vml axed by dr pepper snapple group

The news is not unexpected if you have been reading the daily (ad) biz, but it’s still sort of sad to type because it definitely means layoffs for the good people of Kansas City-based VML. Dr Pepper / Snapple Group, formerly Cadbury Schweppes, has removed the last vestiges of a WPP roster of agencies that only a few months ago also included Y&R and Mediaedge:cia by shitcanning interactive shop VML.

Considering that the DPSG soda portfolio, with flavored sodas leading the way, has outperformed category competition from Coke and Pepsi, I can definitely see why sleazy VP of Marketing Sean Gleason would want to remove them. After all, they were responsible for the tragic development, launch and massively over-estimated sales of Accelerade. What? Eh? Oh.

The good news is that, with VML out of the way, Mr Gleason can fill out his roster of agencies with an interactive shop headed by a buddy, just like a tipster says that he did with media, advertising and below-the-line.

I don’t know if that accusation is true, but a tipster who has been right before says it is, and anyway it wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened in the history of marketing.

It happened on BMW with GSD&M and on Porsche with Cramer-Krasselt and on the Burger King interactive account with Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. It happens. It’s the industry.

But it still sucks.

It especially sucks for those who will lose their jobs…there is no official word that this will happen, but after losing the Burger King account to the aforementioned CPB and now DPSG, which had seen them as agency of record with responsibility for online advertising, major web redesigns on most brands, maintenance, etc and so on, it is going to be tough to retain their staffing model as is.

we hear…cpb snagged burger king’s interactive business

The old client-agency relationship just isn’t what it used to be, especially in this day and age of agencies expanding their capabilities beyond the traditional limits. Now, competitive isn’t just between agencies in traditional functions like advertising and media and PR, but rather with all agencies because you never know who has staffed up to try and take your piece of business.

With the word on the street is that Kansas City-based interactive agency VML has been shown the door by Burger King, a client for which they had responsibilities for online advertising and BK.com, and it going to be replaced in its interactive duties by advertising agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, it is clear that nothing is sacred.

Sure, CPB isn’t just any ad agency.

In fact, they probably get the whole digital thing better than most interactive agencies and they have shown the ability to do a range of work, from building campaigns around a viral hit like Subservient Chicken to building useful and engaging consumer applications like the Domino’s pizza builder. Plus, the agency gets good PR, and what client doesn’t want that?

It’s hard to say if there is cause, as it were, for Burger King to ditch VML (but I would love to know if any readers have thoughts on that), though if they had anything to do with the Dr Pepper-Pauly Shore-Valentine’s Day debacle I strongly encourage any and all clients on their roster to immediately reconsider their professional relationship with the agency.

I have reached out to all relevant parties to confirm the rumors, but nobody is talking this morning. Or at least they’re not talking to me.

If the rumors are true, congrats to Crispin and bummer to VML…hopefully nobody’s job is affected.

cadbury schweppes is getting trigger happy

According AdAge… marketers apparently can’t get enough of reorganization, but they aren’t getting much satisfaction from it either.

No surprise there as the people controlling the re-org are usually the ones responsible for much of the initial mess.

Reorganization – of the internal teams and the external agencies – has reached a crescendo at Cadbury Schweppes. The internal teams have already been wracked by one big round of layoffs, ostensibly to make the beverages side of the company more attractive to potential buyers, and has another one lined up if the rumors are to be believed. Then there are all of the people who have left the company of their own accord – almost the entire Brand and Activation team on Snapple and Mott’s – and others, including Director of Interactive Erika Knight.

That move doesn’t bode well for interactive agency VML.

Nor does the fact that VML’s WPP cousins Mediaedge:cia and Y&R have been fired and are in a review that Cadbury Schweppes is pretending isn’t a review respectively. The word is that they might just fire all of their agencies and start fresh with a completely new roster across all brands and functions. That would be fun.

Maybe Cadbury Schweppes could just pull a Dell and just start their own agency completely staffed with cronies and old friends of the VP of Marketing and the CMO (or whoever is calling the shots over there).

While this sort of behavior is par for the course with many marketers (I know that everyone reading this has at least one horror story and maybe more) it is still fucked up. Especially so is the word that Y&R, which isn’t exactly a Daily Biz favorite, was not told that other agencies were pitching against it and officially heard the news through Adweek.

What a classy organization.

the vml tempest in a teacup

Possibly the most viewed thread of posts at the Daily (Ad) Biz have been those about Kansas City-based interactive agency VML. It all started with a compliment about the nicely designed Snapple website (which, as an aside, leads me to believe that I ought to be more positive in ad reviews) before things quickly went downhill, resulting in a passionate slanging match in the comments section of this post.

At first, impressed by the vehemence of the anti-VML comments, this impartial observer was swayed. After all, the comments referred solid dollar values and specific projects and there were a lot of them. Something was going on.

But then the counter-comments came in.

The plain fact is that the “anonymity” of the internet is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes it easy for the real story about and agency or a company to bubble to the surface because people are able to say what is really on their mind without worries about repercussions. That is undeniably a good thing. On the other hand, what’s to stop someone who is disgruntled for any number of reasons to post things that are nothing more than mud-slinging?

Though the specificity of the comments about VML do lead the reader to believe that something has gone wrong over there, at least on a project or two, the pro-VML comments did help to balance the verdict.

Agency Spy had two posts close together about two different agencies, Fallon and Zimmerman, and the response in the comments section for each one was very different and very revealing.

The comments about Fallon, while scathing, did come from people who obviously had a lot of heart for the agency. They wanted it to get back to the glory days, they believed in what it was and, though they were calling out some people by name, seemed to think that the glory could be restored.

The comments about Zimmerman were just plain scathing. And that said a lot about the agency as a place to work at and as a place to do business with.

VML seems to be closer to Fallon than to Zimmerman (in terms only of employees or ex-employees willing to speak positively about the agency), though even with that it’s hard to say what’s really going in Kansas City. I would love to know…

calling out vml

Kansas City-based interactive agency VML has come in for a lot of fire here on The Daily (Ad) Biz despite Y&R holding official Least Favored Agency status.

It all started so well, with kudos to the agency for the nicely designed Snapple website. But then the readers weighed in and VML got raked over the coals for taking a three quarters of a million dollar bath on site production.

And then more comments came in calling out VML staffers by name and slamming the account and creative team that works on the Cadbury Schweppes business.

The hits keep coming. Cadbury Schweppes launched a new product line, A&W and Sunkist Floats, to much fanfare, but with no website. No website even though the press release pointed people to it.

Again, the word is that the boys (and girls) at VML bear much, if not all, of the responsibility for yet another big error:

I am an employee of the carbonated side of Cadbury Schweppes, although I don’t work directly with VML, I can say that this is another VML screw up. I work in very close proximity to the A&W (and other carbonated drink) managers in Plano, TX. Needless to say, they are pretty fed up with VML’s attitude, processes and account management.

Due to VML’s “holier than thou” attitude towards Cadbury’s agency partners, nobody wants to deal with them. – so it’s bad communication all the way around and a press release goes out without VML’s input and you get what you have here. A half-assed lunder construction page thrown up to cover VML’s slow asses.

Let’s just hope that that VML comes through on the website, but rumblings within the office down here in good ‘ol Texas is that the website doesn’t hit the mark. Of all the concepts presented, this was the only “usable” one that came close. Due to budgets, VML wouldn’t budge on any redo and they had to make this one work. People aren’t to happy about it either.

2008 will be interesting for the Cadbury and VML relationship.

Coupled with an email from a loyal tipster that alleges that the first round concepts from VML were so bad that the internal interactive team did not even show them to anyone else and just told VML to actually read the brief and have another go, 2008 is going to be very interesting indeed.

I can’t wait.

oops, we forgot the website!

Cadbury Schweppes is back on the radar with the launch of a new product, A&W and Sunkist floats…in a bottle.

I remember getting root beer floats at my Grandma’s house in the summers of my youth so I am inclined to nostalgia about the concept, though the product might be too rich for me now. Andrew Springate, VP of Marketing, calls them “indulgent treats like nothing consumers have experienced before; one pour and your taste buds will be amazed – no work, no hassle.” Definitely too rich. But a good product idea.

The cousins that I had so much fun with over the holidays would, in particular, love something like this.

And then they would bounce off the walls for a week.

There is more to launching a product than actually getting it into market, and that is getting all of the marketing support up and running. Especially a website. In fact, it could be argued that a website is the cost of doing business these days.

And the Floats website does not work.

I will caveat that just in case it gets up and running later on (as one hopes that it does since it is in every PR clip picked up by Google). The website has not worked all morning. I began trying to view it at 8am EST and it is not past 10…and I just tried a minute ago and still no luck.

Hopefully this is not something that Cadbury interactive agency VML is to blame for. They have been taking serious heat for the debacle that was the Snapple website and, especially after reading some of the comments to that linked story, it is clear that VML cannot afford another fiasco.

Yours truly will keep digging and you can keep laughing at this case of marketing ineptitude.

thanks vml: cadbury’s bargain snapple website

The more I hear about them, the more I think that Cadbury Schweppes Beverages really gets it.

They had a huge viral win with the Dr Pepper Cherry Chocolate Rain video; so far the video has had over a million and a half views and it only cost $200,000. Not to mention how the video positively positioned the Dr Pepper trademark.

A reader comments that Cherry Chocolate Rain is not the only bargain the Cadbury has gotten lately.

Apparently, the very slick new website by VML for Snapple was created for the I-bought-it-on-eBay cost of $250,000.

At least, that is what it cost Cadbury:

“This website costs over a million to produce, but only costs Cadbury $250,000. Why the overage the company had to eat? EGOS, EGOS, EGOS. . . creative egos swell at VML and they wrote a check that the developers couldn’t cash. The website you see is held together with spit and wire – the developers did a good job making it work. The creative director (Tony Sneethen) cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a fiasco of epic status at VML.”

I am stupefied that VML would have proposed a site like Snapple’s with a budget of $250,000. And the fact that Cadbury was able to hold their feet to the fire and make them actually create what they pitched…well, that gets you a site this good that cheap.

I usually fall on the agency’s side of the production cost argument – I think that clients need to understand that the things they are asking for, especially last-minute changes, have a cost associated with them. Clients must be willing to adjust their budget if they adjust the scope of a project.

However, I have also been in the room when agencies have promised the world on a shoe-string budget to win the job (or because they don’t realize just how much work will go into the project – which is Bozo the Clown’s usual m.o. on digital), and then furiously backpedal when it comes time to pay the piper.

If you pitch it, you have to be able to execute it.

If you lose money executing something you’ve promised, well, you get called out on an industry blog (among other things).

Good job, VML. You get this upside-down EFFIE for ineffectiveness in managing a budget:

d-day for mediaedge with cadbury schweppes

A few weeks ago Cadbury Schweppes Beverages, makers of Dr Pepper, Snapple and others, announced that it was putting its media business into review. Incumbent Mediaedge was to defend, but sources said that retaining would be unlikely.

Then, the de-merger between Cadbury confection and Cadbury beverages heated up and there was a marketing department reshuffle. One that included almost 500 layoffs.

Yet, the show must go on. In the case of Mediaedge (and the other agencies pitching Cadbury Schweppes), the show goes on with all pitches taking place next week, and a final decision by early December.

It is still, ahem, unlikely that Mediaedge will retain.

Why do agencies that know they are going to lose still pitch the business? Is it some sort of a macho thing? Do they not actually believe that they have no chance? I have to admit to being baffled by it. Sometimes, it seems, it’s better (in terms of agency expenditure and the bad publicity of having an account in review) to just resign. Fall on your sword and all that.

In better news, and contrary to previous rumors, I hear that Mediaedge is the limit of the near-term agency flux at Cadbury Schweppes. The senior marketing team has not changed and it really wouldn’t make sense to fire a bunch of internal people and then get rid of all of the agencies, too (VML and Y&R, it looks like you’re safe).

Just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it will happen, but one does hope.

the axe is dropping at cadbury schweppes

From what I hear (thank you loyal reader with the inside scoop, you keep my blog from falling into irrelevance), the axe is dropping at Cadbury Schweppes this week.

The internal marketing team will be sorted out by the end of the week and big cuts are expected.

No word on what this means for Cadbury Schweppes’ roster of agencies, which includes the evil Y&R for advertising, VML for interactive and the in-review Mediaedge:cia for media, but let’s go out on a limb and say that it is not going to be good.

Already, the word is that an agency shake-up is imminent, but not until the turmoil subsides a little bit.

This de-merger gets more interesting by the day.

more agency flux at cadbury schweppes?

I was feeling pretty good after my post on the sharp-looking Snapple website; I had done a good deed by recognizing good work by another agency and I even bought a tasty new Snapple White Tea as well. I like to support good marketing by actually purchasing the product they are shilling.

As long as its in my price range.

Anyway, after taking off my hat to VML, a tipster brought some interesting information to my attention.

It turns out that the upheaval at Cadbury Schweppes might not be limited to WPP’s Mediaedge, but may also stretch to, that’s right, WPP’s VML as well.

The sharp-tongued tipster says that Manhattan-based Code & Theory has been sniffing around the interactive business over there, with involvement in some high-profile past and current projects on the Dr Pepper brand. With Mediaedge in review and unlikely to retain the business, is VML to follow?

Because of my vendetta against Y&R, I would be happy if WPP went away altogether, not just at this one client. Still, with all of the upheaval at Cadbury Schweppes that has been reported in the media, I can’t imagine that a change is going to take place any time soon.

Though I’m also not sure I would want to be working on that account.