Claire Beale On Advertising

It's time for agencies to get creative with their roles - or they'll lose out

First, you'll notice that I'm not Stefano Hatfield. He is otherwise engaged this week on the small matter of taking on Associated Newspapers in a bloody battle for the hearts and minds of Londoners. As editor of News International's first-ever UK launch, thelondonpaper, Hatfield is busily planning his first salvo.

Talking of Associated, Guy Zitter, the managing director of the Daily Mail, is not a man known for his emotional incontinence. As you might expect, he's a hard-as-nails operator with a dangerously mean streak when it comes to dealing with media agencies who fail to recognise the true commercial value of the paper he flogs. Nevertheless, and he would probably hate me saying this, he has a rich seam of charm if you care to dig deep enough, and this week proved that he's a loyal old bugger, too.

Zitter has just pulled the Daily Mail's advertising account out of the agency where it has resided for 35 years. That's one of the longest client-relationships in an ad business increasingly characterised by fickle, here-today-gone-tomorrow clients hooked on the ego trip of the pitch process or, worse, always moving their business in search of cheaper and cheaper advertising. And Zitter's decision to pull the account, worth a juicy £25m, is actually a testament to his loyalty rather than the opposite.

The Mail's creative work has been handled by the same man for 25 years - an equally astounding feat in a business where the cult of (cheap) youth continues to thrive. Now that man, Brian Watson, has quit Draft FCB for new agency The Law Firm, taking the Daily Mail account with him.

Watson has produced more than 1,400 ads for the Daily Mail over the years, enough to put him in The Guinness Book of Records for the most commercials ever produced for a single client. He also, famously, managed to turn around an ad for the Mail from briefing to execution in half a day - a remarkable achievement when so many agencies still take weeks to cogitate on the syntax of the original briefing document.

OK, so the Daily Mail is never going to win any creative awards; these are disposable ads designed to drive tomorrow's newspaper sales, not live on in the pages of the D&AD annual. But Watson and Zitter have made a pretty effective partnership over the last quarter of a century and it's clear that Zitter sees his advertising relationship as being with Watson rather than the FCB agency where he worked.

At a time when the ad business is dominated by amorphous global agency networks and clients are often won and lost at a level far removed from the local agency management, it's heartening to see that such strong personal ties do continue to thrive and advertising can still be, at its heart, a people business.

Back in the days of the old full-service advertising set-up, agencies were often clients' most trusted advisors, creating brand-building advertising, yes, but also working alongside marketing departments on brand strategy and product development.

Today, agencies are scrambling to reclaim this sort of high ground but, all too often, are forced back into the box labelled "pretty pictures". So it's not surprising that there has been much debate recently about how brand consultancies such as Wolff Olins are encroaching on ad agency territory, devising new brand strategies and then all but making the ads. It's the reason cited for the recent split between Sony Ericsson and Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Apparently BBH belatedly discovered that Wolff Olins had been working on a new strategy for their client and, not only that, Wolff Olins had virtually designed the ads; all BBH were asked to do was polish them into shape. This story has been leapt upon by agencies keen to parade their strategic credentials and highlight the lack of rounded creative talent at the branding agencies (whose creative nous, the ad agencies argue, stretches no further than the ability to design a logo). In fact many brand consultancies, such as Interbrand and Lambie Nairn, are now run by ex-ad-agency people who are more than capable of transporting their advertising experience into the brand consultancy arena. But the real issue lies in where the client relationships reside nowadays.

Advertising agencies find it increasingly difficult to claim access to the client boardroom and have to make do with a relationship at the marketing-director level, often in companies where the marketing department has lost its internal status and there is no board-level marketing function. Brand consultancies, on the other hand, sit at the chief executive's right hand, devising brands, corporate identities and company transformations. Little wonder that they are able to leverage this sort of relationship to extend their businesses into ad-agency territory. Until agencies work out how to raise the value of their service within their clients' boardrooms, they will continue to be under threat from rivals with real access to the chief executive's ear.

RICKY GERVAIS always said that he'd never make an ad. Well, except for that one for the Prostate Cancer Charity. And that one for Jobability, the website for disabled job seekers. Worthy causes, both. And, erm, now this one for Microsoft that's storming the web. OK, it's not an ad as such; in fact it's two 20-minute films. But they do a pretty good job of putting a human face on the mighty Microsoft corporation - no mean feat.

The films - designed to look like training videos and apparently used to teach staff about the Microsoft culture - were actually shot back in 2003. I bet back then (an age, in internet terms) no-one worried about them being picked up online (Google Video didn't exist) and dominating the blogosphere. But big corporations can't change paperclip suppliers these days without someone, somewhere picking up on it online and writing about it. And when you're a corporation as powerful as Microsoft and a comedian as brilliant as Gervais, there's not a hope that the collaboration won't be seized upon.

In fact, it's a wonder the films have taken so long to see the light of day, which is why some bloggers are asking whether, in fact, Microsoft itself has put the films out into the internet ether in a subtle but powerful marketing ploy. Microsoft has, apparently, launched an investigation to find out how the films leaked out and has requested that they be removed from some sites. Even so, the only people to come off badly are Stephen Merchant and Gervais, as bloggers debate whether taking the Microsoft shilling has dented their artistic integrity. Now that the cat's out of the bag maybe Gervais can be persuaded to relent and join the legions of TV comics who have cashed in on their wit in the name of promoting consumer brands. Apparently Flash is looking for a new spokesman.

BEALE'S BEST IN SHOW CASTLEMAINE XXXX EXTRA COLD

If your hangover-inducer of choice is a a glass of beer, it won't have escaped your attention that if you're not cold these days, you're not hot. And when I say cold, I mean, of course, Extra Cold.

Guinness has been running adapted shorts of its famous blockbuster campaigns (surfer, snails, dancing eskimo) to push its cold variant. Foster's and Carling have all put some marketing welly behind their extra-colds. They're all fighting for a slug of a market worth £11bn. Now it's the turn of Castlemaine XXXX.

As briefs go, it doesn't get much simpler. And cold, as anyone who's spent August at home this year can testify, is something we Brits know a bit about. So BBH, Castlemaine's agency, has taken a literal, but beautifully clean and straightforward approach for a new set of poster ads.

Castlemaine's Australian, right? Extra cold means wrap up warm, right? So we get a bloody big spider in woolly gloves, a Koala in a furry Parka. You get the picture. It's shot against a swelteringly dry outback landscape; it's the beer that gets them shivering.

BBH was once described on this page as the home of "joyless excellence". Joyless or not, it remains one of London's best creative agencies and these posters show that despite a few turkeys this year (KFC anyone?), it can still do the business.

Claire Beale is editor of 'Campaign'

claire.beale@haynet.com