• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 21, 2014

AKQA has won The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation for its consistent contribution and outstanding achievement. The award is the highest accolade that a UK business can receive. Of the win, AKQA Founder and CEO Ajaz Ahmed said: “It’s tremendous recognition for our team to have its hard work and ingenuity recognized by winning the Queens Award for Enterprise Innovation. We are truly honored and look forward to continuing to the adventure ahead, both in the UK and overseas, with energy and momentum.” That's awesome, Ajaz. But you might have a tough time convincing Sir Martin Sorrell, who's a Sir and God of Advertising in the UK and the rest of the world, that there's any higher honor than, well, being Sir Martin Sorrell.

Speaking of being honored, M&C Saatchi LA has been honored with something a bit more substantial than royal recognition: actual new business. The agency's social, digital and content division, M&C Saatchi Share, has added UGG Australia to its roster. And M&C Saatchi LA has added creative media duties for the Sylvester Cancer Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, currently a client for whom they are developing social media campaign which will launch this summer.

Writing in Forbes, Greg Satell paints a bleak picture of the agency business noting "ad agencies offer very similar services carried out by very similar people and the whole thing is a big race to the bottom. He says the best way to understand the challenges agencies face is to view them through the lens of five forces which consist of bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers, threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products and competitive rivalry from within. All of this should sound very familiar to anyone working inside an ad agency. Satell does offer up some hope such as implementing open innovation and expanding skills through training but they amount to the likes of an ant facing a steam roller.

In the ever changing agency name change game, Wichita Kansas-based agency KC Creative Advertising has changed its name to B2H Marketing Group which stands for...we have no idea but owner Christine Bitner says the change reflects the agency's addition of inbound marketing services. Oh, okay -- had we just visited their new Web site, we'd get that B2H stands for business to human. You might want to have included that tidbit in the press release. It all looks extremely HubSpot to us. Which, of course is perfectly fine because HubSpot rocks .