Firing Friday
It’s firing Friday for Wal-Mart’s top marketing exec Julie Roehm, and subordinate Sean Womack who allegedly were engaged in personal relationship.
Other allegations for Roehm included inappropriately accepting gifts from vendors and showing favoritism.
The big news though, is that Wal-Mart overturned it’s previous commitment to Draft FCB, which PRpulp commented on back in November.
Here’s The New York Times:
And she attended a September dinner given by Draft FCB at the Manhattan hot spot Nobu, during which she lavishly praised the ad agency and appeared to suggest it had the upper hand in the contest more than a month before an official announcement of the winner was due.
At the dinner, Ms. Roehm spoke about how Draft FCB, formed this year by the merger of the Draft and Foote Cone & Belding agencies, might be the model of the ad agency of the future, said one attendee, Linda Fidelman, president of Advice and Advisors in New York, a consulting company that helps marketers search for advertising agencies.
Companies and large non-profits regularly engage in agency reviews. They’re often structured by executives who have previous relationships with an agency or its partners that can get questionably close to be considered appropriate and non-biased. The question is: where’s the line? Is the client who accepts a dinner or a drink too far over the line? Joy riding in fancy cars apparently is…
How does Draft feel?
Draft FCB was in the early stages of hiring as many as 200 additional employees at its Chicago headquarters to handle the Wal-Mart account. Philippe Krakowsky, an executive vice president at Interpublic, said, “We were disappointed to hear of Wal-Mart’s decision.”
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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December 8th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
I have lots of questions, but I’ll focus on one thing right now: How can an agency win a $580-million account and then go out to hire 200 creative and administrative personnel to service the account?
Brands are important–even for advertising agencies. Like all companies, each one has a certain culture, mission and proprietary process. But welcoming 200 new employees changes the culture of any agency. And, consequently, that will significantly affect the culture of the agency that just landed a half-billion dollar account.
Companies hire ad agencies, but ad agencies are nothing more than people. So, essentially, people are hiring people. And, in this case, Wal-Mart didn’t know hundreds of people they were going to get in bed with.
December 8th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
I agree, Gino. The whole Draft FCB incarnation has been fascinating to watch. From an outsider’s perspective who has no interest in big NYC agency politics whatsoever, it’s punch drunk to consume.
The people I feel badly for are all the young hires who are fresh out of school. Those who are jumping ship to the big city to work for (what they thought to be) one of the most exciting companies with one of the biggest accounts in the world.
To them, today has to be the biggest deflation since they learned the truth about the tooth fairy.
Today the tooth fairy just stole their paycheck.
December 11th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
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