After announcing a new creative review in March, insurance giant MetLife has chosen San Francisco Project Worldwide shop Argonaut as its new creative agency of record.
CP+B beat VB&P, Y&R and Havas to win the business in late 2010 but declined to participate in this review.
According to the release, Argonaut will work to ensure that the client “presents a single, unified brand” in all relevant markets. The agency will produce both a new brand campaign and a series of “executions that are specific to MetLife’s businesses.”
Client CMO Esther Lee (who joined the company three months before the review, surprise surprise) has very good things to say about Argonaut, calling it “a big ideas agency that understands how to get underneath the complexity of large companies, find the soul of the Brand and express it in a meaningful and un-ignorable way.” Prior to joining MetLife, Lee was the CEO of Havas’ Euro RSCG. She also founded her own agency, DiNoto Lee LLC.
Agency CCO Rick Condos says that his newest client is “constantly innovating to help improve people’s lives,” adding, “We can’t wait to help them tell this story around the world.”
MetLife spent $90 million in the U.S. last year according to Kantar Media. The review did not affect media agency MEC.
Argonaut, launched in 2013 by GS&P ECDs Condos and Hunter Hindman, group strategist Max Heilbron, Eleven founder Jordan Warren and creative technologist Robbie Whiting, recently joined the Hershey’s roster and made some new ads for tech startup Fitbit. The shop may be best known for its 2014 Volkswagen Super Bowl campaign.
CP+B had been working on the account in multiple offices before the review. Last December, the agency hired creative director Robert Lund, formerly with The Barbarian Group, to work on the business (along with Infiniti and others) in its totally non-existent New York office. No word on how the account change will affect the Crispin team at MDC Partners headquarters in Manhattan.