How Brett and Lee won the Olympics for McCann

A lot of people must be asking, how on earth did ill-favoured  McCann Erickson manage to beat the mighty WPP to Locog's prestigious 2012 Olympics advertising account? Not least among them, Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP's nettled chief executive.

The short answer is: Brett Gosper, McCann Worldgroup EMEA president and his secret weapon, Lee Daley.

It can be no coincidence that, weeks after McCann Worldgroup appointed the somewhat tarnished, but nevertheless clever, former Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive to the newly created role of EMEA chief strategist (reporting directly to Gosper), McCann walks away with the Olympics prize.

Another non-coincidence is Gosper's familiarity with the workings of Olympics committees. He happens to be the son of Richard Kevan Gosper. Ring a bell? Then I'll refresh your memory. Gosper senior is a former Australian athlete of some renown, and more to the point, a former IOC vice-president of 20 years standing at the venerable body which holds supreme sway over the Olympic Games.

Just for the record, Kevan – as he prefers to be called  – won an Olympics silver medal for the men's 400m relay in 1956, and managed to take in being Shell chief executive and chairman Down Under during his long and successful career. So he's not lacking influential political connections. He's practically a national hero. What you might call Gosper junior's inside track, in fact.

One other non-coincidence is Daley's own brief and colourful connection with high octane sport. Remember his four-month stint at Manchester United? He'd probably rather you didn't. But by the law of unintended consequences, it has served him well in the end.

Sorrell pipped at the post in Olympics pitch

Much consternation in Farm Street, Mayfair, as McCann-Erickson, backed by IPG, wrests the Locog advertising account from its 'rightful' owner, WPP.

From the beginning of the pitch, WPP had looked a shoo-in. It was one of a remarkably small circle of contenders that had the power and scale to handle what in effect is a piece of global business. True, the much smaller Chime beat it in the duel for the initial 1-year marketing communications package. But that was a blip. Chime (even if it is part-owned by WPP) simply didn't have the resources to win part 2   – the much bigger bit of business spanning 3 years to the Games themselves.  And it showed when it was one of two to be dropped from the frame last week, leaving McCann and WPP.

At the time, no one much rated McCann's chances of success. WPP, now the world's largest marketing services network, is a much stronger organisation than Interpublic – which has been severely weakened over the past few years. In addition, WPP's boss, Sir Martin Sorrell had invested a lot of personal energy in winning the account. The fact that he was personally present in Singapore when the British team, featuring David Magliano and Sir Keith Mills, won the bid to hold the Olympics in London gives the flavour. For WPP, it would have been a way of juxtaposing one very British success story with another – its own.

Why did it lose? The devil is in the detail. Locog's is no ordinary ad account. Though worth a notional £10m over 3 years, this £10m is in fact a benchmark figure for which competing agencies had to tender (as did other services, such as the Locog accountants, Deloitte, and the Locog solicitors, Freshfields). Agencies were invited to provide ad valorem services – such a media buying, content, creative ads, sponsorship. If Locog spent over £10m, the winning agency would be quids in, because it would be conventionally rewarded. If, on the other hand, Locog underspent, the winning agency would have to underwrite the difference, and that would mean coming up with cash. 

It can readily be seen this is an expensive but finely judged gamble, and one which will be heavily disruptive of a marketing services network's normal commercial activities. Though there is glory in winning the business – and a tier 3 sponsorship thrown in – the account could easily turn into a poison chalice. Sorrell was prepared to take that chance, but was incensed that Locog had spun off the more profitable research part of the business (worth another '£10m') as a separate account (for which, by the way, WPP is not competing).

Failure to strike a deal over this vexed issue was the main reason that WPP lost out in the final pitch. It may come not to regret that mistake in the next few years.

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...

Has the sun set on Dawn Airey's ITV ambitions?

The question, now that Michael Grade has been dislodged as ITV chief executive, is: will Dawn Airey want the job anyway?

In the dream-team line-up of a year ago Airey – very much a Grade protegée at that time – looked by far the strongest internal candidate as his successor. John Cresswell, chief operating officer, is too faceless; Rupert Howell, commercial director, has certainly got the personality but lacks a serious track-record in top-level TV management. The other internal candidate, head of programmes Peter Fincham, had only just joined as Airey left, after facing the music over the BBC's "Crowngate" fiasco (an improbable saga of Her Majesty spitting tin tacks backwards). At any event, he would be unlikely to present Airey with serious competition if she were to throw her hat in the ring.

But will she? Airey quit as ITV's head of production, essentially, because Grade broke his word. He had given everyone to believe that he would step down as chief executive in 2009. But such was the gravity of ITV's crisis, and the extent of his vanity, that when his much-touted programme-led recovery failed to materialize on schedule, he decided to extend his tenure by another year. Result: Airey lost patience and jumped aboard the nearest sea-worthy vessel, Five, as chief executive. Irony number one: had Airey stayed, given her strong previous record as managing director of Sky Television and her ruthless boardroom skills, she would now be contemplating becoming chief executive of ITV a year earlier.

Irony number two. Five has its problems. As a johnny-come-lately terrestrial channel, its audience is too small, and too ill-defined, for it to survive long term in the era of digital multichannel TV. Indeed, a merger has already been proposed with Channel 4 as a solution to their collective troubles, though this seems to have gained little traction with the industry or the regulator, Ofcom. On the other hand, Five is wholly owned by RTL (and eventually Bertelsman, the biggest media owner in Europe). Should break-up, or takeover, of ITV ever emerge as the preferred solution to its intractable problems, then RTL would have to be in the frame. For Airey, would it be better to bid for the present ITV job or bide her time?

If offered the ITV job, it might well be because ITV shareholders see her as a handy exit strategy. Who better to manage the handover of the company to RTL? In which case, she would not hold the job for very long, though she would be a great deal richer at the conclusion of business. If, on the other hand, she stays on at Five, the merger might never happen. In which case, she will have passed by a great opportunity, perhaps her only opportunity, to be chief executive of a significant broadcast media company.

Of course, Airey is not the only external candidate to be fancied for the job. Tony Ball, former chief executive of BSkyB, and Stephen Carter, currently communications minister (but for how much longer?), must be considered formidable alternatives. Carter came close to being offered the ITV job last time round, after a half-way decent stint as coo at stricken cable company NTL, but lost interest after it emerged that Grade was going to be not the non-executive but the executive chairman.

Right now, Grade is merely a lingering embarrassment – a chairman stripped of his executive powers. Any of the external candidates would make his instant dismissal a precondition of taking the job. All that he is doing by staying is blighting the chances of the internal candidates.

Ash in the mouth for Fallon

What goes around, comes around. The BBC has recently recruited Ash Makkar, a former Teletext marketer, to oversee the marketing of BBC2, BBC4 and BBC Knowledge. One of Makkar's principal concerns over the next few years will be to deflate the division's bloated budget. So it will be no surprise to find, in due course, his eagle eye fastening upon the advertising agency roster. One agency in particular may feel a little vulnerable: Fallon London, which once fired him.

Sainsbury's will move to BBH – and pigs have wings

Where do these rumours come from? The latest one circulating the ad industry is that the £50m Sainsbury account, starring superchef Jamie Oliver, is about to move – without a pitch – to Bartle Bogle Hegarty. No one would be more surprised than AMV.BBDO, the incumbent for donkey's years, or indeed BBH – if it were so lucky as to win the business.

The rumour almost certainly originates in Claire Harrison-Church. Not from Harrison-Church herself, I hasten to add, but in what she has done, and where she has come from.

Earlier this year, H-C replaced Helen Buck as brand communications director of Sainsbury's. In other words she now has hands-on (though not exclusive) responsibility for the ad account. Looking more closely at H-C's track record, we notice an uncannily close association with BBH over the years. She was once brand director for Lynx at Unilever and later marketing director of fried chicken retailer KFC. It is also said that BBH helped her, in some unspecifiable way, to get her last job at Boots.

All that does not mean, I'm afraid, that BBH is about to receive a handsome return on its investment. Marketing directors aren't that grateful or, in Sainsbury's case, that powerful.

Sly play with media regulation

I'm not sure I fully understand the logic of Sly Bailey's position, outlined at the Digital Britain summit, although her ulterior motive for adopting it is clear enough.

The chief executive of Daily Mirror-owner Trinity Mirror hit out at "gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by the tens of millions" which, "by performing well on search engines like Google, ... have eroded the value of news." Step forward, presumably, the Sun, The Guardian and the Mail as villains of the piece.

Bailey's ultimate target is the dotcom news aggregators, such as Google News, which she roundly condemns for first pirating other people's news, then commoditizing it around search optimization.

"A consumer is now as likely to discover newspaper content on Google, visit our sites, then flit away before even discovering that it was the Daily Mirror or the Telegraph that created the content in the first place," she said. "Or worse, they may visit an aggregator like Google News, browse a digital deli of expensive-to-produce news from around the world, and then click on an ad served up to them by Google."

In other words, everyone – consumers, dotcom portals, and advertisers on them – is getting a free ride except the publishers who actually pay for the content in the first place. No wonder the media is in crisis and experienced journalists are being discarded like autumn leaves by our major newspapers and free-to-air broadcasters.

Bailey is quite right, of course. But she goes on to suggest the newspapers have exacerbated the trend by building mega-news sites with the explicit intention of performing well in organic search. Her solution is to loosen the regulatory straitjacket, at present preventing newspapers from merging, in order to confront the challenge of the internet.

"Any merger regime which does not take Google, Yahoo, Rightmove and Monster into account simply isn't fit for purpose," she said. She's presumably banking on Lord Carter's Digital Britain report to come up trumps at the end of June.

Personally, I wouldn't put too much money on it. First of all, I'm not sure how making the newspaper industry still more concentrated is going to help combat the challenge of the internet. If anything, concentration would accelerate the trend that Bailey is decrying. Secondly, the suggestion is politically naive.

If politicians took a strictly utilitarian approach to media, they might just agree with Bailey. But they don't. Their main concern is to ensure that the newspaper barons, and specifically the house of Murdoch, do not become any more powerful than they already are. For God's sake, these media dynasts can influence the outcome of elections and put you into the political wilderness for years!

However, Bailey speaks with the conviction of desperation. The way her company is going, it will soon disappear of its own accord if it is not allowed to merge with something more powerful. And I don't mean by that Johnston Press.