The Diary of Putney Swope.

Omnicom Bitch Slaps Ogilvy with Motorola Razor

Adweek just reported that Motorola awarded the holding company Omnicom lead creative duties for it's $100 Million ad account taking the account from Ogilvy.  O&M's ceo Shelly Lazarus did not comment, but then again, we didn't even try.  To be honest, we don't have the balls to confront her on this one.  If she did comment we're sure she would say something classy like "We are very proud of the great work we collaborated on over the past many years and we wish Motorola all the best in the future."  Then she'd blast off an eMail to the world wide O&M staff telling them to throw every piece of shit Motorola phone in the garbage right before she went into the exec bathrooms, ripped the sink out of the floor and threw it through the window.

Read the Adweek article here.

TOP 10 Reasons Why Your Agency Isn't Winning Enough New Business.

From the home office in Cheyenne, Wyoming....Top 10 reasons why your agency isn't winning enough new business.  Number....

10.  Your head of new business is the building's janitor.

9.  You keep responding to rfps even when you know your agency is completely wrong for the work.

8.  Your creative team keeps using Michael Jackson as the prototypical target consumer.

7.  You spend less money marketing your agency than you do on staples and you spend less time marketing your agency than you do on picking out the color of the title page on your power point presentation.

6.  Your exec team thinks your agency is in the idea business and not the "selling your clients shit" business.

5.  Your agency prides itself on saying "Everyone is responsible for new business" which means no one is responsible for new business.

4.  You delude yourself into thinking that new clients will come to you because of the great creative work your agency has done in the past like the average advertiser has any idea who created that print ad or tv commercial.

3.  Rufus, the guy that does all of your pitches starts each presentation asking the client "Does this dress make my ass look big?"

2.  When asked by a potential client if you can provide any recommendations from satisfied clients you respond, "Your Mama."

1.  Your agency stinks....

Ba da boom.

Is it me or is IPG looking more and more like a Soprano's episode?

Ok, Michael Roth (aka Tony Soprano) tells everyone to stay calm or else.  David Bell (aka Junior Soprano) takes a leave and will be a "consultant" (read contract hitman).  Omnicom (aka "The NY Crew), led by none other than John Wren (aka Johny Sack) seems to be taking down all esplanade scratch (read "new business").  Nicky "Boy Genius" Cyprus (aka Tony Blundetto) was brought in to "clean up the books" but he gets whacked before he even gets to unpack his boxes.

On the positive side, it looks like McCann E (read Vito's crew) is starting to bring in a couple of solid scores (HP) and it's assumed that Tony, I mean Michael, will appreciate the "tributes" that McCann kicks up to him.

Don't forget, he's got BNC looking to leave the family (watch out boys, you saw what happened to Brendan when he wanted to "retire") and the Raleigh based crew, HM&P, talking about taking out the boss for losing out on a score.

read today's AdAge piece on the sec filing here.

PR firm BNC to parent, IPG - LET OUR PEOPLE GO...

One of Interpublic's more successful PR firms, Bragman Nyman Cafarelli, is looking to get out from under the Interpublic umbrella.  While two of the three partners are no longer actively driving the firm, one is and he's not pleased answering to his boss in NY.  Maybe he thinks his clients are concerned about the holding company's accounting woes that have been plastered all over the financial pages for the past year.  Yeah, like Jessica Alba and Cameron Diaz read the WSJ.  Face it, they couldn't even spell "WSJ".

Note:  For those ad people out there that aren't too bright either, WSJ is short for the Wall Street Journal.  It's a pretty major daily newspaper that covers business, international and other real news.  There's no Page Six section which explains why you may not have heard of it.

Read the NY Post story here.

P.S., Does anyone here really thing there is synergy between a Hollywood PR firm and ad agencies that work for companies like Goodyear and PG?  We don't.

Is this Googles first direct assault on Ad Agencies?

The NY Post reported today that Google and Nike are working together on a word of mouth campaign for its soccer sports line of crap.  Google is going to handle all of the technical aspects on building and promoting a leading destination for "soccer crazed fans", which Nike can hopefully leverage for its sales and marketing efforts.  What's conspicuously missing is an Ad Agency working with the two.  Ok, everyone knows that if you want to market to teens you do it on the web, video games, ipods, etc.  There's not a lot of need for an advertiser to pay a media planner and/or creative agency 10% of the buy to tell them that.  In addition, the marketing executions on Google, MySpace, FaceBook.com, etc. don't strain the creative muscles all that much.  So, it begs the question.  The last couple of years, when everyone was talking about how TIVO was going to change the face of advertising, were they naive, stupid or just with their heads up their ass?  Will more Advertiser-Media direct relationships be coming down the road?

Read the NYPost article here.

AdAge's Scott Donaton Disses Ad Hall of Fame Honorees

The editor of AdAge, Scott Donaton, thinks the four inductees to the AAF's Hall of Fame are gutless and ball-less for not directly addressing the issues he, in his esteemed wisdom, believes are causing "earth-rattling change in the business in which they were pioneers."  Nice to know that he does give a "free pass" to Henry Luce, Time Inc. founder.  In his Gatsby-like prose Donaton lets Mr. Luce off the hook with his classy "After all, he died the year I was born so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a speech."

He's right though, these guys are ball-less and gutless.  I mean as I group they only founded the first national newspaper, Al Neuharth of USAToday/Gannett, created a multi-billion dollar ethnic-specific entertainment company, Robert L. Johnson of BET, started one of the most successful and important media empires of our day, Henry Luce of Time, Inc. (posthumously) and ran one of the most recognized brands for over 10 years, Donald R. Keough of Coke.  Yeah, a bunch of wimps.  It's not like they ever wrote for a trade journal.  We hear that Scott's piece for next week talks about how Bill Gates was nothing more than a lazy coder who didn't have what it takes to graduate Harvard.

Read Scott D's article here.

Now to be fair.  We've met Scott and he's a decent guy and his stuff tends to be pretty decent.  He's certainly upgraded the quality of writing at AgAge, not that there was anywhere else to take it.

GM's $2.9 Billion in Ad Spend Up For Grabs?

The NYT's media and advertising columnist, Stuart Elliott, thinks it may be (read the NYT article here).  At a time when the average agency/client relationship seems shorter than a Martha Stewart prison term (less than a year as a reminder), GM has been long considered the most loyal of clients.  Some of its relationships exist longer than 50 years, virtually unheard of today with CMO tenure down to under 2 years, disagreements over agency compensation and major shifts in ad channel strategies (fancy way to say: move to Internet ads).  If the doors to GM's advertising coffers open up, Madison avenue is going to look like a river of blood as agencies go to battle to win a share of the second largest ad account in the U.S. (P&G spent $3.5 Billion last year).  And if some of GM's recent moves are any indication (giving some of the Caddy business to small Boston based shop Modernista), the battle grounds will extend beyond Madison avenue.

Here's a look at some of GM's agencies.

Long-term Agency Relationships
Campbell-Ewald  has created spots for Chevy since 1914.
Leo Burnett has been with Pontiac since 1936.
McCann Erickson's been pushing Buicks since 1958.

Newer Agencies on GM
Goodby, Silverstein hawking Saturns.
Publicis Group picked up the company-wide media planning business in 2000.
Lowe Worldwide picked up the GMC creative assignment in 1997.
Deutsch picked up Chevy Sport work last November.

They say that only God has stuck with his ad agency longer.  No, we have no idea what that means either.

Is Pizza Hut Going to Take Their $400 Million Account to a New Agency?

AdAge reported that Pizza Hut's CMO, Tom James, is out and UK marketing director, Bill Ogle, is in.  Mr. Ogle's star has been rising ever since he developed the very successful UK campaign offering a free teeth cleaning with every large two topping order.  Given the Brit's reluctance for dental hygiene, the campaign received lots of attention but very little in terms of actual redemptions, which kept the cost low for the Hut.

The real triple topping question is will a new CMO mean a new agency in the not too distant future?  Might BBDO, the agency of record for over 15 years, be looking for a new pizza client?  If Andrew Robertson, BBDO's ceo, is looking for some words of comfort from the Hut's parent company, Yum Brands, he might think again.  “We had an advertising campaign or execution that was very confusing,” Mr. Novak (Yum Brand's chairman and ceo), said. “You know we didn't really articulate what the view, what the deal was. We clearly can do better. I can tell you the Pizza Hut team definitely feels the pressure to improve their execution. But I'm very confident at the same time that we got the team that can get that done.”  No word on whether he considers BBDO a member of the team or just a hired gun that could be easily reloaded.

P.S., We didn't have a Pizza Hut logo so we used one from Dominos.  When viewing, please close your left eye, squint with your right eye and imagine it reads Pizza Hut across the box.

adage article here

AdAge Reports Endorsement Trouble for Barry Bonds...You Think?

It seems that the crack reporters over at AdAge have uncovered another block buster.  Their deep-throat worthy sources tell them that...[STOP THE PRESSES]...Barry Bonds might have some trouble getting endorsement dollars this year and the MLB might not take full marketing advantage of his historic quest for Hammering Hank's home run record.  We have heard from our significantly more reliable sources that Lee Jeans is interested in him being the national spokesman for their wife beater t-shirt line.

AdAge is also considering breaking the story that OJ Simpson is not, repeat not, going to get the spokesman spot for the Ginsu Knife and Cutlery Company.  Great reporting guys.  Keep taking those journalistic risks.
AdAge Story Here

If You Invested $1,000 in the Ad Holding Cos. 5 Years Ago, You would Now Have?

$941.40     |     6% Decline

Doesn't seem like a lot, but it outperformed a similar sized investment in Enron.  Publicis was the one star of the fleet increasing about 100% (15% CAGR).  Before you jump into a chorus of "Viva La France", keep in mind that Havas appears to have performed the worst.

WARNING:  We spent about 4.5 minutes on analyzing the numbers from Yahoo finance.  Don't take a second mortgage on the house and invest based on our advice.  The $1,000 was prorated based on market cap and resulted in about 5 shares of each holding company.