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?