Paul Lawson plots Burnett breakaway

Spring and we've already had the first cuckoo in adland, with news of the Garry Lace Robert Campbell start-up  – which opens its doors on May Day.

Of more substance, if it gets off the ground, is a breakaway being hatched at Leo Burnett. This features Paul Lawson, group managing director of Burnett and Arc, plus his executive creative director Jon Burley. The aim is to set up a full service agency offering advertising, planning and buying 'solutions'.

This is hardly an original formula. Indeed, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Hurrell & Dawson, the agency set up by M&C Saatchi alumnus Nick Hurrell and former TBWA\London chairman Neil Dawson in 2006. Despite its distinguished pedigree and a name-change, the new agency has not exactly covered itself in glory.

There are some reasons for believing the foul-mouthed but capable Lawson may be more successful, however. Lawson's attachment to media has more to it than a strategic conviction that agencies must, once again, put the 'full' back into 'service' by reuniting creativity and media under one roof. He was once a media planner himself, at Allen Brady & Marsh, before deciding, like many before him such as Tim Bell and Rick Bendel, that account management was a better route to the top.

The immediate reason for the breakaway seems to be growing disenchantment with Burnett grupenfuhrer Andrew Edwards. Lawson lost out to Australian outsider Edwards in the duel for the top job after Bruce Haines left 18 months ago. Edwards, it seems, is strong on 'below-the-line' but not much else; and the personal chemistry isn't great either.

So what's holding Lawson and Burley back? Absence of a planner – a professional one, that is. Edwards Groom Saunders might have fitted the bill perfectly. It had talent, in the form of Jez Groom, Peter Edwards and Will Saunders, but lacked traction as an independent communications agency. Unluckily for Lawson, it was snapped up by Engine in February.

Mind you, there's always Mark Cranmer, the former Starcom MediaVest EMEA ceo, currently consulting at Aegis. He's said to be looking for a new challenge. More of that soon...

Campbell Lace – the Beta version

Goodness me. After some last minute shenanigans, the rumour really has born fruit. Lace Campbell is shortly to be an established fact. Actually, the new agency is going to be called Campbell Lace Beta. Who is Beta – the planner perhaps? No it's an idea borrowed from the internet, presumably meaning work in progress. The agency launches in May. This last detail can be inferred from its icon, a maypole – which is also, they tell us, a symbol of riotous pagan creativity. Can we be sure you're not leading us a bit of a dance, Garry? 

Who rules, suits or creatives? Garry Lace explains

Who really calls the shots at a successful advertising agency, the top suits or the creative supremo? It's a tired old saw which received new stimulus earlier this year at an IPA Client Services debate featuring Robert Senior, ceo SSF Group, and Ed Morris, recently departed executive creative director at Lowe.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Senior flattered to deceive by exalting creative excellence as "the fuel without which the bus goes nowhere." Leaving Morris, cast as patsy, to argue the lame pedestrian virtues of the account man as "grand orchestrator between creativity and commerce." The vote? Er, 44 to 6 in Senior's favour.

But wait just a moment. Doesn't history tell us something entirely different, and isn't Mr Senior the living embodiment of this alternative truth?

I call to witness none other than Garry Lace, one of London's most consummate suits. Lace it was who first highlighted an increasingly bizarre phenomenon in creative agencies: the wilful decision to dispense with chief executives and entrust agency management to the precarious hands of creatives, planners and the like.

For Lace, of course, this unfortunate trend has the poignancy of a parable – with himself cast in the role of Jesus Christ. Look what happened to Lowe after I left, he might say: a creative (Morris) and a planner (Rebecca Morgan) have presided over its ruin. And now just a planner...

Strictly speaking, that's being a bit economical with the truth. Lace's flamboyance was his own undoing; and besides, there was Amanda Walsh in between.

But in a wider sense, he has a point. Euro RSCG, which has recently dispensed with the services of its chief executive, Mark Cadman, seems embarked on the same path of self-destruction – led by a planner (Russ Lidstone) and a creative (Mark Hunter).

Self-serving though these words of Lace may partly be, I feel I ought to quote them in full. "I've always worked on the assumption that companies need a leader" he says. "That person for whom people will work harder and care more because they are able to construct a vision for the business based on experience and instinct and articulate it in a powerful and motivating way. That person who proves to be a magnet for talent and clients alike and for whom nothing is impossible."

Lace may yet get an opportunity to prove his point. He has been languishing recently as managing director and part-owner of Admedia the "out-of-home" (read toilet advertising) specialist. But rumour is the strangest thing. It has thrown him into a start-up venture with Robert Campbell, former creative powerhouse of RKCR and current co-founder with ex-Times man Toby Constantine of tgi50, a website portal aimed at the 'just over' 50s.

Even stranger is another rumour: the one that links Mark Cadman with ... Ed Morris, in a similar venture. If either of these ventures gets going, maybe we'll be a little closer to the truth. Who really does rule at an ad agency, the suit, or the creative?