Ad Agency

PACO Collective (PACO) announced that Flawless Beauty, LLC (Flawless), the new haircare line co-owned by Hollywood actress Gabrielle Union, has selected it as Social Media Agency of Record. PACO will be responsible for all social media efforts including social strategy, content management and creation, social engagement, and blogger management.

I was fortunate to have a great talk the other day with Kevin McNair, Britvic’s marketing director, in which he asserted the need for marketers to have the financial prowess of a CFO and the insight and business acumen to act like a CEO, as reflected in the headline for our interview.

Sometimes revolutions sneak up on you. For ages, boring bloggers (this one anyway) have been going on about the need for change, the coming of the transparent era, how the media agencies’ future resides with planners, how buying will become increasingly automated and on and on and on. And guess what? Suddenly it all seems to be starting to happen!  By Brian Jacobs / The Cog Blog

News that the Department of Justice is investigating “bid rigging” by ad agencies to favor in-house agency facilities highlights how competitive bidding works in the world of advertising and exposes a problematic industry practice, one that undermines the trust between agencies, clients and vendors.  By Alex Blum

Pólvora Advertising announced the hiring of Jon A. Andrade as General Manager.

Madison Avenue Manslaughter outlines the hows and whys of steadily declining fees, increased workloads, diminishing industry perception and morale, kickback scandals and opacity characterizing relationships among advertisers, holding companies, media buying companies and creative ad agencies.

If one were to equate the difference between the 4As and the ANA — the two associations which govern the ad/media agency and brand marketer communities respectively — to the differences between the Confederacy and Union states, the case for, or against, transparency should become abundantly clear.  By David Smith and Tim McHale

LatinWorks announced the hiring of Leo Olper to the position of SVP and Managing Director. 

Why advertisers and agencies should improve how they work together to maintain a healthy, loving and productive relationship.  By Bruno Gralpois, Agency Mania Solutions

Miami-based creative shop Alma Ad announced an expansion of their management team after winning 9 new accounts that fueled the agency’s growth by one-third in just two years.

Paco Olavarrieta has joined d expósito & Partners as a Partner and Chief Creative Officer. The minute we found out, we offered him the opportunity of a Q&A with HispanicAd.com. Here, creative guru Paco Olavarrieta speaks about the U.S. Hispanic Market, Creativity, Total Market, the present and the future of our industry, salsa dancing, red wine and more.

HispanicAd.com has learned that Paco Olavarrieta, the award-winning creative leader and a trailblazer in both the U.S. Hispanic Market and the multicultural arena, has been named a new partner and Chief Creative Officer at independent agency d expósito & Partners, LLC.

Executives who know how to set up and manage agency relationships are best positioned to improve their marketing ROI.

2016 was  rife with stories pointing out the decay of advertising. The saddest of those suggest we have lost our way. If so, the reason would be that the landscape has changed.

Sir Martin Sorrell announced at a conference I attended toward the end of last year that Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) was the biggest threat to the marketing and advertising industries that would bite in the next year, 2017.  To be honest, I’m sure this is a worry for the country’s highest-paid executive, that huge mega contracts don’t just roll over but are instead replaced by brands commissioning work as and when needed. But what I’m discovering from smaller agencies is that it could be a godsend.

Since the inception of our nation — and as recently as 2013 — lawmakers have periodically eyed advertising as a potential source of tax revenues because its long-term effects can make it seem more like an investment than an expense. After studying a wide array of research on the issue, two professors from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles have concluded that there is no basis for changing the current treatment of advertising as a short-term expense.  By Erich Decker-Hoppen, director of communications for MASB

Integrated communications firm Elasticity today unveiled Elasticity Multicultural, a new practice group led by Alejandro “Alex” Duplan.

Coral Gables based Zubi Advertising has been sold to WPP Group owned GTB.  With this acquisition WPP has consolidated the entire Ford Motor Company account under its roster of agencies.

After a long period of talk and nice conference discussions, is the start of 2017 finally turning out to be the start of really doing something about transparency? With today’s massive P&G announcement, it would certainly appear so. We’ve had a lot of talk and it’s probably fair to say that media agencies have had to be, shall we say, “inventive” with how they keep margins up — but could we now be seeing a year of clamp-downs?

So O&M is tearing down the financial walls that separate the different operating groups within it, starting in the U.S., with a promise that all other markets will follow over the course of the year.