After eight years in their landmark Austin headquarters, known as Idea City, Omnicom's GSD&M decided it was time for a house cleaning.

The purge of accumulated junk last month came on the heels of a disappointing bid for Kia's $270 million ad account in December and an apparently thwarted win on Subaru's $165 million account a month earlier.  That gave the house cleaning a symbolic meaning to go with the literal. "You can’t go into tomorrow carrying yesterday’s garbage,” agency co-founder Roy Spence told his troops in announcing the clean-up and barbecue.

By the time the project was over, the shop’s employees had filled a 30-yard construction dumpster with more than 10,000 pounds of discarded items.  And that didn’t include donated what-nots such as toys, pens, notebooks, beach balls, crutches, hats and a variety of canned food.

“Some weird things showed up,” observed spokesman Eric Webber. “There was a deck of playing cards with naked men,” he said.  “But some of the cards were taken, so there were only 42 in the deck.  Fortunately, we pulled that out of the charity contribution pile before it was sent out.”

—Posted by Richard Williamson