Orcon appoints Draft FCB to its account despite Special Group’s Cannes Grand Prix win
Orcon has appointed Draft FCB Auckland as its new advertising agency, effective immediately.
The incumbent agency is Special Group Auckland, creators of one of New Zealand’s most awarded campaigns of the year – Orcon Broadband’s ‘Orcon + Iggy Pop’, which won a host of national and international awards including the Grand Prix in Direct at Cannes.
Draft will undertake a range of work for Orcon, with a new campaign scheduled to be in the market in the new year. Orcon’s head of sales and marketing Taryn Hamilton says Draft FCB was appointed after a short pitch process.
“Draft are a great bunch of people with a superb track record and we’re really excited about working with them. Draft offers the strategic ability and skill set that is needed to help Orcon realise its ambitions. We’ve done some great work with Special, the Iggy campaign helped put us on the map, and set a great standard for our communications. We are all very excited however about the next step in the evolution of the Orcon brand.”
Orcon’s PR will continue to be handled by Pead PR.
31 Comments
no danger of another grand prix there
ooooooo i’m such a bitch
What a stitch up! The worst part is that the client will probably move on in 12 months having not made any impact on the business.
Good on Draft. Talk about a bumper 12-15 months. They’re obviously doing something right.
I don’t see why they’d intimate that a lack of strategic depth is the reason for taking the business elsewhere (especially not to FCB anyway) – Special’s strategy has always been to use any opportunity to build it’s own brand – and Orcon’s budgets served that purpose admirably. What this would seem to reveal is that the kind of work that wins pitches may not actually pan out to be the most effective or well thought out from a medium to log term business perspective – no surprises there.
Orcon got the awards. Now they want some customers.
Obviously all the chest beating and PR’ing didn’t really have much substance behind it. Best this, best that, first this, first that. Looks like it must have been the lack of actual business results which finally sealed their fate. Lesson learnt you’d hope.
Let it go Tony.
2.01 Easy fix, just bring on David Bowie, Billy Idol, Steven Tyler, Alice Cooper..get the picture?
you pricks were lining up offering blow jobs at special 3 months ago, now look at your carry on. fickle.
Just goes to show. What is famous in the ad world, often goes unnoticed by normal punters.
Go The Cult
The Doobie Brothers are coming to town. They’re brothers. They’ll want to text each other. Maybe ‘Face Chat’. Not to mention calling long distance to friends, family and relies.
Advertising is about, inevitably, building sales for clients.
Sorry to remind everyone.
When there are lower than average sales, clients tend to look for new ways to help build sales.
Like Orcon.
Imagine you owned your own company and you were shelving out large $’s from your own pocket to pay for an expensive ad campaign. Sadly, the expensive ad campaign fails to ignite the sales department.
So, you try again with a new campaign. That too fails. But yet, you still find yourself shelving out large $’s for small results. And the only people claiming success are the people whom aren’t shelving out the actual hard $’s – the ad agency.
What would you do? Continue down the same vein? Probably not.
Yes awards are nice. But the truth of why ad agencies exist is to increase sales of clients. In this case, Special share more of a kinship with mid-nineties Saatchis than with an agency that’s doing well today.
I don’t want to shit on Special, I like their work. But at the end of the day we’re in advertising to do a job that gets results for clients. And in the struggle to do that job we try to add an idea or a little bit of craft along the way. Invariably, that is where the tension between client and agency comes into play. Sometimes, that tension becomes too great.
Like what happened with the Orcon and Special relationship.
lots of advertising awards
shame about the crap customer service
is a new agency going to fix that?
Clients and organisational investors have a right to expect business results. Without results they wouldn’t survive.
Gold at Cannes is meaningless if they don’t get customers and $$$.
If this is the issue, Orcon were right to move.
2.01 I work at Draft and that’s fucken hilarious!
The moral of the story:
Clients cannot survive on awards alone.
There’s only so much a campaign can do when Orcon’s service itself isn’t winning people over. Their technical and customer service has slipped a long way in the last couple years. I should know, Ive just spent the last couple of weeks on the phone to their customer support team which was an absolutely horrendous experience. I use to be a huge fan of the company recommending them to anyone who would listen but I now think no better of them than Telecom, which is pretty f&%$#@g bad! Infact I would recommend just about any other provider over Orcon.
Tony this sucks mate, your Iggy campaign was stella, you did what you were asked to do and that’s raise the profile of a low rent ISP. If their offer didn’t cut it in the market what the hell are you supposed to do about that? Bunch of ingrates.
The Cult returns.
2.59 so to be so condescending but in your case it seems to be justified. Part of a proper agency’s role is make sure the offers are compelling. Ad School 101. The other thing is Orcon is hardly a low rent ISP. They’ve been ISP of the year a few times over the past decade if I remember rightly. Sounds like sour grapes to me.
Plato are you inferring that Special Group are not a “proper agency”?
Big call.
Really Plato? Really? You think agencies should be investing time into assessing the financial planning that goes into incentivising and offers? Our only job is to sensor check it against what we know about the market.
In our diminishing role as agencies we are constantly trying to invade on what is essentially a client responsibility. If we focused on our main role of idea generation and crafting then we might not hear so many complaints of art directing and copywriting clients.
Ad school 101 – what a shitty remark. Say something relevant or not at all.
Plato, it’s thinking like yours that marginalizes the efficacy of an agency. We should always aspire to be creative in all out endeavors, that’s what our clients pay for – ideation.
The Iggy Pop campaign worked incredibly hard in terms of awareness, conversation and a palpable shift in brand perception. If the product does not stack up there is very little the agency can do The problem resides client side.
12.53. Bullshit. Clients do not pay for ‘ideation’ at the expense of financial success and market share.
You sound like the author of many failed campaigns, justifying failure with blurry, vague measures of success that you can identify with, but shareholders and clients cannot.
I hope I get to pitch against you one day. Bring it on.
Geez guys – what brouhaha. Agency this – client that. We should only do this, they won’t let us to that. Bollocks! Agencies are about ideas – creative (ads) and innovative (new ideas for clients’ products) there are no lines we can’t cross, only agencies that don’t have the skill of competence to cross them. But for the full story – read Marketing magazine this month as the lead story is all about this stuff. Onwards to victory!
I hope I get to pitch against you one day.
Never mind the specifics of Orcon, what’s interesting here is that Special have lost a high profile piece of business. They’ve certainly got talent for the big creative idea, the big one-off campaign. They play the Awards and PR game just like a big shop. They’ve seemed dismissive of other indies, with Redwood somewhat arrogantly proclaiming that there were now some ‘credible start-ups with creative and strategic firepower, rather than just a small businesses that will do anything to make a profit’. Let’s see if they have the capacity to manage long-standing client relationships, which is pretty critical in indie-land where there are no big contracts or global alignments to protect you. No doubt about it, losing a client after such a short relationship is not a good start.
In ten years or so the boys will still be able to pull out the “I worked with Iggy Pop” story at dinner parties. That’ll always be a better story than anything about awards or long term client relationships.
Um, hello? Draft hasn’t actually made anything for Orcon yet. Until then….Who knows maybe they will only be able to hang onto Orcon for as long as special? And while everyone’s on here commenting hopefully Special is heads down thinking of whats next to amaze us with…. lets be honest when they had Orcon we all dug the iggy thing.
Everyone was on special’s nuts with their orcon iggy stuff/web banners and now….haterade. I agree 8.28 they’re probably cooking up something awesome and everyone will back to dickriding their work in no time.