When It's Time to Pass the Baton

Compass Points today is about the fine points of building an agency brand, with a salute to the life’s work of my good friend Mike Hughes.

In the early ‘70s Mike was a newspaper writer who was bored with being “an ink-stained wretch” and was starting to think advertising might be an interesting career. He walked his news clips around Richmond, Virginia to show Harry Jacobs, then the legendary creative director of the South’s only interesting agency, Cargill Wilson & Acree, then to David Martin of the Martin Agency, and finally to a little Richmond office of Chicago agency Clinton E. Frank, where they put him to work writing ads for Reynolds Metals.

Finally Harry Jacobs, who had just moved over to the Martin Agency as a full partner with Martin, called Mike in for another look and hired him. In those days the Martin Agency was a swinging Southern hotshop, where writers and art directors like Luke Sullivan and Cabell Harris would put in a day’s work, and then repair to a bar or someone’s home, and do ads for non-profit clients. Their after-hours agency had a several names like Drinking Buddies Advertising, and Harry tolerated it because he was getting good work from these “kids” – and because their clients were no threat to the Martin Agency’s trajectory.

In the ‘80s the Martin Agency had the standard roster of accounts like banks and utility companies – but where it excelled was in ads for agricultural BtoB clients who wanted to sell their herbicides to farmers in obscure publications—and didn’t mind what the agency did in their ads as long as they worked. Suddenly the Martin Agency’s quirky work for cattle feed was winning metal in the big national shows.

Then, about 1990, Harry and Dave decided it was time to sell the agency to a big national or international agency – and settled on becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Scali, McCabe Sloves, which, in turn, had become part of Ogilvy. About this time, Martin Sorrell bought Ogilvy to fill out his other network purchases and inherited Scali and the Martin Agency. Marvin Sloves had some issues with Sorrell and arranged for the agency to buy back its stock; only to turn around and sell it again to Frank Lowe, whose London-based agency had in turn become part of Interpublic. (Dizzying, isn’t it.)

These deals couldn’t happen in today’s universe, but Martin Sorrell had been beat up by another creative shop he bought—and didn’t see how letting Scali/Martin go would interrupt his longer term strategy.

It’s not clear why Frank Lowe wanted Scali and its Southern appurtenance—other than that he admired the work being produced by these agencies.

As things settled down, David Martin took his money and pushed off—leaving the agency to Don Just and Harry Jacobs. As the ‘90s wore on, Don handed off client service and administrative duties to John Adams, who took the title CEO, and Harry became chairman and handed off creative to Mike, who took the title President/CCO.

Mike was able to light up the creative sky again—thanks to a campaign starring a wily, green lizard with a funny British accent, which [along with some cranky cavemen] made Geico the country’s top automobile insurance company, and, then again, when he made drab, dependable UPS a talking point, with the campaign “What can Brown do for you?”

At the same time, in his off hours, Mike was serving as chairman of the board of the “The AdCenter,” the country’s only masters-awarding, creative advertising graduate program, at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Mike recruited Rick Boyko from Ogilvy to run the AdCenter. Under Rick, some new faculty members and a distinguished board, the school suddenly became the leader in portfolio-based, creative advertising training. The school (recently renamed The BrandCenter), continues to rank high not only as a creative center but against the MBA programs at the leading business schools which increasingly are adding a creative branding component to their curricula.

Now, almost 40 years after joining The Martin Agency, Mike has brought in John Norman from Wieden & Kennedy to be his successor as chief creative officer. Mike will continue as president of the agency to help John Adams, try to begin to make it a global creative shop—similar to what Wieden, Fallon and Bartle Bogle Hegarty have become.

“Establishing distance offices has always been difficult for me,” says Hughes, “because I was anal and wanted to watch the work all the way through [from concept to execution].” But Hughes says it’s time. He and John have named three younger partners-- Beth Kelley, head of HR and “manager of creative:” Matt Williams, a senior planner and John Norman-- to begin the transition to running an international shop on their own.

Mike is a gentle giant, known the world over in creative circles, but hardly a household word among clients. That’s, in part, due to the way he generously credits others for the agency’s successes and, in part, due to his seemingly light but firm management style. He says he isn’t disappearing from the agency scene and if anything is more "motivated" by his new duties. But he has earned almost every accolade the agency world has to bestow, because of who he is and what he and John Adams have accomplished from their out-of-the-way, red-brick-and glass base in Richmond.

Mike gets the Compass Points 2009 award for brand building—both the agency’s and his client list (which now includes Wal-Mart), hands down.

One of the hardest tricks in all ad-dom is to manage this kind of transition. We’ll see if he and John can pull it off. There was nothing sadder for me this year to see Cliff Freeman have to close its doors and go out of business; and, earlier, to see Fallon/Minneapolis essentially become part of Saatchi & Saatchi. There should be another way to keep great agency brands alive.