MS Campaign Hits OC; OCR Magazines Readies First Title
Anyone have some space?
FCB Worldwide is reorganizing its Southern California presence and needs a new home for its three Orange County offices and their 200 employees. Also, its Los Angeles office, with 100 employees, is looking for new space.
A round of acquisitions and merging of formerly separate units left too many offices in Southern California, so to cut overhead, FCB is consolidating its LA, Costa Mesa, Santa Ana and Newport Beach operations to create a single $450 million SoCal agency with offices in Los Angeles and Orange County under one umbrella: FCB Southern California.
“The move is designed to generate firepower, to lure new clients and to better service existing ones, as well as consolidate costs like real estate,” said Vonda LePage, a spokeswoman for FCB.
The centralization also creates more career opportunities for the staff, LePage said. Account representatives will be able to work on a more diverse set of clients.
The firm anticipates no layoffs and has restructured its senior management. This is the way it looks:
n Jim Harrington, formerly general manager of the Costa Mesa office, is now president of FCB Southern California.
n Scott Montgomery, formerly executive creative director for the Costa Mesa office, is now executive creative director of FCB Southern California.
n Bob Gale, formerly group account director and field service network for the Santa Ana office, is now senior vice president in charge of the agency’s Taco Bell business.
n Thom McElroy, formerly chief creative officer of the Newport Beach office,which used to be McElroy Communications before FCB acquired it,is now president of McElroy FCB, a division of FCB Southern California.
n Howard Casavant, formerly senior group creative director for the Los Angeles office, is now senior group creative director for FCB Southern California.
FCB Southern California, a division of FCB Worldwide, is the largest agency brand of Chicago-based True North Communications, which has annual revenue exceeding $1.2 billion. True North, a holding company, is the parent to FCB and Bozell Worldwide. The local agency added $50 million in new business during the first two months of 2000. One of its recent clients is the Internet2000, a German business-to-business company with an office in Laguna Beach.
It’s a Pro Bono Campaign
MS: “It’s not a software company.”
MS: “It’s not a magazine for feminists.”
The MS stands for multiple sclerosis and the taglines were designed to create awareness of the neurological disease in the San Francisco Bay area. Since the campaign launched in 1997, MS awareness in the Bay area tripled from 13.5% to 35.6%.
Now, the Orange County Chapter of the National MS Society hopes to do the same in OC through the same campaign. MS is often confused with muscular dystrophy, says the OC chapter.
The ad campaign was developed pro bono by San Francisco-based McCann-Erikson. Eller Media, based in Phoenix with an office in Orange, donated ad space on more than 100 OC transit shelters. More than 3,000 people are afflicted with MS in OC and 175 are diagnosed annually.
Fore!
OCR Magazines, a new division of The Orange County Register, is launching its first title, GolfExtra, in June. The magazine will cover the Southern California golf scene and will be in the Register for targeted subscribers and distributed to non-subscribers by other means. GolfExtra will have a circulation of 100,000. It will be published bi-monthly … Cypress-based Creative Media Recording, an audio production company, landed a contract with Kaiser Permanente to provide recording services for their Health Phone tape series for the Mid-Atlantic region. Kaiser of Southern Calif. has been a long-time client of CMR but this contract breaks CMR into the Mid-Atlantic area.
CMR will create several radio public service announcements for the Fair Housing Council of Orange County. The PSAs will inform listeners of the housing services offered by the Fair Housing Council. Also, CMR is providing audio post-production for Mitsubishi Motors’ new Eclipse Spyder convertible video.
