News broke on Adweek yesterday that the Current Media agency review, first announced via Twitter, has been put on hold and that the person who initiated the review, Jordan Kretchmer, has left Current.
From Adweek:
When reached via e-mail, [New SVP of Marketing Michael] Streefland acknowledged the pause in the review, indicating that Current executives needed time to chart the brand’s strategic course.
“The Current RFP triggered a lot of constructive internal discussion and we realized we put the cart before the horse and need to lay down some strategic direction before we engage with a creative agency to execute upon that direction,” Streefland wrote. “Those discussions are happening right now and we should emerge in a few weeks with an update for the agencies.”
Now, of course, some agency folks and other observers are all a-Twitter about how this whole thing was a dumb idea all along. My agency and I participated in the early stages of the review and we don’t regret it for a minute.
Let’s face it–the more things change, the more some things stay the same. Advertising account reviews are a shit sandwich and there’s little changing that fact.
Jordan tried to inject a little transparency and open up the review to new agencies. I think it’s great. It wasn’t a perfect process and I don’t think we’ll see many others like it, but that’s OK. That Current management itself doesn’t have their act together has nothing to do with holding a review via Twitter. Client marketing departments are just as chaotic as agencies are these days. This surely isn’t the first agency review that got stalled due to personnel changes. It won’t be the last. Just more people know about it, as opposed to most mysterious, backroom, consultant-laden agency reviews.
