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DDB’s new ‘Influence Manifesto’ gets mixed reviews

The DDB network is famous for lots of things although, it must be said, more for what it did – Bill Bernbach and all that – than what it does now across the piece.

But you can say that of most one-time great agencies and, unlike some other creative pioneers, Britain’s Collett Dickenson Pearce for example, DDB is still with us – now under Omnicom rule – and undeniably big.

Anyway it seems to be trying to redefine itself in a way that’s consonant with its stripped-down and rather elegant past. So it’s created an ‘Influence Manifesto’ proclaiming that the “only thing that matters’ is “influence in the world.”

Do these agency tags do any good? My friend George Parker doubts that this does (actually he does rather more than doubt it).

Maybe the problem, like the one an FT reviewer had with John Hegarty’s recent book is that when you strip down everything – as adfolk like to do – it’s all too easy to see any holes.

Which may be why more cunning people – like academics and philosophers – make bloody sure there are plenty of words to keep you off the scent.

One Comment

  1. Whilst getting totally fucked up on Fourth Reich Potato Vodka, I watched this travesty again, just in case that for some reason and in my geriatric condition, I was missing some deeply buried kernel of wisdom in this video phantasmagoriianightmare… But, no… It’s total shit and something that dear old Bill Bernbach would have freaked out about… But then, Bill never freaked out… He would never have hired these cretins in the first place. What a sad state of affairs we have arrived at in what was once a great business.
    Cheers/George “AdScam” Parker

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