End of JWT Chicago Raises Questions About City's Role in the Ad World

The closing of JWT’s once-massive Chicago office has triggered an existential crisis among ad folk in the Windy City. You can see that in the comments section underneath Ad Age’s coverage of the story. There were 33 posts at the time of writing, and we haven’t even reached lunchtime on Monday.

The shuttering also points up the difference between the way Chicago sees itself in the ad business, and the way everyone else sees it:

Ad Age gave the closing a huge story; Adweek gave it little more than a brief and a piece of stock art. Ad Age is part of Crain Communications, which has a huge Chicago office; Adweek is part of Nielsen in New York and the mag doesn’t have anyone based in Chicago (it used to have a staff of three). Adweek covered the closing by using a reporter based in New York.

So there it is: The end of JWT is a siesmic event, rocking the ad world (if you’re based in Chicago); or it’s just another small shop that only had 50 employees and a tiny tourism account that failed to withstand the recession (if you’re based in New York).

As commenter jude says:

This is disturbing for Chicago as an ad community.

It should be. The ex-JWTers debating the end of the office have engaged in the usual anti-management backbiting (and there’s an interesting theory to be woven about whether JWT New York was jealous of JWT Chicago’s success during its glory years).

But there’s one inescapable conclusion: If clients had wanted a powerhouse JWT in Chicago, they would have asked for one. In the 21st Century, it appears that clients want their agencies to be located near to capital markets (i.e. New York) or the media (i.e. New York and Los Angeles).

Yes, Kraft kept most of its accounts at other Chicago agencies after it fatally yanked its business from JWT. But the lesson seems to be that aggregate demand for large agency functionality in Chicago is declining, not increasing.