To San Francisco last week for the Leagas Delaney launch party. Bruce
Haines said he suspected no-one here believed the agency had really set
up over there, and they had just two men and a pair of Adidas trainers.
Well, it is there, honest; the first UK agency (along with M&C Saatchi)
to open up in the US for 20 years. If you must know, the last to do so
was KLP. It led indirectly to that agency’s demise as the New York
employees ran off with its business. Little chance of that happening
with Adidas.
In time-honoured tradition, Adidas asked Leagas Delaney to open up the
office. It did so first in Portland, Oregon, Adidas’s US HQ. However,
Leagas Delaney, encouraged by Adidas (Robert Louis Dreyfus, the former
Saatchi and Saatchi boss who now runs Adidas, sounds like a dream
client), chose not to stay in the Nike-dominated town, but to strike out
on its own - something Bartle Bogle Hegarty will consider carefully,
making the likelihood of it setting up in Levi’s hometown, San
Francisco, less likely than New York. Now the agency, with its 15 full-
time staffers, has already won its first domestic account - California’s
second-largest vineyard.
I tell you this not merely because I enjoyed my first visit to
California, but because the mood of the launch party was genuinely
different to that currently in London. The great and the good of Goodby
Silverstein and the rest of the booming San Francisco advertising scene
were out in force. They were all genuinely excited that Leagas Delaney
had chosen their city in which to start up. The spirit of camaraderie
felt much more like London than New York. The argument was that if an
agency with a reputation for creative excellence as high as Leagas
Delaney’s arrived in town and was seen to be succeeding, it made their
own selling proposition easier, despite the risk that it might steal
some of their prospective business.
Leagas Delaney’s reputation, it seems, is more ‘pure’ in San Francisco
than in London, where what it stands for seems sadly unfashionable. It’s
not about through-the-line, interactive 3-D, relationship hypertextual
face-to-face marketing, but effective advertising, built on creative
instinct. Although the work can appear a little samey in that it’s all
classy, beautifully executed stuff, Leagas Delaney’s niche is one which
many others would aspire to. Its success with Adidas is actually a model
for the business. Look at the way Dreyfus pays tribute to its role in
revolutionising his company’s fortunes. When you next pull on a pair of
Gazelles or Campus trainers, spare a thought for the staff at Leagas
Delaney, Ca., where the office is dead at 6pm because they’re all off
home or sailing. Instinct can still go a long way, huh?
