New McCann Worldgroup Australia chief Ben Lilley announces changes in email to all staff – removes layer of middle to senior management
New McCann Worldgroup Australia CEO Ben Lilley – pictured centre with John Mescall and Ashley Farr – has emailed all staff with this announcement:
Team, as you are aware, we have now completed a further and final round of staff structuring changes, following the merging of McCann and SMART earlier this month.
We did not originally anticipate these extra changes and I am sorry for the short-term disruption they may cause. Having spent the last 6 to 9 months though getting to know McCann from afar, and now a very intensive month inside the business, these are changes we now see as a necessary part of our reinvention and reinvigoration of McCann.
For too long, this business has continued to operate as a conventional and traditional agency while the advertising and marketing world rapidly evolves around it. This is not a sustainable operating model. There is no future for traditional agencies in this market, or anywhere else in the world. The traditional agency model – and the layers of management, cost and operating inefficiencies that are part of it – is dead.
Globally McCann is reinventing itself as a transformational agency with digital at the core, under the new leadership of CEO Nick Brien and Chief Creative Officer Linus Karlsson (who was also the co-founder Mother New York). Together Nick and Linus are reinvigorating McCann’s tremendous assets: its rich heritage, enviable roster of blue-chip clients, breadth of expert marketingdisciplines and global network of scale and reach. We too have been charged with reinventing McCann’s offering across Australia and New Zealand. And this restructuring is a necessary, if painful, step in helping us proactively transform our business, bringing innovation, creativity and performance to the forefront of all we do.
It is never a pleasant task to have to disrupt our team like this and it is not something we have done lightly. However, we now have a brilliant combined team of McCann and SMART talent across our Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Auckland offices, working across an equally brilliant portfolio of blue-chip clients. Indeed, in my career as a creative I would have killed to work in an agency with clients like Coca Cola, Holden, L’Oreal, Mastercard, Nestle, Specsavers, Uncle Tobys and Xbox all under the one roof.
With this change we have effectively removed a layer of middle to senior management that will help you all operate more efficiently and at our full strategic and creative potential. Importantly for our clients, this means more direct contact with the people who are actually working on their business, not just their business heads, and a leaner and faster operating structure. Indeed, while the merging of McCann and SMART has created the scale of a larger agency, we have the leadership, processes, structures and DNA of a creative independent, backed by global resources of the world’s largest agency network. This is a virtually unique proposition across Australia and New Zealand and a major competitive advantage as we take our reinvigorated offering to marketinto the new year.
We will not be replacing any of the middle to senior management roles that have been removed from the business. However over the coming weeks and months we will be adding more strategic, creative and digital talent to work directly with our clients. If you would like to recommend anyone you think should be part of the new McCann, now is the time to put them forward.
As always, if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions as a result of these changes, please do not hesitate to let me know.
41 Comments
fark, looks like i need a new career!
If they’re the future, we’re all stuffed!
“We are cutting out those who used to do the work.
And getting the cheaper and inexperienced ones (un)lucky enough to stay, to do more.”
I wonder whether the need to adjust to the non-traditional business model came with non-traditional compensation and bonus structures for the senior management who wielded the trimming hedges.
Noticed that the outgoing sods are called ‘layers’ but the incoming ones are called ‘talents’.
YOU CAN’T FOOL ANYONE McCANNTS
When I grow up I want to work in middle to senior management in a traditional agency….
Lilley’s right about one thing – the current agency model is dead. Too many people, too slow to respond, too much bullshit, too much self-indulgence, far too costly.
If it wasnt before, it sure is now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww9EU-m5gSc&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Just seems like a way of making a PR story about the fact you have duplicated roles when two agencies come together and unfortunately some people have to go – ie 2 CEO’s and you only need one. It’s the ‘end of the traditional model’ it’s just the end of 3 people’s jobs.
So who went? do tell…..
What would you know Lisa?
YES WHO WENT? We might be able to recruit them and reinvent the ‘traditional agency’ model for these ‘new’ times.
You know cut out the inexperienced and minor roles and create an agency where the real intellectual horsepower is brought to the fore across all clients.
That sounds like a real proposition for getting the best work from your agency.
Leadership by email. Nice.
“we will be adding more strategic, creative” so why did they just sack the planning director and the entire creative team, and junior account service?
So who went? do tell…. the people actually who did the work
Every ‘merger’ has a victim and a victor.
Every merger produces a cluster fuck.
Name one agency merger which has survived in its merged form and prospered.
Usually a merger is like two unattractive people at the end of a party. Both want to get laid, both can’t do any better so they go for it. Next morning they pretend it was a planned seduction.
Everybody pretends to believe them.
Sad really. Both sides get fucked though.
No.No.No!
These new people aren’t from the ol’ SOM days, there’s no way they could be any good.Surely, they could have got some EX SOM Staffers!
@ tell me more
It benefits no one to know who got axed.
It’s the lousiest day of their working life so I asked those who do know, not to fuel this nasty request.
What goes around comes around. And one day, it could be yours.
So a little more sensitivity please because karma is a real bitch!
This applies too to those who did the chopping.
Anyone w talent, and who dared questioned questionable & insecure people.
Ben,
Does this mean you place no value at all in senior managers?
The industry’s pre-occupation with a youthful workforce being the only workforce of value is becoming sickening.
McCann’s has a great list of clients whose customers are far more diverse than the youth focus that has been Smart’s focus for so long and becomes a bit cliched, tiresome and limited for clients who are looking for diversity of input & experience from their agency.
With this renewed focus on relatively junior employees being the only ones of value, what is the proposed use by date of current employees. Should they feel nervous at 35….are they over the hill at 40.
Sounds like a blatent case of age discrimination wrapped up in the smoke and mirrors and puffery of having to present a new and improved agency.
But that’s OK, the industry not only tolerates this but actively encourages and applauds it!
“You are fired and we are awesome. Repeat: WE ARE AWESOME. Unlike you, who are fired.”
Stay classy, McSmart.
Don’t know anyone involved.
My instinct is that those that are out are better off out.
And don’t those three look smug.
They have proper ‘I’m alright jack’ smiles.
Guys, reality check, you work at McCanns
So this will be amazing. Because now Smart have all these amazing global clients to do amazing work on. Because Smart do amazing work don’t they? Oh hang on.
Sounds like the new management of McCann’s Melbourne are going to be like the old management of McCann’s Melbourne…pay their people crap, treat their people like shit, completely disrespect their client base…but sit back and take all the profits.
It can only lead to another mess. The old McCann’s have no clients left. Holden hate them. L’Oreal hate them and would leave if they could get out of their global contract. Smart have nothing from this deal.
I’m looking into my crystal ball and seeing day care centers pumping out poo stained creative. Where is this industry heading??
You haven’t created a thing.
You haven’t inspired a single soul.
Corporate Karma always strikes.
If the tax office audits you, do you ask for the youngest tax accountant you can find to handle your case?
If you are in an emergency room with a senior doctor trying to save your life, do you defer to the young intern?
If you find your house has a major structural problem that needs fixing, do you brush aside an experienced builder in favour of his apprentice?
Each of these workplaces have a range of age and experience and each of them have value. McCann’s now believe that it is Smarter to offer clients less as apparently great campaigns are only created by apprentices…for apprentices!
PR an email that informs staff of why their workmates and friends getting sacked.
Bad form guys.
Cheap advertising solutions, just what the world needs. Well at least we know one competitor who will be competing on price rather than creating value through ideas.
Smells like the new Singos. I hope they have a good bar.
actually the bar’s amazing.
An awful place just got worse. It’s been like watching a car crash in slow motion for years now. Every so often another body flies out of the spinning wreck and it hasn’t stopped rolling yet. The final explosion at the bottom of the cliff can’t be far off though. Such a shame because some wonderful people have been through the place.
Seems like this isn’t the first time this has happened,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wuBs7o-6DI&feature=related
Having been around the block with the workings of McCann-Erickson for many, many year, here’s one tip worth banking. In excepting these managements roles, your days are numbered from your very 1st day. A succession plan is being drafted up by the people who put you there right now, same goes for those people, and the people above them too. Take comfort in knowing that at: Hotel California – You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
‘The traditional agency model is dead!
Pot/Kettle/Black.
You’d be ashamed to say you’d look for a job now there wouldn’t you.
Art directors ain’t auditors.
Writers ain’t plumbers.
AE’s ain’t A&E.
But your point is taken nevertheless.
And on the left hand bar you’ll see the list of BestAdJobs, filled with exciting new positions at the New McCa…. oh wait.
I worked at McCann for many years here in Australia and overseas with (mostly) positive memories.
So it has been kind of sad to watch them flail.
But, much like the previous reinventions, I think this one misses the obvious.
Yes, it is true that the kind of agency Mr. Lilley describes is the template for this day and age. But there are heaps of them, all saying the same thing, all fightling to be the new new thing.
Unless McCann explodes itself, it will never be that kind of agency.
But with everyone reinventing into the same space, surely there is an opening for an agency that does not follow the trend. i am sure many clients do not wish to be danced down this road.
McCann had strengths in the network and in strategy. Sometimes they even did good work (the SF office won the Grand Prix a few years back). So surely a more disruptive strategy would be to zag as everyone else zigs.
Spot on, Dodger. Hard working, talented people have been caught in the crossfire – they have been let down by a very long stretch of very bad senior management.
When I joined McCanns 25 years ago it was going through a re-invention.
Wasn’t McCann once an ad agency?
Look, I wish people would just be honest and stop pretending they’re reinventing advertising when all they’re doing is maximising profit.
Badjar played the same game – suggesting they were benevolently training young creatives when really they were accessing cheap labour. It’s no shame, because the kids did get experience before being pushed out the door rather than being paid more, and at least Badjar never pretended to be recreating the wheel.