Today in blind items, two agencies struggle with clients’ marketing teams, one struggles with an ethical conflict and one struggles to survive.
- First, we hear that a big-name client is behaving like a typical enfant terrible. This company’s agency has an entire office dedicated to serving its business–which recently came into a great deal of money–and sources say that the client’s top internal marketer has an outsized influence. Not only does he “dictate” creative direction, but he recently informed the creative team that his director friend would helm forthcoming spots before the department even got briefed on the project. Good times!
- A second, far smaller client scored a media coup with a campaign based on a simple but contradictory take on a major retail event. Yet, as the media piled on, the client had some requests: they demanded that every story concerning this work remove all credits for their advertising, marketing and PR agencies. Why? Because this client wanted everyone to know that it was THEIR team that came up with the red-hot idea–not any of the agencies they hired to promote it via creative and media outreach.
- One agency won a lot of praise for a campaign created to fight a certain prevalent health condition. Some of our readers, however, take issue with this coverage because one of the same agency’s clients happens to make a product that has long been proven to cause that very condition. We don’t find this to be particularly controversial as it has happened many times throughout the brief history of advertising. But it is, at the very least, ethically dubious to be celebrated for work fighting a problem while also creating work that directly contributes to the same problem.
- Finally, a mid-size western indie shop went through a big creative upheaval, and there may be a good bit more to it than that. We hear that its ECD dismissed a majority of the shop’s creative department before being fired himself thanks to both a failure to win new business and his difficulty working with colleagues who happen to be something other than straight, white and male. We also hear that the head of this agency told employees that it would not seek to hire a replacement and that some recently retired members of the same department have been asked to assist in the now-former leader’s absence.
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