Advertising Industry Archive

Cliff Freeman & Partners is to close down, reports Noreen O’Leary at Adweek. The move is not unexpected. BNET noted in February that the venerable agency’s new accounts did not seem large enough to replace the ones it had lost. Those losses included Quiznos, Shoney’s, Bonefish Grill and Snapple. But it wasn’t just the losses. It was the increasingly weird chain of events...

More...

WPP (WPPGY) chief Martin Sorrell seems to have a strange obsession with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and “Armageddon and Apocalypse.” He’s linked them in three of WPP’s recent quarterly statements: Q1, Q2 and now Q3. WPP reported revenues up 16.7% to £2.007 billion, but down excluding acquisitions. Due to Europe’s non-transparent financial disclosure laws,...

More...

Publicis boss Maurice Levy has again lashed out at WPP chief Martin Sorrell. The pair — who control advertising’s biggest agency rivals, such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Ogilvy & Mather, respectively — have a famously public hatred of each other. To recap, in recent months Sorrell has called Levy an “amateur,” “callous,” and “hysterically...

More...

Lamar Advertising, the giant billboard provider, promised more than a year ago to convert to “100-percent recyclable materials for outdoor advertising,” a laudable goal. The effort was intended to “further enhance environmental sustainability.” But does this square with Lamar’s recent push into digital billboards? All over the country, Lamar is trying to convert...

More...

Coca-Cola is looking for help advertising its corporate social responsibility efforts in the U.K. and Europe. The soda company is considering pitches from WCRS, Publicis and Coke U.K. roster agency VCCP. Coke is highly sensitive on issues such as obesity, environment, child labor and poverty. One reason is if you Google “Coca-Cola corporate responsibility” the second item that pops...

More...

Randy Cohen, who writes “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times, is to East Coast liberals what Judge Judy is to the rest of America: You ask him to solve an argument, and he solves it. Now he’s come out against Ralph Lauren and its bobble-head doll ads, and in favor of the French/U.K. Liberal Democratic Party idea of enforcing warning labels on fashion ads that have been...

More...

Omnicom chief John Wren appeared to be using his Q3 2009 conference call to pitch rival auto accounts to Chrysler, or at least to alert clients that his agencies — which include BBDO – may be available for work soon. Wren told investors Chrysler was “at risk” and that Omnicom’s agencies were “engaged in a number of other pitches for other auto makers.”...

More...

Havas can breathe a sigh of relief: After pitching — and reportedly losing to WPP – the £25 million U.K. portion of Danone Groupe’s $500 million global media account, it has retained the $100 million North American business which WPP wanted. The news will be a welcome distraction from Havas’ Q3 2009 results, which show revenue down 9.3 percent to €326 million....

More...

Every time I hear ad agency chiefs talking about their optimistic views for economic recovery, I cross my fingers and pray that this will be the month that I can retire the BNET Ad Agency Layoff Counter. And then reality hits. Recent job cuts include: 40 to be axed in the Deutsch-Lowe merger. 40 cut from McCann Erickson in San Francisco. 64 jobs gone at Comcast’s ad sales unit. If...

More...

WPP’s Visible Technologies unit has taken investment funding from In-Q-Tel, the investment fund of the CIA. Visible Technologies is developing tools that can scan social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and scour meaningful data from them. According to Wired: It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” —...

More...