WPP breakaway Myrtle lands AAR campaign
The AAR, which matches clients with suitable ad agencies, has hired newly-founded communications agency Myrtle to run its own marketing campaign.
Myrtle has been launched by five former members of WPP Group’s Relationship Marketing Group, who announced they were leaving in August to create the start-up (MW August 26 1999).
AAR managing director Martin Jones refused to disclose how much he would spend on the campaign, but says: “We need to know how to reach a group of consumers [clients seeking ad agencies] who are constantly bombarded with offers they don’t need on a regular basis. We appointed Myrtle after they approached us, as I’m a believer in hunger and happy to encourage new enterprises. Also it was not going to upset anybody – no one will accuse us of favouritism on this.”
Myrtle client services director Alexandra Goldsmith says: “We want to produce creative work in the form of communications that are useful to the people receiving them, rather than intrusive.”
The start-up has also been appointed by Greenpeace UK, and claims two other unnamed clients, one of which is a dot-com.
Joint creative directors Marcus Codrington Fernandez and Brian Millar, who held the same positions at RMG, claim to be the brains behind IBM’s “Solutions for a small planet” campaign while they were at Ogilvy & Mather New York.
