More Lucky Generals.
A while back the agency announced it was in talks with Omnicom, seemingly with a view to setting up a micro-network within the holding company. It still might but more likely, initially at least, is the newish London agency being parachuted into TBWA London, rather as adam&eve was in 2012 in what turned out to be a highly successful revival of DDB.
TBWA London has also revived somewhat recently under chairman and CCO Peter Souter – an Abbott Mead Vickers veteran back in the day where he succeeded the legendary David Abbott as creative director – although its progress has been unspectacular – Lidl excepted. Souter is said to be staying on if (when) the merger with Lucky Generals takes place.
Lucky Generals (below) is a more modern sort of construct, producing a high volume of mostly good work for a rapidly-growing list of mid-sized clients. Such clients may not be on a par with TBWA’s Apple and Nissan in terms of income but they can energise a big global agency. Adam&eveDDB has a pretty lengthy list of such as well as its international business and some have paid off mightily: it has won buckets of awards globally for niche London store Harvey Nichols.
There’s always the danger that when you parachute in an agency it parachutes out when the earn-out is complete. Omnicom/DDB has avoided that with adam&eve which is now building its own network although one of the founders, media strategist Jon Forsyth, is leaving.
TBWA is a huge agency worldwide with all sorts of quasi-independent nooks and crannies such as TBWA\Media Arts Lab which handles Apple. Its West Coast operation still seems to be TBWA\Chiat Day. Maybe TBWA\Lucky Generals (or the other way round – pushing it a bit) will be one of them.
Update
General Nairn tells me this isn’t going to happen – it’s more likely to be a separate entity like 180 or Heimat in Germany. Well he should know. But it still seems to make a lot of sense.
