No surprise
Samuel Helbling on the glory and misery of the WHS brand
Samuel Helbling on the glory and misery of the WHS brand Reinhold Weber had a great time as CD at Aebi & Partner in the mid-1980s. Those were the euphoric years in which Jean Etienne Aebi's agency left hardly a cube to the competition at the ADC awards. But flying high is also dangerous, because the air at the top is getting thinner and thinner. Before the disastrous Elephant Wedding in 1988, the model advertiser left the agency, which soon turned out to be an oversized balloon with an alphabet salad of a name that has long since been forgotten.
was named Advertiser of the Year for the first time. In 1990, in faraway Denmark, he was caught off guard by the news that GGK had been sold. He could not accept being sold off without being asked and resigned immediately. It must have hurt him that he was labeled a deserter and almost the gravedigger of GGK.
The sequel is well known: While Reinhold Weber founded WHS with Yvonne Hodel and John Schmid, which was successful right from the start, GGK went into a nasty tailspin. In 1992, the creative talent was crowned for the second time by his colleagues. But his luck ran out at the end of the 90s. His expansion abroad failed spectacularly. The star advertiser wasted millions in Berlin and Vienna, then lost the Smart budget and had to drastically downsize his agency. Since then, things have gone quiet around him and the news of the grounding of his agency last Friday didn't really surprise anyone.
The only thing that made people sit up and take notice was Weber's boldly announced collaboration with GGK-Zurich. But Weber seems to have done the math without the GGK landlord. Hermann Strittmatter has been told by the SonntagsZeitung that he doesn't think much of Weber's plans. If anything happens at all, it is the integration of Weber's agency into GGK Zurich. So it is clear who is dictating the terms.
However, speculation about an imminent succession plan at GGK is premature. After all, the GGK patriarch considers himself irreplaceable, as he defiantly assured this magazine when he reached the statutory retirement age in 2002.
> Samuel Helbling, Editor-in-Chief
was named Advertiser of the Year for the first time. In 1990, in faraway Denmark, he was caught off guard by the news that GGK had been sold. He could not accept being sold off without being asked and resigned immediately. It must have hurt him that he was labeled a deserter and almost the gravedigger of GGK.
The sequel is well known: While Reinhold Weber founded WHS with Yvonne Hodel and John Schmid, which was successful right from the start, GGK went into a nasty tailspin. In 1992, the creative talent was crowned for the second time by his colleagues. But his luck ran out at the end of the 90s. His expansion abroad failed spectacularly. The star advertiser wasted millions in Berlin and Vienna, then lost the Smart budget and had to drastically downsize his agency. Since then, things have gone quiet around him and the news of the grounding of his agency last Friday didn't really surprise anyone.
The only thing that made people sit up and take notice was Weber's boldly announced collaboration with GGK-Zurich. But Weber seems to have done the math without the GGK landlord. Hermann Strittmatter has been told by the SonntagsZeitung that he doesn't think much of Weber's plans. If anything happens at all, it is the integration of Weber's agency into GGK Zurich. So it is clear who is dictating the terms.
However, speculation about an imminent succession plan at GGK is premature. After all, the GGK patriarch considers himself irreplaceable, as he defiantly assured this magazine when he reached the statutory retirement age in 2002.
> Samuel Helbling, Editor-in-Chief
