ADVERTISING & PROMOTION: Is this the man who’ll put fire in Lintas’ belly?

A while ago the boss of Lintas in Malaysia kindly gave me a beautifully

produced book called The First Hundred Years, purporting to be the

history of the Lintas Group. It was written by Barry Day, the celebrated

Interpublic creative panjandrum, widely admired for having the most

luxuriant sidewhiskers sighted since May 3 1877.

The author triumphed over unpromising material. He dealt dexterously

with the truth (Lintas hadn’t actually been in business for 100 years)

and managed to sidestep neatly the fact that, save in Asia where they

have had some very talented managers, it has had a remarkably

undistinguished history and is best known for bland, if not invisible

advertising. However, he did take the trouble to point out that the idea

of planning was originated by them around 1960, although whether they

should be praised or excoriated for this is, I think, a nice point of

debate.

Lintas is the descendent of Lever’s old advertising department and

became an independent agency as a result of some nifty opportunism by

one of their senior managers in the late 50s. As a business, it has

always done quite well, but nobody has ever been able to get very

excited about it - either those working there or those competing with

it.

Now Martin Puris, of Ammiriti and Puris, has taken on the intimidating

task of trying to transform it. Ammiriti and Puris is little known

outside the United States, but none the worse for that. It has a name

for imaginative advertising and for being a nice place to work, which

makes it rather an oddity nowadays, when calculating machines poorly

disguised as people rule the world.

I know Martin Puris slightly, so have been following the way he is

tackling this challenge with some attention. It amounts to fighting on

two difficult fronts. First, he must combine agencies with utterly

contrasting traditions; second, he must create a new culture for the new

creation. Having been faced with the same problem in miniature some

years ago, I am impressed by the way he has begun.

He has a view on the future of the industry. In fact, he has a view on

just about anything, which you can see expressed in little tableaux on

the walls of some Lintas agencies nowadays - not all original, but hair-

raising stuff by their standards - such as: ‘If we do what we’ve always

done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.’ In a speech to his troops, he

suggested advertising agencies should reinvent themselves. ‘Media ought

to include anywhere and everywhere a consumer can experience a brand...

a campaign might feature a branded retail space, restaurant or event.’

He feels there should be no boundaries between media and that

advertising people can and should shift back and forth between wildly

varying disciplines. Good for him. I hope he succeeds in putting fire

into the belly of the Lintas volcano.

Drayton Bird runs the Drayton Bird Partnership

This article was first published on Marketing