Thanks to an ever-so-handy “personal e-mail alert” from AdAge.com, I just learned that Motorola is trolling for some hot agency to take on a “branding assignment”, which is sort of adspeak for “AOR Ogilvy is about to get it in the neck, but we want to make sure our ass is covered before we give it to them.”
Can’t say I’m too surprised. I complimented Motorola a while back for an extraordinary event they held in conjunction with this year’s Super Bowl. But at the same time I said their “Moto This and Moto That” advertising was ordinary in the extreme.
I guess they’ve figured out it’s time to flush that campaign, but here’s what I can’t figure.
Why would any hot agency want to take on this assignment knowing they will be presenting their ideas to the same brain trust that approved “Moto This”? Yes, of course, I’m not a dummy, I know money has something to do with it. Plus agencies are hopeless romantics. What was it some wag once said about second marriages? They are “the triumph of hope over experience”? Something like that. Agencies always think they will change the client, that this time it will be different, etc. and so on.
But I’m reminded of something Martin Puris and Ralph Ammirati always believed. They claimed “you become your clients”, which is why they grew somewhat slowly for a shop as hot as they were at the time. And some would say the beginning of the end for that extraordinary shop was when they finally bent that principle and took on the Burger King business. An account that’s been the La Brea tar pits for good agencies for decades.
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