Blind Items: The Roaring 20-Year-Olds, or Two Girls for Every Thought Leader

By Patrick Coffee 

young women

  • Being an executive at a global digital agency is a demanding job that requires a lot of travel…and one such top marketer chooses to manage his work/life balance by spending time in the company of his favorite young female employees. Seems that every time this thought leader and newsletter writer has a business trip coming up, he asks his assistant to arrange for one of the agency’s early-20s lady staffers to accompany him to whatever hotel his expense account can afford. We hear that this executive doesn’t just like his female companions young–he also believes that variety is the spice of life, and he tries to take a different lucky lady on each trip. It’s OK, though, guys…as far as we can tell, he’s not married!
  • Last year, this agency lost one of its biggest accounts and moved its headquarters from the home of that now-former client to a certain metropolis. The shop looked to relaunch as a leaner version of its former self, but we hear version 2.0 isn’t going so well due to a lack of new business. Employees haven’t been paid in at least a month, the agency has yet to fund its payroll for 2016, and staffers are threatening to quit en masse unless their employer finds a way to give them the money they’ve earned.
  • Another agency which prides itself on NOT being an “agency” recently decided to pivot from ad-maker to sponsored content publisher. Unfortunately, those “traditional” accounts kept the company in the black. Over the past six months, most of those hired to run the publishing arm left along with several other leaders including an ECD, two CDs, two top strategists, an account leader, a recruiter and the heads of tech and production.
  • We hear that an account manager working on a big tech client at a very well-known PR firm embezzled almost a quarter of a million dollars by filing fake expense reports over a period of several months. The firm successfully swept this scandal under the rug in order to keep the client in the dark by firing the employee, but the perpetrator landed on his/her feet…in an account management role at one of the same city’s most storied ad agencies.

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