Dream of Chicago ad revival is dashed

Crain's Chicago Business reports:

The comeback of Chicago's once-storied advertising agencies, creators of the Marlboro Man, "Where's the Beef?" and countless clownish beer commercials, lasted about six weeks.

The city's ad agencies, decimated after years of losing headquarters and major accounts, seemed poised to regain their fizz when local player DraftFCB Group aced out Madison Avenue in winning the Wal-Mart Stores Inc. account.

Instead, Wal-Mart's sudden removal of Draft from the $580-million account has delayed the road test of a new industry model — a leading-edge attempt to combine direct marketing with traditional advertising — that promised to revamp Chicago's competitiveness as an ad center.

"Momentum is everything in this business," says John Greening, director of the advertising sequence at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Chicago had lost momentum. It looked like it was going to get it again. Then it had the rug pulled out from under it."

Draft, a direct marketer that was wed to FCB only last summer, had planned to boost its 1,150-member Chicago staff by more than 100 — until Wal-Mart pulled the plug this month. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer fired Julie Roehm, its vice-president for marketing communications, and dropped DraftFCB amid allegations that she violated Wal-Mart's ethics policy by attending a DraftFCB dinner and seeking a ride in Chairman and CEO Howard Draft's Aston-Martin before the account was awarded.

Ms. Roehm has denied any improprieties. In a memo to employees last week, Mr. Draft termed Wal-Mart's decision a "bitter disappointment" and said an investigation found no ethical violations.

The hope was that DraftFCB's Wal-Mart win could help ease the pain of so many accounts lost by Chicago agencies. In just the last year, Leo Burnett USA lost the U.S. Army ($1 billion) and Cadillac ($225 million); DDB Chicago Inc. lost J. C. Penney ($400 million), and Y&R Advertising's Chicago office lost the Miller Lite account ($180 million).

Check out the Crain's graph of employment on right hand side.You might say Chicago's losing a lot of white collar jobs.