The client here is S-Fone, a not-so-large Vietnam mobile service and the story is that they asked five or so agencies to pitch for their account and then asked the agencies to "pay" to pitch for the media. The value of the media portion of the business is 3 million US. Hot a shabby amount around here.
DDB ended up in a two-way battle for creative only against Ogilvy and emerged victorious on the creative assignment but declined to participate and pay to be included in the media portion.
You can read the whole strange tale here on Brand Republic.
Shit. Is this some bizarre wave of the future or just a Vietnamese thing? Or could it be Korean? S-Fone is affiliated with SK Telecom in Korea so I wonder. But, in any case this brings me back to my blimp experience.
The client was the blimp owner and was asking an agency to pay to write a plan and then have exclusive rights to sell advertising on the blimp and the agency was in-turn asking me to write this entire plan, uhh, for free.
Both Ogilvy and DDB walked on the pay portion of the pitch and I, of course, opted not to write any plans for free on blimps. There's a whole lotta hot air being passed around here these days. I'm glad I walked on the blimp instead of being taken for a ride.
