Agency Spy

Yoda Bob has pulled one of his own back into the fold — and the added bonus — it hurts one of his main competitors.

Mauro Cavalletti is returning to R/GA as executive creative director after three years at other shops, including Organic and most recently AKQA, where he was group creative director.

Cavalletti, 46, begins work at R/GA in mid-May, when it will open in San Francisco. The West Coast outpost is the New York-based agency’s third office, following its expansion to London about two years ago.

Adweek has more details:

“He’s extraordinary at creative, technology and user experience,” said Bob Greenberg, CEO of R/GA. “It’s all the things we need and want to get. He’s a real manager and can handle large clients.”

R/GA is looking at office space in San Francisco that could house as many as 80 employees, Greenberg said. By the end of 2008, the shop expects roughly 25-30 workers. R/GA has more than 600 employees in New York and 30 in London.

“We opened in San Francisco not based on business but based on talent,” he said. “Talent is the biggest issue facing agencies today. It’s the biggest open creative and technology talent pool other than New York.”

While Greenberg sees AKQA as R/GA’s main rival, he said the shop would not specifically target talent from there.

“It’s not so much the agencies but the Yahoo!s and Googles,” he said. “All the technology companies have many potential hires for us.”"

Now Bob is getting a little silly there — hiring from the Yahoos and Googles would just be fucking dumb for an agency — unless it was a straight tech job that is.  Having experience with those companies, it would be a clusterfuck if you tried to convert them to the agency lifestyle because the mentality is completely different and the client demands would cause the new people to lose their shit — quickly.

At AKQA, Cavalletti worked on several accounts, including Target, Method and Kraft. He led Organic’s user experience practice in both New York and San Francisco from 2005-06. In his past life at R/GA, Cavalletti rose from senior interaction designer to interaction design director to creative director from 1999 to 2005.

Cavalletti will initially work on Nike at R/GA, along with new clients the office acquires. He will report to Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer for North America. R/GA has also landed two local clients that Greenberg declined to name — speculation has that one of them could be Levi’s.

We have a winner — Avenue A - Razorfish.

The prize? A brand new digital McJob!

Yes… that would be Mickey Dee’s UK digital account for the next three years or so (so they say that is — as they also say, given the fickleness of clients these days, nothing but death & taxes is assured.)

They battled AKQA to the proverbial death and emerged victorious for the account that is expected to be worth about $10-15 million yearly — big bucks in the digital sense (ATL CEOs probably spend more than that on their expense accounts.)

It will include all the online advertising, the development of a new web presence, and the potential development of digital kiosks to replace a few cashiers and make things go faster as you can ponder if you want the chocolate shake or tub of Coke to go along with that Egg McMuffin or Filet-o-fish.

The fast-food giant did not have an incumbent digital agency for its consolidated business although Avenue A - Razorfish has handled work for the restaurant chain in other markets. Leo Burnett will continue to handle McDonald’s above-the-line advertising account and The Marketing Store will handle its below-the-line account.

In the year ended 30 September 2007, McDonald’s spent £34 million on advertising in the UK with online accounting for £3.6 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. This digital spend is expected to almost double over the next year as the company plans to invest some £400 million into making its European businesses more locally relevant.

At the start of the year the fast food giant reported net profit of £640 million for the last quarter in 2007, fuelled by double digit growth in Europe.

(ed note: and this begins today’s int’l digest — because there is fuck all happening stateside these days it seems. We need a good old fraud to be exposed — OK…significant fraud that is… none of this everyday shit that agencies pull on an hourly basis — or someone dig up Leo Burnett and/or David Ogilvy and see what their take on the state of current ad industry is.)

Roar. AKQA has opened its entry gates in their search for Future Lions. Check out their slick website and Sonic The Hedgehog-esque mascot to go with it, here. The online submission form doesn’t go live until April 1st, but don’t you want to be prepared? The task is to “shake up the advertising world literally redefining the medium and the message.” Easy peasy, no?

The AKQA London office engaged in a “walk to work day.” The video, complete with soundtrack, shows their small push for green living. We asked you guys if your agency was even a little green. The good:

“I work for an office of JWT and they are definitely trying to practice what they’re preaching. They supplied each of us with a re-usable water thermos and a coffee mug to get rid of all the paper and plastic cups throughout the agency. They also posted signs all over the place to tell people how they can save energy and be less wasteful. Sure, the agency has other problems like any other shop does, but they seem to be taking the “green” thing seriously from what I can tell.”

The bad:

“I hate to think how many trees are chopped for a single presentation. Every agency I have ever been with in NYC had both recycling bins and garbage bins and they both ended up in the same place at the end of the day: the trash.”

And the ugly:

“The last agency I worked for ONLY stocked the kitchen with white styrofoam cups. Being the semi-granola, big-mouthed fool that I am prompted me to send an email inquiring about a possible switch over to re-usable cups, or in the least, replacing the cup stash with plastic dixie cups in an effort to cut down on our carbon “footprint.” Mind you this was week 2 of working at this agency. Boy was that a nightmare… I almost instantly received emails left and right from all dept.’s warning me of the ramifications of the email I had just sent out, something regarding the president of the company “having a thing about his cups.”
That was the most specific response I received until a few days later the president decided to do a “reply all” (hitting the entire agency) with the quip, “hasn’t someone told the new guy about my cups?”

Later it turned out he had some unworked out OCD issues, one of which being that he could only drink from styrofoam cups, and therefore felt it necessary to make it an “unwritten company policy” that the cups were to be used if you did not provide your own. My guess was so that he didn’t feel like some sort of “special case” if he showed up to a meeting being the only one sporting his styrofoam cup of water + styrofoam cup of coffee (he was also unable to have one without the other… yet another trait I would later learn).

That should have been a red-flag right off the bat, but I was too busy trying to brainstorm with the rest of our team about how to promote one of our clients as being a “Green, Eco-Friendly Home.”

We’re asking again so that we can create a master list of agencies. Where do you work? Is it even a little green?

AKQA was named digital agency of the year by AdWeak. Okay. Sure. The Cult of Ajaz, whose powers are supposedly as intense as a religious leader, which keeps people in the firm, have had a stellar year. Well, except for Andrew O’Dell, who was president of the interactive shop’s flagship and ECD P.J. Pereira who departed the flagship office of SF to form their own agency. It’s been described as a “post-digital” shop. What do you think “post digital” means?

And also, Martin Cedergren, the executive creative director of AKQA Amsterdam, left the agency to join creative shop 180 Amsterdam last week.

AKQA was the very long shot in our Digital Dead Pool (someone had to do it). We congratulate the agency on weathering what could of been some stormy seas with its addition of new services and companies (analytics, SEM). We also pointed to the danger inherent with navigating integration plans, which often fail to bring shops together and spur strong creatives to bail. So, hmm… Is this a Crispin syndrome where the agency also functions as an incubator for top talent or is top creative leaving because the agency has swerved away from its original small office mentality and mission? We’ll see…