Is it news when a London creative agency CEO leaves? James Fox is stepping down at Havas after three years (mostly under then group boss Xavier Rees, newly installed at AMV BBDO) even though the agency seems to have done tolerably well in the period.
Havas is now a standalone quoted agency in Amsterdam and one of the perils of such a move is the need to make quarterly numbers, tough in a difficult economic environment in which such agencies seem to be always tasked with making more from less.
But there’ll be a lot of agency suits on the market soon (Fox may well have something else he’s lined up) with the newly-announced merger of Publicis Worldwide and Leo Burnett inevitably leading to duplication and cutbacks. Publicis seems to be firmly in the driving seat despite the new name Leo.
A side effect will be more agency types going it alone although underpinning that model has been the willingness of the big ad holding companies to buy them, usually on earn-outs, some of which can be highly profitable for the founders (James Murphy and David Golding at adam&eve then New Commercial Arts, Nils Leonard and co. at Uncommon, who now in the Havas fold.) Will the current wave find such eager buyers? P/E companies are as digitally fixated as the rest of the financial world although VCCP’s backers seem to have done well)
Many will see this as the death knell of ad creativity and it’s certainly true that the digital wave hasn’t helped: there’s a shortage of both budget and talent when it comes to making ads these days. Although there’s no God-given right for ad creativity to emanate solely from big network ad agencies.
Back in the day they devised planning as, in part, a defensive measure: to justify the work which, sometimes, in the hands of a maestro such as BMP’s John Webster was hard to sell to clients who, not unreasonably in some cases, just didn’t get it. But clever planners could provide reams of (reasonably convincing) justification. Now planning sails under strategy of course but it’s still in essence the same thing.
But can the new wave of agencies afford such a multi-layered level of support if that’s required to gain the confidence of clients when (even now) very large budgets are sometimes at stake? That’s the challenge for new, independent agencies. It’s one their big brother network rivals have signally failed to solve judging by the increasing pace of so-called “rationalisation.”
