We Hear: Woods Witt Dealy & Sons Closing

By Patrick Coffee 

While we can’t offer a formal statement or official status update at the moment, multiple sources tell us that New York’s Woods Witt Dealy & Sons will soon be closing its doors.

The shop, founded in 2005 by Harry Woods (formerly of BBDO and TBWA), Gill Witt (BBDO, TBWA, Ogilvy) and Phyllis Dealy (Leo Burnett and more), has created work for major clients including a 2012 campaign that compared Duracell to Jay-Z, but our predecessors at this blog can’t recall fielding any campaign pitches.

WWD&S has been best known for throwing the annual “Wrath of Cannes” party, which we covered many times over the years. These events went down before our time, but we’re told that there was much rejoicing; in 2013 the agency even created its own beer for the occasion.

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Over the past few months, several employees have left the agency: longtime Art Director/ACD Steve McCarron, for example, is now VP/creative director at Publicis and fellow AD/ACD Alexis Champa is with Weber Shandwick.

We began receiving tips regarding the agency last week; yesterday, after multiple attempts to contact WWD&S, we reached someone at its number in Manhattan who told us that the most relevant press contact was out of the office. After repeated attempts to speak with a proper party over the past 48 hours, we’ve been unable to reach either said contact or any of the agency’s principals (to whom we reached out directly). The given phone number for WWD&S currently leads to a recording telling us that the office is closed and listing standard business hours as 9 to 5.

While the WWD&S homepage remains live, its tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts have been deleted.

One of our sources claims that one or more of the agency’s founding partners plan(s) to launch a new agency at some point in the near future.

Updates if we get them.

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