Langdon unveils radical shake-up
McCann-Erickson is creating a specialist strategy group, launching a relationship marketing company and abolishing its planning department as part of chief executive Ben Langdon’s long-awaited radical agency restructure.
The moves are designed to create a more integrated agency and shift the multinational away from an image that is dull, safe and lacking creativity. This is in part due to a client list that includes Unilever, Gillette and Nestlé.
Langdon, managing director and chief executive, has put his plan into action after six months in the job. Having recruited Gary Betts and Malcolm Green as executive creative directors and moved Jerry Green to deputy chairman (MW December 6), Langdon told staff last night (Tuesday) of the changes, which may lead to redundancies among administrative staff.
But the “Night of the Long Knives”, which some observers predicted after Langdon’s arrival in July, has not occurred. Instead he has shifted resources and people to change the agency’s emphasis.
“By switching the spend from one area to another we can put more resources into creativity and strategy and still make our margins,” says Langdon.
The below-the-line agency McCann Communications is to be broken up and integrated into the main company. Its direct marketing resources will be transferred to a new agency, McCann Relationship Marketing London. The McCann RM brand will be exploited globally. McCann’s Neural Networks division, which specialises in data warehousing, will also fold into McCann RM.
Langdon has also taken control of the youth marketing agency, Magic Hat, which previously operated as part of McCann Europe.
The Strategy Group, combining full-time staff and ad hoc consultants, is a response to the growing threat from external strategic advisors, including management consultants, design groups and branding specialists.
David Clifford, the former CDP vice-chairman, Barry Ross of the Strategy Research Group and the managing director of the Henley Centre in Ireland, Gerard O’Neil, have been hired as consultants. Langdon hopes to recruit further consultants by January.
The Marketing Week reputations survey (MW November 22) revealed that over 40 per cent of marketing directors seek strategic advice from other sources than their ad agencies. McCann dropped five places in the league table – less than five per cent of the marketing directors surveyed said they would approach the agency for strategic advice.
“In five years agencies will get a brief and be asked to make no more than the pictures as increasingly they are divorced from the intellectual high ground,” he says. “The inbalance in planning departments has created a generation of neutered account executives. They are bag carriers in suits with smiling teeth who believe that any strategic decisions have to be passed to the planners.”
The agency’s planners will be moved into dedicated account teams.
