Advertising Industry Archive

Leo Burnett CEO Tom Bernardin submitted to an interview with Ad Age, but the chat featured a glaring ommission. Can you guess what it was? That’s right. There was no mention of the agency settling its billings fraud case with the US Army for $15.5 million (back story here and here), which occured a couple of weeks earlier. UPDATE: Age reporter Jeremy Mullman notes that Bernardin was asked...

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Lee Garfinkel, DDB’s chief creative officer, has inspired a comments thread on Adweek.com that has reached 253 items, a majority of them dedicated to celebrating his apparently imminent departure from the agency. (DDB is in talks with BBDO’s Eric Silver to take over the job.) While Garfinkel has his defenders, dozens of his underlings seem desperate to see him leave. Even his...

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Since the recession began, 24,100 ad agency jobs have been lost. In all ad-related jobs, including media, losses have topped 65,100, according to Ad Age. The numbers are not unexpected, but they do indicate that agencies are severely under-reporting the number of people they let go. BNET’s Ad Agency Layoff Counter topped 7,000 jobs lost last week. That counter measures publicly reported...

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WPP buys interactive shop in Italy – WPP wholly owned global media investment management arm, GroupM is acquiring a 90-per cent stake in H-art Srl, a full service interactive agency in Italy. [Source: Domain-B] WPP buys stake in Vietnam’s Smart Media — Vietnam’s Smart Media Joint Stock Co. will sell a 20% stake to WPP PLC (WPPGY) in a deal to be signed Wednesday, Smart...

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Valassis employees get a free lunch on their employer once a month, but hard times in the ad biz mean VP Mike Wood may be cooking those meals himself, according to KWCH, a Wichita news station. It has a cafeteria, exercise room, stock options, and flexible schedules for it’s employees.  Once a month, there’s usually a lunch - on the company - to show appreciation for it’s...

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UPDATE: BuzzNewsRoom claims all Phelps links on the Subway web site have been removed in preparation for Subway’s firing of Phelps from its business. See here. Following a tabloid photograph of Olympic champion Michael Phelps smoking pot through a bong, Kellogg has dropped the star from its advertising and endorsement contract. Phelps had appeared on Cornflakes boxes which, as the LA...

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BBDO’s Silver set to replace DDB’s Garfinkel — BBDO New York executive creative director Eric Silver has resigned and is in advanced negotiations to take the top creative post at DDB in New York, sources said. Lee Garfinkel, the office’s chairman and chief creative officer since 2003, could not be reached. [Source: Adweek] DraftFCB shuffles management — Interpublic...

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This is the year that Cliff Freeman & Partners has to pull it out of the fire. When the agency announced a few days ago that it had won the Saudi Arabian Airlines account, the only reasonable reaction was: How has this venerable shop sunk so low? As Adweek reported, Saudi Air spent less than  $1 million in both 2007 and ‘08. That will not pay the bills. Perhaps the most crucial fact...

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UPDATE: Crispin Porter & Bogusky has laid off 60 of its 900 employees. In an email statement the company said: “In response to the current economic climate, advertising budgets are being reduced in virtually every industry. On a comparative basis, CP+B¹s business is doing well but we are not immune to the constriction of the economy. Our two main responsibilities are to our...

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UPDATE: The TweetMoney blog just announced the results of its “Design a  Revenue Model for Twitter” contest, and it was won by Publicis agency Denuo. See here. Facebook and Twitter – both hailed by marketers as the future of reaching consumers — seem to be determined to doom their financial futures by refusing to link their massive traffic flows to advertising and...

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