RELATIONSHIP ADVERTISING

For further proof of the symbiosis between agencies and their clients, we turn to The Sawtooth Group, which has taken up using a familiar product to communicate more efficiently.

For a Coldwell Banker commercial shoot in Paris that ended earlier this month, the shop’s entire creative department was equipped with BellSouth’s MyBiz Interactive pagers to link staffers in the U.S. and Europe. Not coincidentally, the Woodbridge, N.J., agency does work for BellSouth Wireless Data and touts the pagers in its ads.

“It was just a lot of time zone hell,” explained Sawtooth president Tom Magnus of the reason to use the high-tech devices, which allow people to send e-mail from pager to pager quickly and silently.

As constant communication was necessary between the continents, the agency helpfully bought the pagers for staffers.

Hmm … could Sawtooth’s own advertising for BellSouth have worked on the agency?

Said Magnus, “We literally are the consuming public.”