the advertising ivy league

There is an Ivy League in advertising. That is, there is a small group of shops that if you happen to get a job at one you will be shopping that experience and using it to open doors the rest of your career.

The Ivy League group does change from time to time as shops fade and upstarts blow past the competition, but a shop’s reputation counts for a lot and even if it’s fallen on hard times it still means something to say “I was at Fallon when Pat Fallon was there (or, even better, when Tom McElligott was).”

My number one piece of advice to newbies, be they creative, planning or account, is to get an Ivy League shop on your CV.

Like now.

The advertising Ivy League is a lot like Premier League soccer in that there is relegation – poor performance and you will be replaced – and a lot of people who start to hate you if you’re on top of your game for too long.

The current Ivy League is:

Crispin, Porter + Bogusky:

This agency is so hot, they could take a crap, wrap it in a ’64 Beetle, put a German accent over it and sell it to Volkswagen as advertising. Which they just did.

Goodby, Silversten and Partners:

Adweek’s Agency of the Year has a long history of top drawer work, San Francisco is a great location and when I was last there everyone seemed to drive a Mercedes. So…yeah.

TBWA/Chiat/Day:

Lee Clow, the work for Apple and a bunch of really good looking employees sort of sum up the positives of this Ivy Leaguer.

Wieden + Kennedy:

Best known for their Nike work and for Dan Wieden’s principled refusal to join the 4A’s, they have faced recent encroachment on their key account by CP+B but are still a place with “wow” factor.

Fallon

This may be a contentious one (and they are in danger of falling out of the Ivy League) because of the recent account losses and other upheaval…but Fallon is still a place that opens doors because of its history of greatness.

There are a lot of agencies that are hanging around just on the outside of this select group. Shops like Arnold (which was recently in the Ivy League on the strength of their better-than-Crispin VW work), The Martin Agency and Butler, Shine, Stern need only that iconic campaign to be in with a shout while other, larger places like your DDBs and BBDOs are places where you can collect awards and do great work…they just don’t have the same cachet.

Though, to be fair, a Pencil looks good no matter which shop you won it at.

the campaign was so good that we’re firing you

Arnold has lost Talbots but picked up The Bahamas Tourism account. I can tell you which one I would rather have at my agency.

The incumbent, Fallon, Minneapolis, was not invited to defend yet, as Agency Spy reports, Ministry of Tourism Senior Director of Communications Nalini Bethel said that no one should slam Fallon. “If you looked at Bahamavention as a campaign in and of itself, you have to look at the objectives that we wanted to achieve with that campaign, and when somebody calls it a failure they don’t even know what the objective was.”

So…the campaign was such a raging success at meeting its objectives that the agency responsible was fired and not even invited to defend?

I was never a fan of the Bahamavention campaign, but of course I don’t know what the objectives were:

I do know, however, that if the Ministry of Tourism were happy with the campaign then Fallon would still have the account.

There are lots of things that poison client-agency relationships – things like turnover at the agency, personality clashes, new management at the client, mistakes by the account team, creative that the franchisees (or ministers) personally don’t like and so on and so forth. But none of those things, on their own, are enough to lose the account if the work is effective.

But work that doesn’t sell alone is enough to lose the account.

Whether the account loss was due to ineffective work or due to a combination of other factors, I don’t know definitively…though it is interesting that Fallon landed the account because of the design work of now spun-off Duffy and reading between the lines makes me think that it was a combination of factors.

Whatever the reason, this is another body blow to Fallon, not because the account is especially large but because it is cringe-worthy how quickly accounts are scuttling out of the place. What client would want to park their account there now when so many others have jumped ship?

why do agencies hit the skids?

When I was a young pup, the list of agencies I would have died to work at included names like Arnold, Wieden & Kennedy, Fallon and GSD&M.

All agencies, at one time or another, hit a bit of a rocky road, whether it is because of difficult clients, the loss of key talent or struggles with their meteoric rise.

With the news that GSD&M has been scythed to half of its size at its 2006 peak, the question was begged: why do some agencies keep on keepin’ on while others hit the skids?

And while others wither and die.

Part of the reason that some agencies hit the skids is clearly the loss of talent. Fallon alone has fathered (not in that way, sicko) Toy, Barrie D’Rozario Murphy and Brew. That those agencies exist is down to the exiting of top creative talent from Fallon, including Ari Merkin, Bob Barrie, Stuart D’Rozario and Bruce Bildsten…which has really hobbled Fallon. As you would expect it would.

But Crispin Porter has succesfully weathered the loss of some top creative talent (the guys who started Goodness Manufacturing). Which leads to reason two that a top agency might struggle: the stepping back of the founder. This has clearly affected Fallon, too, but from what I hear out of Austin, the stepping back of Roy Spence is the proximate cause of GSD&M’s struggles.

The third major reason that agencies hit the skids is the mix of ownership by the big four holding companies and getting bigger. The holding companies, being publicly held, need to squeeze revenue out of their agencies so, however much an agency might say they are about great creative work, once they are publicly owned they are really about making the quarterly numbers. A balance can be struck, but it’s not easy. And, as an agency grows, there are inevitably more layers and approvals and satisfied creative directors who have already accomplished things to drown out the creativity of the young guns. Inertia takes over and the agency gets institutionalized. It’s possible to fight this, as Saatchi has done lately with Tony Granger in New York and Harvey Marco in LA, but it’s also hard.

The final reason is luck.

has eco-advertising jumped the shark?

Adverganza has an interesting post about Arnold Worldwide’s new environmentally-friendly campaign for Timberland that is greener than Kermit the Frog.

Beyond the discussion about the campaign, a really interesting topic came up:

“I guess the real question I have about this is whether we’re dealing with a true sustainable trend or whether a few years from now we’ll all be snickering at the jump-on-the-bandwagon quality of all this politically-correct eco-consciousness—at least until the floodwaters begin to lap at the front door.”

Strip Adverganza’s bit of politically-correct eco-consciousness at the end of the post and consider it for a second.

When my Dad was a kid, the big issue was population, with Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. Needless to say, with birthrates in the West (including the United States, whose population is buyoed by immigration) falling below replacement rate, Mr. Ehrich was a little short of the “world is ending” mark.

When I was a kid, the big scare was acid rain. Again, needless to say (as acid rain has not, since I left first grade, destroyed the environment or me), this did not turn out to be QUITE the issue that everyone thought it would be.

Somewhere between those two issues (in 1975), global COOLING was the big scare, as this Newsweek article shows.

Based on history, global warming has likely reached its apex of consumer relevance and will slowly fade until it is superseded by another environmental “issue.”

But what does that mean for environmentally-conscious advertising and companies? Trends show that the environment gets better as countries gain affluence (because, with wealth, people have the time and means to care for the environment and want to live in a nice one) and, despite some economic flutters this summer, in America we’re still getting richer…which leads me to suspect that environmentally-conscious/friendly advertising will is likely to continue to be relevant for and important to consumers.

If I were a marketer I wouldn’t nail my flag to the post of global warming, but I sure as heck would do all that I could do to lower the waste material in my packaging, to make my manufacturing energy-efficient and to bring my advertising along for the ride.

It’s the right thing to do from a “good for the Earth” and a business perspective.