Hasta La Creative!

The government plans to strengthen relationships with agencies and rigorously evaluate campaign spending under the new centralised Government Communications Service launched today.

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ConAgra is consolidating ad creative for all of its major brands with Omnicom Group’s DDB, according to industry executives.

The move means that independent Venables Bell & Partners in San Francisco will lose duties for several brands, including: Orville Redenbacher, Slim Jim and Healthy Choice. Venables Bell worked on Orville Redenbacher for six years; in 2007 the business was shifted over from MDC Partners’ CP&B, which infamously reanimated the late popcorn brand founder Orville Redenbacher, earning the campaign the name “Deadenbacher.”

In addition, P.F. Chang’s restaurants and Hebrew National, also owned by ConAgra, were technically on Venables Bell’s roster, though ad spending and development of new work has been pretty stagnant. Those accounts will also move to DDB. The consolidated business will be handled out of the network’s operation in San Francisco, which is known as DDB California. The office has been on ConAgra’s roster, working on other brands such as Marie Callender’s, Pam cooking spray and Rotel.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Media executives are grasping for clues as technological upheaval gathers pace.

Erwin Ephron, one of the most influential consultants in media planning, died Sunday at age 79 after a long illness. He leaves behind a legacy that included developing the concept of “recency” still widely in use today.

After a long media career that included work at BBDO and his own agency Ephron, Raboy & Tsao, Mr. Ephron formed the consulting firm Ephron Papazian & Ephron in the early 1990s. He was honored by American Demographics Magazine in 2003 as one of the five most- influential media people of the past 25 years.

Reach (or how many people ads reach) and frequency (how often they’re reached) had long been the cornerstones of media planning when Mr. Ephron in 1995 put forward the idea of “recency,” which held that ad impressions closest to the time of purchase are the most powerful. It followed that reaching consumers at the right time — when they’re in the market to buy — was key, as opposed to simply reaching them often.

Continue reading at AdAge.com