blah, blah, blah. Sorrell is basically admitting that WPP has become irrelevant. That they’ve done it to themselves and the solution? From what this article says, it’s no so solution at all.

“We don’t take anything for granted,” he says. “Fear of failure drives us quite heavily.”

Yeah, but not in the right direction, apparently. Instead of asking your staffers, who know the day to day problems, you get a juggler. Instead of looking forward, you’re playing serious catch up. Goddamn. This is so sad. So very sad.

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