The start-up formed by the Fallon founding partners Laurence Green and Richard Flintham, the former Cadbury marketing director Phil Rumbol and the Saatchi Saatchi Fallon chief financial officer, Steve Waring, will open its doors early next year with the promise of offering clients a new way of working and a new way of paying for creative communications.
The independent enterprise has yet to be given a name but is being privately funded and will operate, in Green's words, as a collective of people working in a new way that can "take up the shape that tasks demand. These are the most exciting times in our business for years, and a blank canvas is very exciting."
Green and Flintham, the former Fallon chairman and executive creative director respectively, have worked together since founding the agency in 1998. Both have had a long working relationship with Rumbol, their former Cadbury client who presided over Fallon's award-winning campaigns for the brand, including the "gorilla" TV ad.
Rumbol, who left Cadbury in April, says that one of the key ingredients of the new venture will be flexibility: "The flexibility in the structure will enable us to really listen to what clients want, rather than having a fixed approach." Waring, a Fallon partner since 2000, will take responsibility for the commercial side of the company.
Robert Senior, the SSF chief executive, is focusing more of his energy back on Fallon: "I'm going to throw everything at making Fallon as good as it can possibly be. That is my moral and fiduciary duty."
Senior, Green and Flintham founded Fallon London in 1998 alongside Andy McLeod and Michael Wall. McLeod left the agency in December 2006. Wall resigned in 2007.
- Editor's Perspective, page 4.
... as Gail Gallie joins Fallon as chief exec
Fallon has appointed Gail Gallie, the former head of marketing at the BBC and a founding client of the agency, as its chief executive.
At the same time, Magnus Djaba, a partner at Fallon, has been promoted to managing director with Gareth Goodall, Katrien de Bauw and Augusto Sola made partners. Staff were informed of the management revamp on Wednesday as the departures of Laurence Green and Richard Flintham were announced.
Robert Senior, the SSF chief executive, said that the changes mark a "new chapter" for Fallon and that the agency will become "less self- referential".
There is, as yet, no direct replacement for Flintham as the executive creative director. A brief is out to hire "creative leaders", but whether Fallon will continue to have a single ECD or manage instead with a team of senior creatives is still under consideration.
Gallie was a Fallon client for eight years when she was the BBC's head of marketing, from 1998 to 2006. While there, she led the launches of CBeebies, BBC Three and the strategic overhauls of the core BBC brand, Radio 1, BBC News and Sport.
After leaving the corporation, she set up the strategic comms consultancy Gallie Godfrey. Before joining the BBC, she was an account director at BMP, working on the Labour account.
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