The game of musical chairs on Madison Avenue — that perpetual shuffling of executives from one holding company outpost to another, from marketer to agency and back again — appears to have paused, if only momentarily.
A recent dispatch promising news of eleven significant job changes at companies including Gap, BBH and Six Flags arrived with all the ceremony of a press release and none of its substance. In place of the customary announcements — who is leaving, who is arriving, who is being "elevated" to a position that may or may not have existed last week — there appeared only the biographical details of the reporters assigned to cover such things.
(One imagines the publicists are still working on it.)
The absence of actual news in a news article is not, of course, entirely without precedent in the annals of trade journalism. The advertising industry has long excelled at the art of announcing announcements, teasing campaigns that will soon be teased, and heralding transformations that remain, upon closer inspection, largely theoretical. That the machinery of coverage might occasionally outpace the events being covered seems almost fitting.
For those keeping score at home: Gap, the San Francisco-based retailer that has cycled through creative partners and chief marketing officers with the regularity of a seasonal markdown calendar, presumably still employs people in its marketing department. BBH, the London-born agency now part of the Publicis Groupe empire, continues to exist. Six Flags, one assumes, still has roller coasters.
The rest, as they say, awaits further reporting.
Original story published in adage.com: "11 key agency and marketing job moves: Gap, BBH, Six Flags - Ad Age"