mckinney emerges victorious

North Carolina agency McKinney has come out victorious in the shootout for the Sherwin-Williams account, which is great news in general but also in this economy. I imagine that if you’re a McKinney staffer walking in this morning you’re feeling just a little bit better about your position than you may have been.

Unless you suck. Then you’re likely to get fired.

Anyway, the inside scoop is that McKinney won out on the strength of a brand and communication platform that took the iconic paint company into the chic, frou-frou realm that they wanted to go.

Good luck with that, says this pundit, noting smugly that Sherwin-Williams has no distribution in Home Depot or Wal*Mart, the who biggest paint outlets, and that brands like Ralph Lauren that are in Home Depot already own that niche. It’s not going to be an easy platform to deliver on.

But why get negative early? Congrats McKinney.

finals time for sherwin-williams

The race for the Sherwin-Williams account is heating up, and not just because agencies are nervously reading forecasts of lower advertising spending and thinking that maybe, just maybe it’s time to win a new account or two before things get ugly.

The race is also heating up because it’s finals time, baby!

Don’t ask me who the finalists are exactly…I can’t confirm all participants and you all know that I would never run with a half-baked story like, say, Fallon walking off with Microsoft (though when you hear about an agency president saying ‘it’s money in the bank’ it does make you confident and anyway I only said that it was rumored).

The point is that it’s the finals, we all know what that means and if you’re lucky I’ll have an idea of who the winner is before Adweek…and so will you.