TBWA/Chiat Day Mass Exdous: Look Into The Future
August 7, 2007
AdRants just got a scoop that makes it sound like a mass exodus is taking place TBWA/Chiat Day, LA. Here’s the brief: “Lara Palmer jumped ship to become founding Creative Director at Taxi, Vancouver. Zach Watson, Blake Kidder and Patrick Almaguer all headed to Wieden Kennedy, Amsterdam. David Steinke moves a few hours east to Crispin’s new Boulder office. Craig Crawford returns to Team One, while partner, Rui Alvares, is going to Lowe Bull in South Africa. Doug James goes freelance as his art director, Chuck Monn hops over to the secretive Media Arts Lab. Lastly, another undisclosed creative is said to be on his way to Arnold Boston.”
However, AdRants doesn’t seem to have an idea as to why other than accounts are in jeopardy people are bailing. We’re wondering if there’s more to it than that – bad management? Awful work environment? They pay poorly? Anyone want to clue us in: agencyspy at mediabistro dot com. Fake that Gmail account if you have to.
Back to the accounts… AdRants notes that the $100+ million Playstation account is also heading for the door, which we mentioned a little while ago. Now this is where it’s get interesting… apparently, Infiniti is also about to bail. We’ll confirm this. Our spies say that Infiniti is going to start leaning heavily on the PR firm Edelman rather than keep trusting the behomth agencies to create smart, sharp campaigns for them. What did we tell you? PR firms are the new agencies.
September 14, 2007 at 7:26 pm
There are a lot of reasons why creatives (among others) are running for the doors and most of it has to do with how they treat their people. Pretty much everyone who’s worked there (including yours truely) has seen the intense drama and backstabbing that seems to get bounced around between the various in house areas, Media, Tequila, Chiat…that largely stems from higher up and as they say, “the shit rolls downhill”. That combined with poor compensation, sweat shop hours, credit NOT given where it’s due has made most of the creative talent run packing. The obvious result is poor and stale creative, bad project management equating to loss of accounts – the most obvious pointing to this is the loss of the Playstation account since TBWA\C\D incumbent defending it is more show of pride than anything because we all can surmise they’re not getting it back. The Masterfoods account isn’t all fun and happiness either as they’d like you to think. If the Infiniti account is now going south, while it wouldn’t surprise me, that’d pretty much be the last nail in the coffin since when all else fails they’ve always had that.
Unfortunately this is not an isolated event – we’re seeing this with other agencies all over LA. Who knows maybe CP+B pulling their LA based office back a few years will get the last laugh after all as the future of other LA satellite offices (good examples of a downward spiral in other agencies is MRM-LA, DDB Tribal-LA, and Deutsch-LA) is unstable at best.
January 19, 2008 at 9:19 am
Its old news that Chiat LA has become a negative place to work, its true though that morale is at an all time low. The work has really suffered…account managment is a joke,….oh well, you get what you pay for.