Grey announced yesterday that Hazelle Klønhammer will become the new MD of Grey Amsterdam. Klønhammer follows up Dick Klicks. Klicks moved to Grey EMEA in March and only a few months later he left Grey altogether to work for Tomorrow Design. Though her name sounds Scandinavian, Klønhammer was born in Australia and moved to Amsterdam in 1996 to work for Wieden+Kennedy and has never really left the city. She worked for quite a few international, creative agencies, like TBWA, 180 and Modernista! You would hope Grey Amsterdam’s reorganization is complete now. In May 2008 Colin Lamberton and Seyoan Vela (once co-founders of the London agency St. Luke’s) were the first hotshots to reinforce the Amsterdam ambitions. They came from Grey London and had been working on the international Fortis pitch with Dick Klicks. After they won the account Klicks asked them to creatively lead the Amsterdam office. They had a bad start when the distinctive clean and graphical campaign (‘life is a curve’) for Fortis was killed after the bank collapsed. Fortis had been at the top of its curve and the sad coincidence was easily and avidly spoofed. Anyway, it’s good that the Amsterdam hub is very important for Grey international and we hope that with Klønhammer on board Grey Amsterdam will find its way to top again.

When you work in advertising, your worst nightmare is someone asking you to make a commercial for ‘feminine intimate care products’ – that’s correct, vaginal soap. Several male teams at Grey Amsterdam were tormented by Lactacyd to do just that – without any satisfactory results. Then someone had the luminous idea to ask a female team the same question. Elise Beenakker and Dagmare van Willigenburg came up with this brilliant idea for Lactacyd; the vagina-perspective – using the pay-off: “You’re vagina is fulnerable”. The execution could have been done better, we think, but then again, they had to use this tiny camera… In any case, GSK last week announced that the commercial will not be broadcasted anymore “due to internal reasons”. It wouldn’t surprise us if someone high up the GSK tree – maybe from the US head office – found the commercial too confronting. If so, why sell a product that embarrasses you? In any case, GSK also made it clear that the commercial is not to be submitted to any advertising festival. Too bad.