Saving...
Coca-Cola is continuing to rejigger the agencies working on the Sprite brand, the latest move being tapping Johannes Leonardo to lead Sprite creative globally.
The previous global lead was Publicis Groupe-backed Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which recently lost the North American piece of the business to Leo Burnett. BBH won the business three years ago following a shootout against Wieden & Kennedy; at the time Coca-Cola had just decided to reinvest in the brand, which had languished for years with little advertising.
BBH in Shanghai continues to work on Sprite and it may also handle project work for the brand.
A Coca-Cola spokeswoman confirmed that it tapped Johannes Leonardo, which is backed by WPP, while BBH declined to comment.
It’s possible Johannes Leonardo’s first work for the brand won’t debut until 2013, given that a campaign from BBH, “Uncontainable Game,” isn’t slated to conclude until early next year. The campaign, which highlights basketball, is running in 27 countries, making it the largest global campaign Sprite has ever executed.
As part of that campaign, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James and a slate of NBA players hailing from outside the U.S. are serving as coaches of “Team Intense” and “Team Sudden.” Players can submit videos of their “sudden” or “intense” moves online to be judged by a panel of experts. Ultimately, two teams of 12 amateur players each will be selected to compete in the “Uncontainable Game” over NBA All-Star weekend in 2013. In February, Sprite told Ad Age it planned to carry the program into at least 2014.
“We have seen a new trajectory for Sprite in the past couple of years,” Michael Mathews, Coca-Cola’s VP-noncola sparkling beverages, said at the time. “And we think we can expect more out of the brand. Our brand-health scores are up.”
Las year, Sprite grew share and volume by 0.1% in the U.S., according to Beverage Digest. The brand, however, is larger in China than in the U.S. It is mainland China’s No. 1 soft drink, though it ranks only sixth in the U.S. Globally, Sprite reported 4% growth in the first quarter.
Spending on the brand has declined markedly from the mid-2000s when it spent nearly $30 million on annual measured media, according to Ad Age’s Leading National Advertisers report. Sprite spent just $9 million on measured media in the U.S. last year.
Contributing: Rupal Parekh
Donna Summer, the “Queen of Disco,” who died of cancer today at age 63, worked hard for the money. Her disco megahits did more than flood dance floors and top the charts; Ms. Summer’s songs were used in plenty of commercials, well after the peak of her popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. As recently as 2011, a cover of Ms. Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” from her second album of the same name, was used in Diesel’s “Loverdose” commercial. The remixed track was sold by Diesel as a special-edition track. The same song was used in a 2007 Citroen ad and a 2000 Coca-Cola spot. The sultry song was also, perhaps a little more appropriately, used in a 1992 Belgian commercial for Durex Condoms, featuring a rabbit bungee-jumping off a bridge. Her music was heard in a 2009 Flora by Gucci commercial, which used Ms. Summer’s “I Feel Love,” from her 1977 album “I Remember Yesterday.” Ms. Summer rerecorded the track for the ad, and it was remixed by Chris Cunningham. The commercial went on to win a Gold Cannes Film Lion in 2009 for best use of music. The versatility of the song — or perhaps the scope of marketers’ imaginations — is incredible. It was also used in a 2004 commercial for job site Monster, out of Deutsch, Los Angeles, as the accompaniment to fast-paced shots of people getting ready for work. Ms. Summer’s 1983 female-empowerment anthem “She Works Hard for the Money” was featured in a Burger King commercial, which advertised a Whopper Jr. sandwich for just 89 cents. “Hot Stuff” was another marketer favorite. That track appeared in a 1979 commercial in Australia for Four’n Twenty Pies, as well as a 2003 Capital One spot and a 2003 Garnier Nutrisse ad. Heard Ms. Summer’s songs in any other ads? Tell us in the comments. RIP, Donna.
Henry Ford is often credited with saying that if he had asked consumers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. Whether he actually said that or not, it’s a great reminder that successful businesses look to the future. It’s ironic that GM, one of Ford Motor Company’s biggest competitors, demonstrated its eye on the past by pulling approximately $10 million worth of Facebook ad spend. The timing of this move is suspect, given its proximity to Facebook’s IPO and GM’s history of working over its publishers.
This move has brought GM more attention than it’s had in a while, but rather than raising doubts as to the value of Facebook, the move really brings into focus GM’s inability to amplify brand and consumer advocacy of its products on the world’s largest social networking platform.
With this move, one of the world’s largest advertisers is trying to say that Facebook advertising doesn’t work. The truth is that Facebook isn’t broken; GM is. And the automaker’s movement of ad dollars to other media channels offers a short-term solution to a long-term business problem.
Putting its $10 million into more traditional online advertising channels such as search and display ads will probably pay short-term dividends for GM, which will only obscure the automaker’s failure to recognize the best way to utilize Facebook. Rather than focus on selling cars on Facebook, the brand should have looked at how to connect with its best advocates to influence purchase behavior across the social graph. Facebook’s true value lies in the power to build loyal fans and then message them as well as their friends to build consumer relationships, with the ultimate goal of rebuilding the brand as well as selling cars. GM’s strategy clearly missed that step.
GM will reportedly continue to invest nearly $30 million to maintain a Facebook presence and develop applications, which may turn some of the brand’s 3.9 million fans into brand advocates. That’s an expensive investment, though, for such a small and disengaged fan base. GM’s chief competitor, Ford, has 10.2 million fans. If Ford consistently messages and engages with these fans and their friends through paid advertising that demonstrates the benefit of a Ford, it will continue to build brand advocates, of a kind that no amount of GM advertising can sway. When it comes time for a new car, rather than research new brands, those brand loyalists will go straight to their Ford dealership; GM won’t even be in their consideration set.
If GM were to take a more progressive approach, it would move social to the very beginning of its sales and product planning strategy, investing in using the platform for consumer research, using paid ads to engage and acquire more fans, and then engaging with those fans and their friends to turn them into genuine advocates. While the automaker complained of its inability to attribute success, we’ve seen consistent data showing that Facebook is best at using online behavior to drive offline behavior, and that Facebook fans influence others and minimize comparison price shoppers, as seen commonly through search and other comparison shopping sites. According to Forrester Research’s “The Facebook Factor” report, fans are also very likely to recommend a brand to friends. By leveraging Facebook advertising, brands can actually connect with fans over time to build loyalty and long-term sales — not only with the single buyer, but also with families of consumers and their friends.
GM’s consumer loyalty problems certainly didn’t begin with Facebook. GM ranked 12th out of 13 automotive brands in Consumer Reports’ latest automotive scorecard, and recalled 50,000 vehicles as recently as April. If the brand was losing ground to competitors on social, it was probably wise to look for a new battleground. It may be smart to abandon Facebook altogether for now, and reinvest its money in making a car that actually appeals to consumers.
Rather than ask what Facebook has done to help GM, GM should have looked at what it was doing to engage its fans. Diverting money into other online channels may sell cars in the short term, but will fail in the longer term, as consumers spend more and more of their time on social platforms like Facebook. Don’t forget that brands used to raise their eyebrows at the idea of search advertising, too. Brands that are investing heavily in Facebook now — such as Starbucks, Coke, Kraft, Zynga and Groupon — will reap long-term rewards.
Facebook’s value comes from its ability to help brands build long-term loyalty, and $10 million is a tiny fraction of GM’s $3 billion annual ad budget. If GM isn’t investing in building brand loyalists, then the automaker and its dealers will miss the value of Facebook, and will ultimately lose resonance with consumers.
Long before the digital age, all business was local and social. Customer engagement was paramount. Shopkeepers, barbers and Avon ladies alike intuitively knew that their ability to connect with customers would often determine whether a purchase would be made. They understood that building long-standing relationships with customers would result in repeat visits and loyalty. For many successful proprietors, this meant knowing customers by name, remembering their likes and dislikes and being on hand to answer product questions. Years before founding Walmart, at the age of 26, Sam Walton put these principles to work as a variety store manager in Newport, Ark. On stage at fMC (Facebook’s marketing conference) earlier this year, Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn evoked the earlier era: ” . . . a retailer would be a pillar in the community. [Retailers] would know not only everybody, but their likes, what they thought was interesting, what new products they might be interested in.”
What happened to the shopkeeper who cared about customers? The answer is simple: technology. Technology has enabled two enormous changes to sweep across retail: national mega-chains and more recently, e-commerce. Both have played key roles in driving down prices by introducing greater transparency, efficiency and economies of scale. But this has come at a cost: the customer experience now feels mass-produced. A central theme of fMC was how social media provides a way to put a human touch back into business. Facebook executives, including David Fischer, Mike Hoefflinger and Chris Cox, took the stage to explain how Facebook’s Timeline redesign provides an opportunity to “reintermediate” a human touch into online interactions with customers. Less advertising, more engagement. Less cookie-cutter, more authentic. Less corporate, more local. The biggest retail organizations around the world are slowly awakening to this sea change. Quinn and his team at Walmart have recommitted to a “social-local strategy” that would have made Sam Walton proud. Walmart has launched thousands of Facebook pages, one for each of its brick-and-mortar stores. Designated store employees who have received special training on social media are responsible for maintaining the pages. They will respond to customer questions and issues, share targeted local promotions, and discuss town news or events, such as the local football game. Quinn says social media is enabling Walmart to “go back to the future” by providing an authentic local customer experience, but at scale. A growing number of brick-and-mortar retailers from Lululemon and Home Depot to 24 Hour Fitness and Quiznos are embracing social-local. According to a report published last month from Mainstay Salire, local Facebook pages already outperform corporate pages by a factor of 40. Disintermediation is fine for highly commoditized brands and products, but if you want to build brand differentiation and customer loyalty, there are no shortcuts to authentic engagement. Certainly, social-local requires greater coordination than having brand pages alone, but like anything, what you get out of social media is proportional to what you put in. Retail e-commerce sales topped $61.8B in Q4 of 2011, but this still amounts to less than 6% of total retail sales. Embracing a social-local strategy allows retailers to capitalize on the shift in consumer behavior toward digital, social, and mobile technologies at the store level, where most of the transactions are still taking place, even while investing in growing e-commerce channels over time. The old shopkeepers, barber, and Sam Walton had it right all along. Customers want to be treated like real people, not an audience segment. Having 20 million fans secures bragging rights for a brand, but from the perspective of the fan, it’s far more engaging and rewarding to be part of a smaller, more intimate community. Today, social-local is a really good idea. As more of your customers get smartphones, check in to your store locations, and begin demanding authenticity with a human touch, it will soon become mandatory.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Clara Shih Clara Shih is CEO of Hearsay Social.
Yesterday, the U.S. news media sent a powerful message to the world — General Motors is pulling its entire Facebook ad spend and going to tune out more than 900 million users of the network to focus on the fan base that they can message for free. The headline of the day was that Facebook is not as effective an advertising vehicle to drive messaging as it had originally been deemed by GM.
Considering the size of the audience and the frequency in which they engage, it seems hard to believe GM is going to prematurely and permanently check out from the social network’s paid marketing. But rather than amaze you with my ability to create charts and infographics worthy of your newsfeed, I’ve elected to focus on the factors that would lead to a marketer’s decision to discontinue buying Facebook ads — and the things that are critical to understand if they want to stay and get it right.
Facebook marketing for a big brand is hard. It’s even harder in a category like auto, when success and sales come from a well-connected network of dealers who have perfected the art of selling and luring generations of buyers to take test drives. Legacy practices, partners’ CRM and brand tracking, backed by a billion-dollar ad budget, tend to create an organization that can prove results based on what it wants to. But the impact and variability of creativity is hard to measure and almost impossible to attribute to any single channel in a sure-fire manner. The real questions we should be asking ourselves, before we blame Facebook for GM’s marketing effectiveness, are were they doing it right and were they measuring it right?
Auto will be a big spending category for Facebook if marketers can get it right. The silos with the walls of auto are strong. However, I have confidence that a marketer can break through and turn the opportunity into a powerful company-wide marketing advantage. Here are the areas in which Facebook should see big advertising spend from auto marketers who get it right.
Brand Marketing: A casting call for great content Companies like General Motors spend billions each decade on brand marketing. TV, sponsorships, street teams, radio, digital and outdoor are all part of the “marketing mix.” The wrong content or idea, across any of these media, renders them ineffective (and can amplify failure). However, the right concept, properly executed on Facebook, sees ad dollars amplify success. The too often cited Old Spice campaign is an example of how Facebook and social media can amplify marketing value, if the right high-quality content is present. Great content spreads faster with ad spend — no infographic required.
The real money for Facebook is at the dealer level. This year, we launched a powerful new technology to help corporate marketers activate their dealers or franchisees at the local level. Why? Successful social marketing, for categories like auto, is local because sales are local. How the dealer and the local salesperson promote themselves and interact with their local community will become a competitive advantage to the companies who get it right. Local dealers and dealer groups alike should be spending money on locally targeted advertising to drive local relationships, events and test drives. This should be a massive part of the local marketing mix and represent significant global spending.
Loyalty and social CRM are not #FREE When a brand publishes a story to its fans and followers on Facebook, it reaches a subset of that audience. The size of the subset depends on the level of engagement that the community experiences. To reach everyone with an optimal frequency, you need to spend ad dollars to amplify your message and leverage the social graph. You would never run an email CRM campaign to reach only a subset of your database, so why would you do that on social?
Measurement is key. Ok, so now you know what to do, how are we going to measure these tactics and hold both Facebook and your agencies accountable, you ask?
Brand Marketing: It’s not about clicks. It’s about developing measures (which we have) that understand and track the reach, frequency and impact of the message across Facebook and social media. Paid media needs to drive this as sharing spreads the content and increases the marketing ROI, provided it is good. If the content sucks, don’t expect anyone to share it and the amplification opportunity is lost. Even worse, if you are not engaging your fans, they will also be lost.
Dealer: Once you give the dealers technology and content, understanding metrics — ranging from test drive requests to event attendance — become easier. This can all be tracked and contained in a central dashboard.
Loyalty: Facebook will only be one part of a loyalty platform. Product quality, service and dealer experience, among many other factors, all play into effectiveness. Survey- based research can help brands like GM understand how much more fans spend on their favorite brands than do non-fans.
Remember, even though Facebook’s IPO is looming, it’s very early in the game. The stock will go up and down. Facebook will adapt and shift based on what is working and what isn’t. It will launch new products, some of which will work, others that won’t. At the end of the day, it remains important for every CMO to understand Facebook and to think and act holistically, by having an effective paid and earned media strategy for the web platform that hosts 900-plus million people. In the words from our past: Don’t blame the channel, blame the message.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Publishers are bleeding themselves dry, giving up the very customer data that holds the promise of their continued relevance in the digital age. Publishers struggle to monetize online users, as the dimes from digital will never replace the analog dollars they no longer receive from print. They see social sharing as a way to drive page views on their traffic-starved websites. But many of these social-sharing tools are actually data vampires. They suck all the value out of the visitor by harvesting his data, and leave the publisher with an empty husk of a site visit. These tools are offered free to publishers. The siren song of easy and free traffic lures publishers in. But what they give up in exchange is their livelihood. After all, these tools are owned by advertising networks. Sharing tools target users by tracking their sharing activity from all of the websites that have their widget deployed. They collect data from the publisher’s site and other sites about what users like, share, read, click on, etc. Then, free sharing tools buy ad inventory wherever they can find those audiences. That means they can buy remnant inventory at pennies on the dollar, add their own targeting layer and sell that inventory at premium prices. If the inventory happens to be on a publisher’s site where their share widget lives, well so be it (yes, they will undercut you with your own visitors, on your own pages). Instead of charging for their product, the sharing tools just take the publisher’s user data. They’ll hand the publisher a few pennies in remnant inventory fees for the privilege of showing their ad unit, but that’s cold comfort when it’s selling at a 90% discount. Recently, these vampires have gone one step further — they “conveniently” offer the ability for users to register to make sharing even easier. Of course, the user creates an account with the sharing tool and connects her social accounts, like Facebook and Twitter. This means that the vampire now has access to all of the social-profile data of the publisher’s visitors. The share tool can now drive even further targeting and segmentation using the demographic data, as well as rich social graph data and interest information from the social networks. Not only do the publishers lose the brand affinity, and all of the customer data about their audience, they lose the entire customer account. The very lifeblood of the modern content business — visitor data — is served up on a platter for the sharing tool to collect and monetize. How could something this blatantly bad for publishers ever happen? This scheme is so smooth that the mark has not even noticed. So many cliches apply here that it spins heads: there’s no such thing as a free lunch; you get what you pay for; and, of course, if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. The reality is that the internal organization of publishers actively work against ferreting out data leakage. The advertising sales team is focused on selling premium inventory. The content team is responsible for the site layout and the technology tools that live on the page. The content team is responsible for delivering page views, so they have an incentive to drive traffic. The ad sales team, which is starving for targeting data, does not have any say in what data are given up to these data vampires. This problem is only beginning to be understood in the publishing world. A publisher recently commented that most publishers “under-invest in the technology product that runs the website.” But many inside the organization are hamstrung to effect change. The solution is for publishers to take control of their own sharing functionality by ensuring that sharing is done within a brand context. Also, publishers must require that the data from sharing activity and the individual user profile data are stored for the benefit of the publisher. That data has significant implications for improving CPMs, especially considering that 47% of publishers admit they can’t respond to RFPs for lack of targeting. In addition, it has broader implications for publishers looking to engage audiences — from commenting; to content recommendations; to leveraging the social graph, data from sharing can improve the site experience in multiple ways. Some publishers have started negotiating data leakage policies with their onsite technology vendors, and this is a good first step. But, ultimately, if a technology provider makes money through advertising, it is a competitor to publishers. And it should not be allowed on the page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Even though Siri was born in California, a state where more than one-third of the population is Hispanic or Latino, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant doesn’t speak Spanish.
With Siri its major selling point, the iPhone 4S has flown off the shelves, despite running the risk of alienating the U.S. ethnic group most gaga for smartphones: Hispanics, who are more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to own them.
Zooey Deschanel and Siri speak English to each other in an ad.
Even so, some think Apple stumbled in not including a Spanish-language Siri when it launched in October.
“I have several friends who purchased iPhones for family members and then returned them because Siri doesn’t speak Spanish,” said one Hispanic media exec. “At first they thought the phone was broken. Then they said, ‘Siri es una estupida.’ “
And though Siri has starred in Apple’s ads for iPhones in the U.S., she can’t be part of its sell in China because she also doesn’t speak Mandarin — the No. 1 language by volume of speakers.
That doesn’t seem to be hurting iPhone’s popularity there, though. Apple grossed more than $10 billion in Asia-Pacific in the first quarter, second only to the Americas $13 billion. Apple earned $8.8 billion in Europe in the first quarter.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to English, Siri speaks German, Japanese, French and even celebrity. (“Siri, remind me to put the gazpacho on ice.”) Apple has said that additional languages, including Chinese, Korean, Italian and Spanish, are on the way this year.
“Apple has a roadmap and has to get all the bugs out,” said Steven Wolfe Pereira, exec VP at MediaVest and managing director of its multicultural unit, MV42.
Apple has long used software like Siri to make its devices more appealing. For example, iTunes drove rabid demand for iPods. Similarly, iTunes was available in the U.S. first, then Europe and then elsewhere worldwide.
It looks like Flipboard; aggregates and posts content like Reddit; and presents news visually, like Newsmap. And it’s from Intel. Launching today, Intel iQ is a social-publishing platform and the tech giant’s latest content-marketing experiment.
Intel iQ is a new social-publishing platform and the latest content-marketing experiment from the technology giant.
IQ resembles a digital magazine but is curated by Intel employees. A story gets to the iQ front page when a certain number of people recommend it. The goal is to “connect with a younger audience and tell them the bigger story of who we are as a brand,” said Editor-in-Chief Bryan Rhoads. “Many of them don’t know, so we need to tell them the story of Intel that is beyond PCs and beyond processors.”
Mr. Rhoads will sometimes place staff-written or important stories on the page, but most articles will appear democratically and make it on their own merits. On page, each story box appears with a photo and a tag: “IQ Original” for staff-written and freelance-commissioned articles, “iQ Network” for content written by partner companies such as Discovery or Vice, or “Via” for pieces from an outside source. The last tag is followed by the name of the publication, for instance, “via Mashable.”
Bryan Rhoads, editor in chief of Intel iQ
Each story box grows visually as social media — clicks, shares, freshness, relevancy and other data from around the web — is added.
Stories range in topic from the latest in biometric shirts and the newest Angry Birds game to gamification in the classroom and social’s influence on the rock band Counting Crows. But technology is the stories’ common denominator. The beta site is organized into three main topics: media, life and planet.
“We have Facebook, Twitter and blogs and all of that, but they’re really not tailored to a younger audience,” Mr. Rhoads said, adding that iQ is intended as outreach to that demographic.
Nicknamed “The Blogfather” by his marketing colleagues, Mr. Rhoads is an Intel veteran who has worked on social media since 2006 and is now chief strategist for the Intel Social Media Center of Excellence. He helped launch the company’s brand blogs six years ago and sees Intel iQ as the next logical step. Intel is already a traditional social-media publisher, with 10 million Facebook fans and almost 250,000 Twitter followers.
“This is a new type of social property that is meant to feed social media and content needs,” Mr. Rhoads said. “IQ is not necessarily a destination, but more of an engine and platform to get out into Facebook and Twitter. You don’t have to come to iQ, but you’ll be getting iQ stories in your news feeds and streams.”
Intel has garnered kudos for its social-media policies. It published its employee guidelines online in 2008 and was praised for the progressive edge, high level of trust and minimal restrictions. Currently, there are 160 social-media practitioners at Intel globally who contribute to iQ, and Mr. Rhoads said he expects that number to grow to the “thousands.”
Who’s going to be the next CEO of Yahoo?
That was my first question to Ross Levinsohn when he appeared at Ad Age’s Media Evolved back in November. At the time, Mr. Levinsohn himself seemed to be the most obvious internal candidate, having bought Interclick for $270 million and forged an ad partnership with AOL and Microsoft. He would go on to strike high-profile content deals with the likes of Tom Hanks.
Mr. Levinsohn didn’t answer the CEO question then, but he did give a pretty impassioned case for why he believes in Yahoo and why he joined in the first place. Want to know what Mr. Levinsohn thinks Yahoo should become? He explained it pretty well:
Advertising Age Player
Mark Modesto is on the move again, this time leaving Marc USA to join shopper-marketing agency Ryan Partnership as CEO.
Mr. Modesto was most recently president of Marc USA’s Chicago office. John Immesoete, who joined Marc USA with Mr. Modesto as the senior VP-exec creative director of the Chicago office, will also join Ryan Partnership as chief creative officer. Both will work out of the agency’s Chicago office, though headquarters are in Wilton, Conn.
Ryan Partnership is owned by Hyper Marketing, an umbrella company formed in January after SolutionSet MediaWhiz bought D.L. Ryan Cos. Agencies under Hyper Marketing are Solution Set, MediaWhiz, Ryan Partnership and Catapult, which offer direct and digital marketing, digital media-planning and -buying, and shopper marketing and promotions.
The move is part of a reorganization of Ryan Partnership, and Messrs. Modesto and Immesoete will report to Zain Raj, CEO of Hyper Marketing. John Kuendig, Ryan’s group president, will become chairman of Ryan Partnership. Mr. Modesto and Mr. Immesoete are not replacing anyone, as the agency didn’t have a CEO or chief creative overseeing all offices. Ryan Partnership has 691 employees in 10 offices.
“We believe that we’re a talent business and making sure we have the best talent to serve our clients is the way we’re going to win,” said Mr. Raj. “Having this caliber of talent come onboard will take us to the next level,” he said, adding that it is part of an effort to “position the new Ryan Partnership” to become a leading independent marketing-services agency. It had revenue of $114.4 million in 2011, up 9.6%, according to Ad Age’s DataCenter.
Mark Modesto and John Immesoete
The pair’s departure from Marc USA comes just seven months after they joined to lead the Pittsburgh-based shop’s Chicago outpost. Marc USA President Michele Fabrizi said of their departures: “We wish them well in their new venture.We brought them onboard with the expectation they’d build the Chicago office and bring in new business, which we all know takes time. In the meantime, John and Mark had another opportunity.”
Jean McLaren, CMO at Marc USA, will become president of the Chicago office, a post she held before Mr. Modesto took it. Mr. Immesoete’s successor has not been named.
Mr. Modesto joined Marc USA a little over a year after he left Interpublic’s DraftFCB, where he spent more than three decades, much of it on the agency’s SC Johnson account. Before being named North American president at Interpublic’s DraftFCB, a role he assumed in 2009, he was president of the agency’s Chicago office. He came up through the ranks of DraftFCB predecessor agency Foote Cone & Belding. Mr. Modesto, along with Chicago Chief Financial Officer Bob Mallers and North American Chief of Staff Bill McCarthy, left the agency in August 2010.
Mr. Immesoete is a veteran of Omnicom’s DDB, Chicago, where he was group creative director. He left DDB in 2004 to write and shoot a pilot for NBC Television based on one of his Budweiser campaigns, and to pursue independent writing and directing projects. Mr. Immesoete began his career at Leo Burnett, working on McDonald’s Hallmark and Nintendo, where he spent nearly a decade before moving to DDB.
What Now?
Like Us
