Hollywood jumps into bed with Madison Avenue

The future, as we know, isn’t the 30-second spot, but rather a combination of that along with brand-owned video channels, branded content and entertainment, long-form video, short-form video, collaborations with musicians, writers, film/TV stars and directors, says Dominic Mills. And where do you go to access the cream of that talent? Hollywood, of course.

Advertising agencies often talk rather glibly about ‘talent’ – by which they mean not only themselves, but also the writers, directors and celebs they team up with to produce ads.

Now the word ‘talent’ is set to take on extra resonance, following the news last week that one of Hollywood’s original, and most powerful, talent agencies, William Morris Endeavor, has bought a stake in hot-shot ad agency Droga5.

Apart from the talk of eye-watering sums of money – press reports put the price of William Morris’s 49pc stake at anything between $115 million and $225 million – this is a deal that has made adland sit up.

In that sense, this move is typical of Droga5. Since it was founded eight years ago by former Saatchi and Saatchi creative director, Dave Droga, has consistently grabbed both the headlines and the plaudits with innovative work for a series of clients like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Amex and Microsoft.

Blue-chip the clients may be, but that’s still a lot of money for what is still a young, smallish outfit, one moreover that has only just opened its third office in London this April, adding to New York and Sydney.

There are a number of factors that make this more than just another independent-hotshop-cashes-in-after-rapid-growth story. For starters, this is not a deal about either geography or digital. Most agency deals of the last five years have either involved holding company purchases in the digital space (think LBi and Publicis, or AKQA and WPP) or have been about bulking up in Asia or Latin America.

Then there’s the fact that it doesn’t involve one of the big four holding companies (five if you include Havas). Hooray for that, because anything that challenges their hegemony of the marketing communications scene (hat-tip to Dentsu for its purchase of Aegis and Cheil for taking a stake in Trevor Beattie’s BMB, by the way) can only make this world a more colourful place.

So, in that sense, William Morris Endeavour represents ‘new’ money coming into adland. In fact, bar the somewhat anomalous purchase of ad agency Nitro by technology company Sapient in 2009, I can’t think of any other new money that has come into adland in the last decade.

So what is the logic of this deal? Well, for Droga5, apart from the cash itself, it must be the ability to fund a) further geographical expansion and b) more investment in proprietary intellectual property such as its Birdseye email visualisation tool.

But there’s more, and the deal is also both a sign of Hollywood muscling in on advertising and on advertising’s direction of travel.

The future, as we know, isn’t the 30-second spot, but rather a combination of that along with brand-owned video channels, branded content and entertainment, long-form video, short-form video, collaborations with musicians, writers, film/TV stars and directors. And where do you go to access the cream of that talent? Hollywood, of course.

Fancy getting the likes of Mark Wahlberg, Alicia Keys, Russell Crowe, Ridley Scott or Robert de Niro involved with your brand? William Morris represents them. Yup, they’ve got all the bases covered.

Better than that, because it’s the key Hollywood skill (and the way films come together), they can package it all up a lot easier for a brand owner than an agency can. As Patrick Whitesell, co-head of William Morris put it, albeit rather inelegantly: “Advertisers and brands want to get close to our content. We can join up the best artists and storytellers in all the verticals.”

Mind you, this is not the first time Hollywood has ventured onto Madison Avenue. Back in the mid-90s, Creative Artists Agency (Hollywood’s other uber-powerhouse and arch-rival to William Morris) pitched against McCann-Erickson for the Coke business and won it. The results were ok, but not exactly sprinkled with Hollywood stardust, and Coke soon went back to adland for the one thing ad agencies are really good at: account servicing.

CAA is still in the game – its ‘Back to the Start‘ campaign for US fast-food chain Chipotle was a big winner at Cannes last year.

But the tie-up between Hollywood and an ad agency is a reminder that, however marketers may be seduced by the lure of Tinseltown, they still need some of that basic ad agency discipline.

Sky ups the ante

Talking of Hollywood stars, you may, like me, have been bemused by a current Sky ad featuring Al Pacino. He plays (I think) a reclusive millionaire, given to poncing round his mansion in a silk dressing gown and playing golf off the top of his piano.

If, as the late celebrity fixer Alan Cluer used to say, the first questions you ask yourself when you see such ads are: ‘What is he/she doing in that ad?’ and ‘I wonder what he/she is getting paid?’, then the ad is a fail.

It turns out that this is Al’s first UK ad and only his second ever so you conclude that he must be doing it for the money. And it turns out, on closer watching, that it’s an ad for Sky broadband, not golf.

Shame. Better by far is Sky’s latest effort, which broke last weekend, featuring David Beckham as, well, himself, but in multiple personae.

It’s engaging, fun, relevant and totally credible. Yes, Becks lights up the ad, but his presence is so natural that not for one minute do you think about the wonga.

While it’s not directly an ad for Sky Sports, it’s clearly an opening salvo in what is sure to be, a month from BT’s launch of its Premier League coverage, a ferocious war.