Body Blow: Copyranter Gets Out Of The Game

Wow. We are depressed. One of our favorite bloggers, Copyranter, has called it game over:

“It takes too much of my time and too much of my life to publish every day.”

Now where will we turn when looking for early morning puns and double-eged pleasantries? We have got a feeling this isn’t going to be a faux-out either. Copyranter is no Jay-Z, no fame whore. When he says he’s done, we’re positive he means it. Sigh. Shit. He shall be missed. He shall be very missed.

New Agency Alert Via Starbucks

Stanley Hainsworth, VP Global Creative at Starbucks, has reportedly left the brand to start his own agency. No idea what he’s going to call it – Hainsworth + Co., perhaps? You know Stanley. Take a look at the image over there. Come on? That hair? It’s like legend.

Stanley spent several years at Nike as a creative director and then spent some more time at the Lego Company as their global creative director. Hainsworth is a singer/songwriter, author, actor, director and producer – a real renaissance man. He was a co-founder and director at the Rita Hayworth Theatre in Los Angeles as well as a founder and producer of BOOM Productions in New York City.

Want more info on Hainsworth? Scott Goodson, head toad over at StrawberryFrog, recently interviewed Stanley on his blog. When asked about his greatest lessons learned, Stanley replied:

“It’s never right the first or second time. Always the third . . . but then you go back to the first version and realize that you were right after all.”

Damn straight. Good luck to Stanley. It’s a rough world out there.

It’s Super Spy Bitches

I took a week off, which left Down Low in charge of keeping it real on Agency Spy. As of this post, I’m back in full effect. I’ve missed you guys. No for realsises.

Just a note to you dear readers: we will be moving to the Mamabistro home site by EOD. Don’t panic! There are full RSS feeds and comment capabilities over there, too. Yes, yes… there’s advertising, as well, but come on, right? We’re in the biz. You know someone has got to pay these bills.

So, hopefully, you’ve had a good week? I hope so.

Super Spy

Whispers around town…

Interesting bit of gossip we received via the tip box over the weekend — and on yet another very slow news day:

Why hasn’t the potential new ECD at TBWA signed the contract?

Well it seems they cannot find a good school for his kids. TBWA is trying to buy their way into some of NYC’s most prominent private schools — apparently unsuccessfully so far.

Nice to see that the ECD candidate is putting the welfare of his kids’ education at the forefront of their requirements — probably because all the hours they’ll be putting in at the job, they’ll never see them aside from vacations

The Carnival culling continues…

alliteration is fun for a Friday…

Following up a previous story, seems Carnival is now down to three shops as contenders for the $70+ million account.

Slated to travel to Miami late next month for the final round are Interpublic Group units Deutsch and McCann Erickson, both in New York, and Havas’ Arnold in Boston.

Shitcanned from contention were the New York offices of Omnicom Group’s BBDO,  MDC’s Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners, Havas’ Euro RSCG and IPG’s DraftFCB.

W+K Amsterdam picks a new leader

Wieden & Kennedy Amsterdam has appointed Lee Newman, previously senior vice-president and group account director at Austin-based GSD&M, as managing director.

Newman will join executive creative directors John Norman and the recently appointed Jeff Kling to complete the management team at W&K Amsterdam.

At SuperSpy’s fave agency, Newman led the agency’s BMW account, helping BMW “evolve their brand positioning” (ed note: don’t you love the extra fancy terminology?) in the US market. Prior to GSD&M, Newman was senior vice-president and group account director at McKinney-Silver on the Audi of America account.

Newman also oversaw the BMW account at Fallon before joining GSD&M, and was part of the team that developed the BMW Films campaign.

So it seems they have appointed a “car guy” in a location where they don’t have a car account (They run the Honda account out of their London office) — interesting tack to take going forward. They run the Carlsberg, Coke, EA, Nike, Sharp AQUOS & Wyborowa Wodka accounts (amongst a couple of others) with 150 people in the Amsterdam office.

Will Ferrell is killin’ that shit…

Funny or Die, a LA & Palo Alto-based comedy video website (think “Funny  Ha-ha Youtube“) founded by Will Ferrell, celebrated its first birthday yesterday — and in typical LA “How good am I?” fashion told everyone how well they were doing by releasing new numbers on its traffic.

According to Funny or Die, it has had over 200 million video views, over 30 thousand videos uploaded, and averages 3.2 million unique visitors per month.

The firm, which is venture backed by Sequoia Capital, said that it is planning on making changes to the site’s design and content over the next few months to add new content, and provide more reasons for users to return to the site daily.

Funny or Die was founded by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and Chris Henchy, and also recently added director and producer Judd Apatow (director of “Superbad” & “The 40 Year-old Virgin”) as a Principal Partner at the firm.

Travelogue — Vol. #2 – Dallas

Ok…so Dallas won out over Miami (although I’ll make it a future edition down the road — I’m nothing if nothing a pandering fool — Chicago will be a future edition too — just to let you know.)

Simple reasoning led me to start with Dallas this week — they have a lot of shit going down there — the readers were quite good at adding points of interest to the discussion as well.

So we’ll run through the usual suspects of agencies:

DDB/Tribal DDB, The Richards Group, Publicis, TLP (Tracy Locke), t:m Advertising, The Integer Group, Dieste Harmel, Rapp Collins, The Loomis Agency, Brierley & Partners, Targetbase, Javelin, imc2, etc.

Now I have probably forgotten a couple that you may consider “critical” to the list — first… sorry about that; second — Jaysus Christ, you guys in “Big D” need to get a real advertising network/club there.

Checking out something called the “Dallas Ad League” — the website is a disgrace and it holds absolutely no relevant info to the Dallas ad scene at all — sure it appears to be a volunteer-driven organization — but they are doing the entire ad community a disservice by half-assing it the way they are.

Although I did learn from their front page that the 2008 AAF District 10 Convention is currently in town — WTF that is of course, I’m really at a loss.

Due to the shitty organization (or lack thereof) for the ad community there, it is a tad difficult to figure out what independents (aside from TRG of course) are worthy of mention. Yahoo Answers had the best list of shops around town — aside from the readers suggestions that is.

It is apparently common practice & quite popular for workers to cycle between the three biggest shops in town — TRG, TLP & TM — and spend a couple of years at each shop before starting the cycle over.

As for breaking into the ad biz in Dallas — there is the Temerlin Advertising Institute at SMU (yes, namesake of the Temerlin Mcclain agency) which was renamed in Liener Temerlin’s name in 2001 for efforts in the Dallas ad community (I’m sure the $6 million his “friends” came up with helped as well.)

Now as for interesting characters (as we’ll try and highlight one person each week who stands out amongst the crowd in the city of choice) there really is only one man who could have the balls to carry this title in Dallas — the man, the legend, the opening speaker of the 2008 AAF District 10 Convention (currently in town!!!) — yes — Stan Richards.

Now doing a bit of research came across this description (it is a tad rich — but as a source of humour — it appears to be limitless):

“People call him all sort of things. Pentagram partner Woody Pirtle has called him “the ideal businessman, salesman, teacher, and mentor.” Rex Peteet of Sible/Peteet has called him “my cheerleader, my muse, my conscience, my dad, my friend, my critic, my enemy—all in the same day.” He’s been favorably or unfavorably compared by various Richards Group “alumni”—all now highly successful entrepreneurs in their own design and advertising businesses—to Leonardo da Vinci, Midas, Machiavelli, Hemingway, E.F. Hutton, Michael Jackson and God.

Stan Richards, founder and head of the Dallas-based Richards Group, is the quintessential advertising agency executive. In fact, his agency is the only one that’s been named “agency of the year” four times by Adweek magazine. He’s also the quintessential graphic designer, principal of Richards, Brock, Miller, Mitchell & Associates (RBMM), one of America’s premier design firms, winner of too many major design awards to count. And as head of various entities that create and produce print advertising, television commercials, radio spots, film titles, annual reports, corporate logos, public relations, sales promotion, and marketing communications of all kinds, he is perhaps above all the consummate businessman, named “entrepreneur of the year” by Inc. magazine in 1995. How many entities he runs and how much money they all make is a bit of a mystery. “A bunch” is all Stan will say, admitting that he has 315 employees, $300 million in annual billings, two buildings in the north end of Dallas, and clients from San Francisco to Yarmouth, Maine.”

Now of course, he has the chops to be the biggest swinging dick in town. On top of this, there is the apparent story of the interesting plane trips; odd recruiting practices (ed note: love some of the comments in that article); the pretty damn good column for “Talent Zoo” (at least in theory — not sure if it is practiced.)

Of course, Stan is a tad old these days and has reportedly starting falling asleep during creative meetings — they’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t burn down one of the buildings with leaving lit cigars around.

He is also all about the education of others — he pledged $1.5 million in 2001 to create the Stan Richards Creative Chair in Advertising for the Temerlin institute.

We had a reader write in to talk about one other contender — a creative director around town (names & true identifying marks removed to prevent getting our arses sued — but it was funny. Big props to the emailer.)

“The guy is an HR accident waiting to happen. From harassment to discrimination, he’s got it covered. Plus he signs his emails: The (removed). I don’t care how difficult is to remember or spell your last name, no one has the right to add their own article. He drives a (removed — but think a very “Damn I’m really overcompensating for my apparently tiny cock” Italian sportscar) and sports a wardrobe of matching branded accessories: hats, shirts, even notebooks. Typical to Dallas, he has a bimbo augmented wife and spends his time recounting his “glory days” (removed an agency name) and looking down his nose at anyone who thinks, acts, dresses different than his uptight Republican idealism.”

Ok…so a bit about Dallas was fun this week — I’m sure you’ll all add your own particular flavor to the discussion in the comments section…but first get a real damn ad-focused organization working for you all there.

*NEXT UP:*

BOSTON — home of Hill Holliday, Digitas, Arnold Worldwide, Mullen, Isobar and others. Feel free to email me with tips and things to look into — especially an interesting character — I have an idea for one, but want to discover more.

More DaVinci news — they have more regional creative leads – YAY!

WPP’s dedicated Dell business unit, still tentatively titled “Project DaVinci” six weeks over the deadline for the name change, has firmed up its creative leadership for the Asia-Pacific region ahead of its official launch date of 1 May.

According to sources, the unit has hired two executive creative directors, to head its consumer and business-to-business hubs respectively in the region.

In the Singapore B2B headquarters, Alfredo Rossi comes aboard as ECD. Rossi joins from Ogilvy & Mather New York, where he spent 11 years, most recently as senior partner and creative director.  Meanwhile, the Beijing consumer hub has hired Mike Shackle from TBWA\Singapore to lead creative.

Well that is settled there for now — of course, still no global CEO or the 500+ missing others to get to the stated 1,000+ employee goal in the next two weeks before they are to officially start cranking out work for the client.

Rumours are that they are currently furiously interviewing for several people to fill out the roles for the EMEA region — which will be regionally headquartered in London — but like everywhere else, having trouble finding people to sign on.

Element 79 – someone get the crash cart

Since we all love our Chicago-based news lately — one of our readers has mentioned that there is confirmation that Element 79 (rumoured to be merging with DDB any day here) has been notified that they have officially lost the Gatorade & Tropicana accounts.

Management has countered with the argument they still have over $10 million in revenue than they did when they opened their doors six years ago — take that for what you will.

Discuss amongst yourselves — the topic: How fucked are they and how likely is the merger with DDB now? Would DDB Chicago — already rumored to be suffering badly — want to take on another anchor as it fights to regain some stature within the client sphere?

UPDATE:

Well TBWA\Chiat\Day LA and Arnell Group are confirmed as the new agencies for the brands respectively. So it is just a game of musical chairs as Omnicom still retains the overall account. That being said, it is going to be yet another blow to the Chicago ad game as it shifts the accounts to both LA & New York respectively.