Two nights ago, I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 CIPD Recruitment Awards at the HAC Gardens. The setting was idyllic – on arrival, we were greeted with a glass of champagne and quickly ushered onto the veranda to lounge in the evening sunshine against a backdrop of a cricket match. An immaculately manicured cricket pitch in the middle of the city – how quintessentially English.
Anyway, a fantastic evening was made much better by Hodes winning the Recruitment Effectiveness award and then topped by our work for Hertfordshire Constabulary winning the Grand Prix award. A great honour and one that does credit to a long-standing relationship between Hodes and Herts, which has allowed us to test some of the more innovative/risky advertising ideas.
But there was a sombre note to the evening. The previous day had seen the announcement that one of our competitors, Barkers, had been bought. Unbeknown to many of us, Barkers was already in administration and its acquisition by Penna for the lowly price of £8.6m resulted in a further suite of redundancies (and I’m fairly certain that it heralds the start of more to come). The announcement had been too sudden to allow for Barkers’ advertisement to be removed from the programme.
Barkers, which was the only agency to post a three-figure billing in the top ten agencies list, focused on the company’s long term history, with the ad proudly stating its establishment date (1812) and survival through “2 world wars, 6 recessions, 8 monarchs, 36 Prime Ministers, the fall of the British Empire, climate change and the global credit crisis.”
It reminded me of a recent book that I have read – Then we came to the end, by Joshua Ferris – which is about the slow and inevitable death of an advertising agency and the desperate struggle of those under its employ to pretend that it wasn’t happening. And it got me thinking as to whether it was really such a big surprise, after all. Plus ca change, n’est ce pas?