Dailey, Suissa Embrace Culture Clash of Merger

For the 50 employees of the former Suissa Miller who gathered last Monday in a Dailey & Associates conference room to hear from their new boss, the message wasn’t to try to fit in.

“I didn’t want them to lose their own individuality,” Dailey CEO Cliff Einstein said he told the morning assembly in his agency’s West Hollywood, Calif., office over bagels and coffee.

That would seem an unlikely directive for the newly merged Interpublic Group shops (they officially combined operations last Monday), whose cultures are admittedly quite different.

Bringing disparate cultures together has historically made agency mergers wrenching affairs—the combination of Needham Harper Steers and Doyle Dane Bernbach a case in point.