The (Alternative) Wrap - 1 October 2007 - North West Media News

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The (Alternative) Wrap - 1 October 2007

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By |Tony Murray

Monday, 01 October 2007

Way back in the riot-torn early eighties, I was somehow convinced that I looked particularly nifty in cowboy boots and flares whilst studying for my “A” Levels at Loreto VI Form in Moss Side.

Our forward-looking English teacher at the time, one Rory Delargy, posited the notion that society no longer had a consensus on anything. After wracking our almost immediately post-pubescent brains, we came up with “incest” and “cannibalism” as two topics that most people broadly agreed on as “bad things”.

Not much of a basis to found a society on I think you’ll agree.

The Qualities of Mercer

To that insalubrious list I was, in the mid-nineties, tempted to add the words “Grant Mercer.” Few media figures, before or after (with the possible exception of Geoff Spellar and Morton Speyer) have united the North West media and marketing community in quite the same way. For a brief few years, the North West industry spoke with one voice on matters Mercer and the tone was far from complimentary.

It was as if everything about Grantley was calculated to up the collective tempo of the already-overstrained pacemakers of the First Friday Club and its associates. The merest uncaptioned pics of the leather-panted Mercer and his “girly” hairstyle was enough to rouse the usually slumbering FFC members into an apoplexy last seen when the cheese course was dropped from the monthly lunches on cost grounds in the late Spring of 1972.

But it wasn’t just his attire and tonsorial preferences that set the nostril hairs of Neil McGeehan and co a quivering. Mr Mercer’s characteristic high-speed wide-boy patter and astonishing self-belief (legend has it that he was the only person ever to rate his own performance as 10 out of 10 in a JWT Manchester failed pitch post-mortem) were all used to ‘grate’ effect.

Mercer

But, I suspect the most irritating thing about the mercurial Mr Mercer was that he was effective and successful. He took over as new business director of JWT Manc in the early days of Andrew Stothert’s relatively brief tenure as chief exec of the agency.

This was a time when JWT was making the difficult transition from life under the legendary Geoff Spellar, a figure who had dominated both his own agency and the North West media landscape to an almost supernatural degree.

Stothert’s ascendancy into Spellar’s role was in no way assured. A number of other figures (notably deputy chief exec Jim Smith who went on to found Clear in something of a huff) had half an expectation of taking the top role.

When Stothert was appointed he inherited a divided agency and one that had lost its positioning – it didn’t have the creative reputation of BDH, nor the solid below-the-line (especially DM) base of Bonis. Into this mix came Mr Mercer and confounded critics by starting to win business left, right and centre.

But it wasn’t to last. Stotty and Mercy fell out among rumours that the latter had demanded the MD title as apt reward for his continued services. With Astley House swiftly un-Mercer-ed, the remaining Stothisttas were keen to bury the periwigged one’s reputation, but his success at JWT had not gone unnoticed…

Mercer was wooed by a number of the leading lights outside of London (and Yellow M!). The mighty BRAHM in Leeds came particularly close to appointing him as MD, but got cold feet allegedly in light of the fact that they thought his presence might ultimately prove disruptive. Hah, they should’ve really twigged that one before the third interview!

So, with breath bated all round, the agency world waited for news of just what Mr Mercer would do next. When the news broke that GM was joining MKP, the aforementioned agency world collectively exhaled and said, as one: “Sorry? Where was that again?”

To say that MKP was little known at the time would be something akin to billing Iraq as a difficult market for time-share salesmen these days. It was widely perceived that Grant, far from fulfilling his lofty proclamations and ambitions, had returned to Princess Street with his tail between his legs and settled for a much lower profile role in a relatively unknown agency.

But, the disruption that BRAHM had feared was soon visited upon MKP and pretty rapidly only Grant and the agency’s founder, Martin Kemp (who once wrote a song for the Buzzcocks apparently) were left from the pre-Mercered agency. Grant did what he always does - created a buzz about the agency, secured a number of new accounts (notably in the financial and telecommunications fields) and soon there was talk (largely jumpstarted by Grant admittedly!) of mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships.

This route led ultimately to the Agency Nobody Had Ever Heard Of becoming a prime acquisition target for the mighty BDH and, no doubt, a huge bag of cash each for Messrs Kemp and Mercer.

So after a brief sojourn as “Cable and Wireless’s creative director for the Caribbean” (surely a business card to die for), Grant is now back in Manc and back in agencyland as chief executive of Dinosaur.

The combination of Grant and Dinosaur’s founders, Chris Lloyd and Mark Beaumont (two of the nicest blokes in the business by the way) is an interesting one.

Dinosaur has established its position as one of the North West’s leading design houses almost by accident. Dinosaur has long eschewed traditional agencies structures with Chris and Mark remaining as creative directors, rather than appointing a managing director.

Dinosaur has relied on the strength of its creative proposition and word of mouth support to develop the business. So how much will that change with Grant on board? “Vastly” is a word that springs to mind.

The challenge will be for Dinosaur to retain its existing strengths, whilst accommodating Mercer’s zeal, ambition, undoubted energy and a streak of ruthlessness that I suspect may well be alien to the agency’s existing proprietors.

The joy for designers working a design agency headed by creative types is that the quality of the work is at least as important (if not more so) than the balance sheet. Certain lucrative accounts (particularly in the retail and financial services sectors) are spurned on the grounds that they would destroy the ethos of the agency and undermine its creative credentials. How swayed the new chief exec will be by such considerations remains to be seen.

I for one welcome the return of Mr Mercer. The North West media and marketing scene will be livelier and more entertaining as a result. Grant may be many things, but even his Greatest Detractor (a widely contested position!) could never accuse him of being dull or disinteresting.

Love For Sale

Love’s tongue-in cheek denials that it is being wooed by BDH, put me somehow in mind of the early days of another North West design house – True North.

Martin Carr, the managing director of True North, was a long standing mate of mine going back to the very first Cream awards which he produced whilst an account director at Henderson Grime. He had just started True North. The agency then had hardly any clients, very little money and only three members of staff, but wanted a bit of publicity.

Purely by chance, Faulds Advertising in Edinburgh had just completed a management buy-out at the time and its new proprietor, Dennis Chester, had told the marketing and Scottish press that he was looking to buy an agency in Manchester.

So Martin and I drafted a letter denying that True North (“despite widespread industry speculation”) had “ongoing talks” with Faulds about an acquisition. Well, this denial made the media section of the Manchester Evening News, a lead story in Adline and the Drum and even Campaign featured an obviously bewildered Chester denying he had been sighted outside True North’s headquarters. Not bad coverage for a nascent, cash-strapped agency with only one client.

So is Love doing the same? Certainly, the arrival of Mercer (the first big hitter to sign up with Manchester’s new wave of highly creative design agencies) will have registered resoundingly in the boardrooms of the likes of Love and True North, so they will all be keen to up their standing in the PR stakes.

Then again, it wouldn’t do BDH any harm to be seen to be in talks with Love, arguably the strongest creative brand trading in town these days. By all accounts, BDH made a bit of a bollocks of its brief flirtation with The Chase (prior to the Chase being acquired by Hasgrove plc), but the acquisition of Love would fit in with TBWA’s policy of buying up leading players in various marketing communications to extend its North West offering (witness its purchase of MKP and Staniforth PR to name but two).

Personally, I think it’s a bit too early for Love to be trading its independence for “guidance” from New York, especially as said guidance can’t be said to be a huge boon to BDH at present. It’s not so long ago that Alistair Sim and the boys from Love were celebrating their independence from Hughie Clarke Williams, their overlord at Tucker-Clarke Williams. I can’t see them hocking their birthright right now unless the pottage in question is of such of particularly pecuniary appeal as to render all resistance redundant.

BDH(H)

Other random musings that struck me this week was the sad news of the passing of Ken Bowden, one of the four founders of BDH (he was the B in that long superseded acronym “Bowden Dyble Hayes”). Interestingly, the agency would actually have been called BDHH, but for the fact that its launch team felt that the name Bowden Dyble Hayes Higginbotham (the maiden name of Win Offland) was just too Northern-sounding and would hamper the business.

Hasgrove – Quilty as Charged?

Not Northern-sounding at all is the ever-acquisitive Hasgrove plc, which I always seem to need reminding is the holding company of some of the North West’s foremost marketing communications companies (notably The Chase and Connectpoint) and not, as it sounds to me for some reason, a manufacturer of greeting cards. I reckon their Hallmark-style logo is to blame.

Hasgrove’s latest acquisitions include Pavilion and Odyssey Interactive and the simultaneous announcement that last week’s Wrap-er, Liane Grimshaw, is now MD of Pavilion. What happened to former MD Andrew Thomas then, Liane? He was a nice bloke, well for a Welshman.

They worry me, these cash-rich publicly listed groups that go around the regions randomly stitching together agencies with the air of bespoke quilt makers to the marketing communications industry. In recent years we’ve had the likes of 10 Group that mutated into Media Square then merged with Equanim doing exactly this and then Hasgrove following the same well-worn route. Despite the growth of all these various agencies that are haphazardly bolted together, they never seem to re-discover or maintain the vitality of their original independent incarnations.

This is despite the frequent assertions of financial growth and stability that the parent companies are obliged to post. All of these shunted-together agency groups, their paper prosperity aside, put me in mind of the comment John Cleese once used to describe David Frost’s career: “risen without trace”.

Bird Appointment

Thompson

Not an accusation you could level at Charlotte Thompson – a managing partner at Bonis at 28 and now at 34 the new development director at BJL, apparently the agency’s first new board appointment for six years.

It also seems something of a change in management policy for Sunlight House’s finest. I’m not saying that at one time BJL’s senior management were a little superannuated, but if you looked up “grizzled” in a reputable on-line dictionary there was a live link to a webcam in their boardroom.

But obviously, all of that has changed, so to honour this change, I’ve decided to launch a new competition: “Top Boardroom Birds and Blokes”.

To take part in this competition you need to email a photograph of said Top Boardroom Bird or Bloke to tonymurray37@hotmail.com .

Said Top Boardroom Bird or Bloke must be a board director of a publishing, PR, advertising, PR, design or media buying company based in the North West of England.

Entries from new media companies will not be accepted on the grounds that “hey they’re not very likely to win now, are they?”

Nominees must be “comely of visage” (Birds) or “finely chiseled” (Blokes).

The judge’s decision is final, though open to subversion through financial and other inducements.

Finally, you cannot enter yourself (unless you are employed in a PR company and then it is something of an occupational hazard).

Tony Murray used to laugh derisively at press releases from marketing communications companies for a living and then only print stories in Adline et al from people who’d bought him a good lunch that month.

Now he teaches in West Beijing and prides himself on learning a maximum of one new Chinese word a month. He now knows 23 of them and not all of them are beer-related.

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