The Amsterdam office of Modernista! (based in Boston) has gone bankrupt this week – this will make 7 employees jobless. According to the agency it was mainly due to the collapse of General Motors in the States. Early October Cadillac announced it was looking for another agency (today Bartle Bogle Hegarty NY, Publicis NY and the Martin Agency Richmond are still in the race) to recapture sales, following its emergence from bankruptcy. Hummer was sold to Tengzhong, a Chinese company – ironic when you realize Hummer more or less symbolizes America’s robust love for warfare. With these important account losses, Modernista! wasn’t able to support the Amsterdam office anymore. Modernista! Amsterdam opened its doors in 2006. Though the only local advertising we ever spotted from the Amsterdam office was for Comedy Central, we’ll miss them.

Source: Adformatie

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.

At first we thought the proposition of this Comedy Central ad was about not drinking water when watching the channel – or maybe even the other way around. But that of course wouldn’t make sense. Also check the commercial. The ads, made by Modernista!, in fact tell you that watching Comedy Central on a daily basis is healthy, because it generates uncontrollable laughing fits. And we like the persuasive power of this positive message. Especially the not so obvious solution of showing the audience (reminds us of this brilliant wonderbra ad), instead of the programmes makes you curious to know what’s on the other side.

Last week thenetworkone and Campaign magazine chose the 16 leading independent agencies in the world. We were happy to discover that three of them (19%!) have an office in Amsterdam; Amsterdam Worldwide, Perfect Fools and Modernista! The selection was based on “creative achievement, spirit of curiosity, open-mindedness and collaborative approaches to solving clients’ communications problems”. Although it’s a bit of a subjective choice and not entirely independent, we are of course happy to hear this. What we like best about the election is that it comes with essays, written by the executives from each agency. Here’s the essay from two ‘Perfect Fools’; Patrick Gardner and Mark Chalmers – the latter set up the Amsterdam office last year. Their digital approach: “if you can think it, then it’s real”. We like the sound of that. And here the essay by Richard Gorodecky, executive creative director of Amsterdam Worldwide. We selected this quote from him to share with you: “The only constant we can look forward to will be continual change”. We agree. As Darwin already taught us; “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”