Some surprising account switches already this year: Nationwide out of New Commercial Arts (account conflict with new owner Ogilvy’s Lloyds CRM business) and Starbucks US creative from WPP to Anomaly before they’d really started.
Now Barclays, 23 years at BBH in London in one guise or another, is reviewing and BBH has reportedly decided not to repitch. You never quite know what’s behind some of these decisions (mostly because people won’t tell you.) It could be a problem with the work although that seems unlikely: BBH produced one of our three Ads of the Year for Barclays.
More likely it’s a change of personnel at the client: Barclays has a newish top marketing team, two of them from O2.
BBH’s decision not to repitch looks strange on the surface, maybe they thought Barclays was intent on changing after all this time or were just miffed. Adam&eveDDB declined the offer when John Lewis decided to review (it went to Saatchi & Saatchi.)
Given the O2 connection at Barclays it would be odd if VCCP wasn’t involved in the review somewhere.
