When Chime, then helmed by the late Tim Bell and part-owned by WPP, bought VCCP (Vallance Carruthers Coleman and Priest) way back in 2005 in a deal worth up to £30m most people thought Bell and co. had lost their marbles.
Chime, built on PR and sports marketing, had tried it once with HHCL Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury) but that had backfired when what had been Campaign’s Agency of the Decade, famous for its Tango and Ronseal work (‘it does just what it says on the tin’) imploded and was folded into one of Sir Martin Sorrell’s many networks.
VCCP though confounded the sceptics even as founders Rooney Carruthers and Ian Priest departed. Chairman Coleman (above) is now retiring after two decades os CEO leaving just planning whizz and OpEd expert Charles Vallance in place. Even so the agency, recently twice MAA’s Agency of the Year, is the UK’s biggest by billings with the most formidable new business record in the industry now that adam&eveDDB is no more (now part of Omnicom’s TBWA.)
VCCP is mostly private equity owned but its owners have left the principals and their colleagues to get on with it, to great and profitable effect. This should have created a model for the rest of the UK’s creative industry: if you need money to expand it’s probably better to go this route rather than than succumb to the blandishments of one of the big holding companies (certainly never a small one) despite the occasional success – adam&eve in Omnicom maybe, BBH in Publicis almost certainly.
Coleman kept a low profile, which was usually the VCCP way, although of his two successors as CEO, Michael Sugden and Julian Douglas, Douglas, a recent IPA president, is better known. But such stability is a rare and valuable thing in creative agencies these days and Coleman epitomises it.
