This weekend, while you were nursing your hangover and preparing for the Oscars, a debate occurred on Facebook between ad industry veterans.
It would seem that Droga5 CCO Ted Royer — or at least his official online biography — took what felt to some like an excessive degree of credit for ESPN’s acclaimed series of SportsCenter campaigns, launched by Wieden+Kennedy in the 90s.
Here’s the line from Royer’s bio that started the debate:
Others — chief among them former ESPN marketing director and ad industry veteran Allan Broce — took issue with the language above.
The resulting Facebook post and comment thread are no longer online, but we can recreate the exchange for you via the magic of screenshots:
Broce and several fellow ad industry players followed by debating the size of said balls. Here’s Scot French, who was an account executive at Wieden+Kennedy when the campaign first launched:
W+K veteran Matt Stiker, who also worked on the ESPN account during that period, responded with a letter:
Stiker did receive that prompt reply:
The updated bio page reads exactly as the note promised it would:
Broce followed by bringing the debate to an end and noting that Royer had probably not written his own bio in a conscious attempt to take greater credit for the campaign at large:
The contested line still contains a moderate dose of snark, but all’s well that ends well in ad land.