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Our favourite ads this week: 

This summer's big music event is of course Live Earth, which aims to raise awareness of global warming. Y&R Chicago have unveiled an excellent teaser ad on behalf of lobbying organisation The Movement for a Climate in Crisis, to promote the event and the cause. It's based around numerous, often bizarre, musical interpretations of the Morse code for "S.O.S" (which is, as I'm sure you know, dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot ...)

Filmmaker Michel Gondry is the latest featured artist in the excellent series of HP Personal ads by Goodby Silverstein. Best known for the Jim Carrey movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gondry is also one of the best music video makers in the industry, and this HP spot, which he also directed, displays a typical breathtaking collection of visual tics and tricks.

P&G's Old Spice is trying to undermine the US appeal of "European manfume" Axe/Lynx with a series of tongue-in-cheek ads featuring comic actor Bruce Campbell. Here he turns in an excellent imitation of Playboy boss Hugh Hefner while performing a lounge bar version of the old Duran Duran classic Hungry Like A Wolf. Ahoy, indeed! 

Welcome, Finland! The first Finnish ad to appear in this space is an excellent ad for road safety commissioned by the country's Ministry of Transport. The local outpost of Publicis is responsible. Great animation, nice ideas - watch out for the squirrel and his miniature air bag - and a predictably blunt final message.

In the news this week: Advertisers & Media

Private equity investment this week took its most prestigious scalp to-date, as a result of the deal by Cerberus Capital Management to take over an 80% shareholding in troubled US carmaker Chrysler Group. DaimlerChrysler is effectively paying Cerberus to take the business off its hands. It will not be paid for the shares and will instead contribute an additional $650m towards restructuring of its former subsidiary. However the German group will be able to remove an estimated $18bn of Chrysler's pension and health-care liabilities from its balance sheet, and will retain a 20% shareholding in the US business. Cerberus for its part will inject a capital contribution of $7.4bn into Chrysler (of which Daimler will in effect receive around $1.3bn via its remaining 20% shareholding). The private equity group will also attempt to broker a deal with the United Auto Workers union to reduce that $18bn benefits bill without resorting to Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. So far at least, UAW has given its support to the deal, which it agrees is in workers' best interests. The deal is expected to complete in 3Q 2007, at which point DaimlerChrysler will be renamed Daimler AG.

Artificial sweetener marketers Merisant and McNeil (a division of Johnson & Johnson) settled their lawsuit over the advertising for McNeil's Splenda. Merisant claimed that Splenda's advertising slogan "Made from sugar so it tastes like sugar" was misleading and was seeking damages and compensation of $200m. The court found in favour of Merisant, but the amount of the settlement has not been disclosed.

We always knew that reality TV show Big Brother was horrific, but this week brought proof positive. After months of negotiations with different buyers (including such unlikely bidders as LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault), Telefonica agreed to sell its 75% shareholding in Big Brother production company Endemol, also responsible for game show formats including Deal Or No Deal and Fear Factor, to a consortium led by Endemol founder John de Mol's Cyrte investment fund and Silvio Berlusconi's Mediaset. Earlier this week Cyrte also agreed to acquire legendary 1960s horror film studio Hammer, and vowed to resurrect its stable of monsters. No need - the next series of Big Brother is likely to be more gruesome than anything Hammer could ever have dreamt up...

In the news this week: Agencies

A number of large US advertisers are beginning to express their dissatisfaction with the structure of agency holding companies. During the late 1990s the big agency networks began unbundling their range of services, spinning out inhouse departments responsible for disciplines such as planning, media buying and below-the-line marketing into separate companies. That process was itself largely triggered by clients, who had become unwilling to pay for inhouse services they weren't using. The spin-out also had a major benefit for the agencies because it allowed the new satellites the freedom to work for rival clients without the fear of a conflict clash. 

However the explosion of new media channels since the late 1990s has created a new dilemma. The separation of agency services has led to increasing dislocation in the way in which advertisers' business is handled. The most serious result is the separation between communications planning and creative departments. The rise of independent media-neutral planning-only agencies such as Naked has in some ways only complicated the process. These shops promise to offer a completely objective marketing plan for each client brand, one which will deliver the best results for the client, rather than merely generate the biggest commissions. However, this separation results in a situation where the creative department of the client's advertising agency produces a campaign which don't fully answer the requirements set out by the planning department of an entirely separate agency. Worse still, it is now up to the client to manage the relationship between its numerous separate agencies, and their respective clashing egos. The most obvious symptom of the resulting headache has been the gradual shift by many advertisers away from large de-constructed networks towards smaller creative boutiques where planning and creative departments still operate alongside one another.

P&G has been the most outspoken critic of current agency structures, and initiated a bold experiment last month when its transferred its Oral-B account out of BBDO and into a new unit set up by Publicis which will offer a complete integrated service combining planning, above and below-the-line creative and media buying solely for that account. (WPP is arguably the pioneer in this area on the agency side. It already operates a number of such dedicated client teams, biggest of which is Team Detroit, which combines executives from several different agency brands and disciplines to serve the Ford account). The latest client to call for a change in structure is Kim Kadlec, global media director of Johnson & Johnson, largely aligned at present with Interpublic agencies. Earlier this year, J&J shifted media planning for its Tylenol brand out of media agency Universal McCann and into its creative shop Deutsch (also owned by IPG). Now the entire J&J media account is up for pitch. Kadlec is thought to be pushing Interpublic to build integrated brand-specific offerings into its pitch if it wants to keep the business.

Havas and Interpublic, each struggling to put financial problems behind them, reported results for the first quarter. Havas reported organic revenue growth - which excludes currency fluctuations and the impact of acquisitions or disposals - of 3.2% to E337m (around $455m), and net new business of E545m, up 13% on a year earlier. (However reported revenues, including currency and disposals, were down marginally from E339 last year). The best performances came from the Latin America (organic revenues up by almost a quarter) and Asia Pacific regions. Excluding France and the UK, European revenues were up 8%. France was up 2.6%, but UK revenues were flat, and US business was down almost 1%. Profit figures were not released. Interpublic's 1Q revenues rose 1.6% to $1.36bn, and net loss narrowed from $170m in 1Q 2006 to $126m. US revenues rose 4%, and UK performance was also positive, but there were declines in the rest of Europe and Asia. (By comparison, Publicis 1Q revenues rose almost 12%, Omnicom's by 10% and WPP's by 5%).

Saatchi & Saatchi has been named Agency Network of the Year at the Clio Awards, currently taking place in Miami. Saatchi & Saatchi New York won the prestigious Grand Clio award for its 42 Below Vodka print campaign and was named Agency of the Year.

This week's account changes: In the US, Toys R' Us handed its $90m creative account to Hill Holliday. In the UK, Premier Foods called a review of its £26m media account, split between Starcom and Universal McCann; Birds Eye called a review of its media, currently with MindShare; and Leo Burnett London resigned Nintendo's creative account. Subscribers can access the full Adbrands Account Assignments database here. 

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Simon Tesler
Publisher, Adbrands