• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 10, 2014

In perhaps an effort to steer our attention away from the drama surrounding an email exchange between Apple's Phil Schiller and TBWA\Media Arts Lab CEO James Vincent, the agency is touting the installation of Luis DeAnda as president of the LA office. DeAnda, who has been with the TBWA network for 12 years most recently as managing director, will succeed Carisa Bianchi, who is stepping down after 24 years with the agency. Of DeAnda, TBWA Worldwide President and CEO Tom Carroll said: "His global experience and past success at growing the businesses he has been attached to speak for themselves. I'm excited to see what we will achieve with Luis at the helm and where he will take the L.A. agency."

It looks like Saatchi & Saatchi has found a replacement for Chief Creative Officer Con Williamson, who left the agency in December to become CCO at Interpublic's Erwin Penland. Filling the hole is Jay Benjamin, who will slide over to Saatchi from sister agency Leo Burnett New York where he was also CCO. Benjamin, who took home a Branded Content Gold Lion in 2012 for his work on The Village Voice, will oversee P&G, General Mills and other clients.

San Francisco-based mobile advertising agency Fetch is having a bit of fun with HBO's "True Detective." After having created We Keep the Other Bad Men From the Door, for which art director Nigel Dennis received publicity on The Guardian and Gizmodo, the agency is out with a video parodying an infamous True Detective Scene, turning the infamous “M-brain Theory” into the “Mobile Theory” in a parody of Mobile Advertising. 

Former CEO of Craft Worldwide, a McCann/IPG company and CEO of RedWorks, an Ogilvy/WPP Company, Fred Schuster is going out on his own. He's hanging up a shingle for Fred&Co. which is being described as a "global creative operations company." The agency aims to work directly with client marketing teams, to "help generate a better creative product while improving operational efficiencies." Well, that's just stellar. An agency that cares about process.

Perhaps you've heard of content marketing. Perhaps you view it as a means to market more effectively online, since no one clicks banners any more. Or perhaps you just think it's a bunch of malarkey "social media experts" barf up at every single social media conference. However you interpret it, author and 20-plus-year ad veteran Tom Martin argues it's a great way for an ad agency to build and spread its reputation as experts in whatever it is they do. He's right. But it's nothing new. Reputation management and "thought leadership" have been around forever. It's just that the Internet and social media have made it easy to do -- and almost a requirement for any entity that wishes to build trust with its customers and prospects.