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By Stuart Smith on May 7, 2013
What’s the biggest, most successful, company you’ve never heard of? Impossible to say, of course. But a good candidate would be Aberdeen Asset Management. It’s in the FTSE100; it’s genuinely global. And it’s very profitable indeed, judging from its latest interim figures. Just to make the point: profit before tax increased 37per cent to £223m; [...]
Posted in Clients, Creative, Finance, Media, News, PR | Tagged aberdeen asset management, corporate makeover, financial services, Piers Currie, PR, simply asset management, Stuart Smith, £20m marketing budget
By Stuart Smith on April 29, 2013
Having, a while back, complimented Chris Macdonald on the improved quality of his tailoring, it would be churlish not to congratulate London’s sharpest suit on landing the hot seat at McCann New York, where he will soon become president. Macdonald (left), who combines the position of McCann London group chairman with agency chief executive, is [...]
Posted in Agencies, Analysis, Clients, Creative, News, PR | Tagged Chris Macdonald, general motors, Harris Diamond, Interpublic, mccann, mccann worldgroup, New York, Nick Brien, Stuart Smith, Thom Gruhler
By Stuart Smith on March 28, 2013
For years, you’ve run your own brand consultancy. After successfully selling it, you step into the limelight as chairman of the Central Office of Information, only to find that mad axeman and part-time cabinet minister Francis Maude is cutting off at the knees the very organisation you’ve just been invited to head. What next? I [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, News, Politics | Tagged Chris Wood, coi, dom reilly, Dominic Reilly, fashion brand, Francis Maude, Government, marketing, Stuart Smith, williams f1 team
By Stuart Smith on March 26, 2013
After years of being a jet-setting senior suit in someone else’s service, Richard Pinder has decided to go global on his own account with the ambitious launch of his own international network, The House Worldwide. Pinder (left), it will be recalled, was head of Publicis Worldwide for five years until group succession politics (the imposition [...]
Posted in Agencies, Analysis, Clients, News | Tagged maserati, new company, publicis worldwide, Richard Pinder, Stuart Smith, the house worldwide
By Stuart Smith on March 26, 2013
What could be more timely than demonstrating the little car’s exceptional cargo-carrying capacity than three nubile women, one scantily clad, all three bound and gagged, occupying the boot space? Closer inspection of the ad reveals that the caricatures are supposed to represent actual celebrities. In the front seat is Paris Hilton, looking over her shoulder [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, News, Politics, PR | Tagged ford, in-house ad, jwt india, Michael Schumacher, Paris Hilton, row, Stuart Smith
By Stuart Smith on March 14, 2013
The newspaper is dead, and the Telegraph’s decision to merge its daily and Sunday titles into a 7-day-a-week operation is yet another nail in its coffin. Long live the free press. By “free press” I mean not the plutocratic oligarchy (absent the Guardian and Observer-owning Scott Trust) that maintains a diminishing stranglehold over printed national [...]
Posted in Analysis, Finance, Media, News | Tagged 7-day operation, abc figures, Daily Telegraph, internet, journalism, Murdoch McLennan, newspaper circulations, Stuart Smith, sunday telegraph, the guardian
By Stuart Smith on March 8, 2013
So, Nestlé is to drop George Clooney – Hollywood’s suavest since Cary Grant – as brand ambassador for Nespresso, to replace him with – what? Marketing’s John Reynolds, who got the scoop, does not specify. A Nestlé spokesman cryptically waffled on about “a solid relationship over the years” (seven of them in all) but reminded [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative | Tagged club, crowd-sourcing, George Clooney, nespresso, Nestle, new spokesman, Penelope Cruz, Stuart Smith
By Stuart Smith on March 7, 2013
It’s over a year now since Peralta founder and CEO Alexandre Peralta (pictured) expunged (literally so) the StrawberryFrog images sprayed all over the interior of his Sao Paulo hotshop. How’s he getting on in the wake of his split with mercurial and moody SF panjandrum Scott Goodson? The other day I caught up with him [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, Finance, News | Tagged Alexander Peralta, bacardi brazil, Jairo Soares, mondelez, Peralta Sao Paulo, Scott Goodson, split, strawberryfrog, Stuart Smith
By Stuart Smith on December 17, 2012
All right, league tables of achievement are as commonplace as turkeys right now. Why burden you with another one? Well, I’ve been asked to – by the good folk at More About Advertising. So: Ad of the Year. Yes, I liked BBH’s The Three Little Pigs and Creative Artist Agency’s Cannes Chipotle winner. Also, Del [...]
Posted in Agencies, Analysis, Clients, Creative, Finance, Media, News | Tagged ad of the year, aegis, agency of the year, bbh, dentsu, follow the frog, Jerry Buhlmann, John Napier, person of the year, rainforest alliance, Stuart Smith, three little pigs, wieden+kennedy
By Stuart Smith on June 13, 2012
I wonder what we should call it? Googlegate? Datagate, perhaps? Google’s inept handling of rogue data captured in the course of its Street View surveys is giving the search giant an unsavoury corporate reputation. It’s hard not to detect parallels here, albeit on a minor scale, with the Murdoch scandal. And these parallels are? Out-of-control [...]
Posted in Clients, Media, News, Research | Tagged data capture, engineer doe, fcc, google, googlegate, information commissioner's office, privacy scandal, street view surveys, Stuart Smith
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