What now for Ikon?
From an agency revered by its rivals Ikon has fallen to become one fighting for its very existence. Mumbrella editor Alex Hayes looks at what caused this fall, and what the agency can do to build from here.
News of the resignation of James Greet as CEO of Ikon Communications has come as a surprise to many in the industry. Retaining the Commonwealth Bank account made it appear the once-revered agency had started to emerge from what had been a very deep trough.
But scratch under the surface and it’s clear Ikon is still an agency dealing with a lot of issues.
Its struggles are well documented, and date back to before the sudden culling of CEO Dan Johns and much of his senior leadership team. Greet was bought into replace him, but it was no secret he had a tough job on his hands.
Thanks Perez Hilton
This is nothing but an ‘opinion’ piece, and a very poor one at that.
What a piece of inaccurate, bias, gossip trash.
Shame on you Mumbrella.
Well it is filed under “opinion”.
And news is a bit slow, so a bit of gossiptainment keeps it all going. 🙂
Ikon will be fine.
I’m guessing that their may be some Ikon staffers commenting here. I’m a a fan of the agency and hope they come out stronger, but think that this is a pretty fair piece asking some very relevant questions: how does a company create a unifying brand with no CEO? How does a local independent maintain parity with much richer competitors when it comes to tech?
A renewed focus on 6 star dashboards will surely fix things?
calm down Ikon staffers – its an opinion piece. Every agency is going through the same shit as everybody else. We’re all shitting over each other to win business by selling shit campaign for the mass market to swallow at the lowest price possible.
Agree with ‘calm down’ – this is a once high-flying award winning business that has struggled for the last couple of years and is now at a crossroads. It tried a leadership approach last year that hasn’t worked out for it and is now trying something different. How this new structure performs is critical as you imagine they can’t afford for this change not to work. An opinion piece on this therefore isn’t out of order.
Great article. Cuts to the core and exposes a dying business model clinging onto the past.
When the share price drops to 50c, probably in 4 months, STW will simply fall into the WPP portfolio and be streamlined down to within an inch of life.
Greet is far from the last middle manager to fall under the hammer.
Strong leadership & sound management is everything in times of turmoil. Luckily Ikon is in the hands of a man with passion, intelligence & experience. Imagine how quickly a company in the media business would fold under a CEO who didn’t know what he or she was doing?
Seems to me that we see an awful lot of negative opinion pieces on this particular agency. Don’t know what’s going on but something is. Did they stand on mumbrella’s toes?