It may seem obvious but new players who are well known and respected in one field often pop up in another. Sometimes these are pretty straightforward extensions. Marks and Spencer starts a food business; Mont Blanc stretches its pen brand into luxury watches. In the advertising world probably because the top guys have tended to come from within the industry, new models have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Of course the holding company model has emerged, with the groundwork being laid by Phil Geier at Interpublic. This led to a hunt for scale Marks and Spencer open new stores , and a degree of buying around the edges Marks and Spencer open a bank in order to build a more integrated offering. The point is, though if you compare any of the holding companies with a big, old-school full-service agency the difference is not so much in the range of services offered but much more about the scale of the resource and thus the expertise on offer.
And then there are the mavericks, the ones who rewrite the rules in much the same way that Phil Geier and more latterly Sir Martin Sorrell did so successfully. The new players and the mavericks are both well worth watching. The mid-sized gap is starting to attract interest. AdAge has written about an ambitious but currently small ad agency holding company being built from the ground up called CHR Group.
And of course there are more. The company, a paper-energy-plantations-logistics conglomerate, employs 28, people around the world. Not too much heritage in advertising then although Mr Bollore was a long-term investor in Aegis, and rather interestingly is the chairman of Vivendi, the media company that owns Canal Plus and Universal Music Group.
I tend to shudder whenever an advertising operation from whichever side of the fence tells me that they have brought in a genius from way outside the boundaries of our industry. I even remember an agency where the Chairman brought in an interior designer by sheer coincidence his partner to be Creative Director. Generally speaking the transformation takes one of two forms โ either the business collapses, or the genius teleports him or herself somewhere different.
