Where the Twain Does Meet
No pitches. No retainers. No awards. No wonder EastWest Creative is still a relative secret. Don’t waste your sympathy. This secret is shaping up to be of the “best-kept” variety: EastWest’s gross revenue rose 85 percent to $7.5 million in 1998, while net revenue climbed 87 percent to $6.5 million. Exactly how does an agency grow without trying very hard?
“We get most of our new business from referrals, either new brands or other divisions at our major clients,” says managing director Robert DeGaetano, 37. “We’re networking rather than leapfrogging.”
One way the business grew in 1998 was through the integration of a package design division. “We wanted to bring in core package-design people to present clients with something seamless,” says DeGaetano. The effort, which now boasts nine staffers led by vp-packaging Kerry Quigley, 39, “came to fruition in 1998.”
Other growth came through assignments for three additional divisions at Kraft Foods, which tapped EastWest as an agency of record last spring.
“We don’t have a high profile. But when our name does come up, it’s with a positive connotation,” DeGaetano says.
Clients support the claim, although for different reasons. An executive at one of its more media-reticent clients commends the agency for producing great creative and strong results without a lot of direction.
Susan Orsini, a consumer promotions manager at wood finishing product maker Minwax Co., offers praise because “they’re open and receptive to ideas. Creative people often have proprietary feelings about their work. They’re willing to listen.”
Orsini says she hired EastWest to develop spring and fall ’99 programs “because they already had a history of doing goodwork for us.” Sounds like the networking thing is legit.
But please, no spec work? “We focus on the clients who are paying us,” says DeGaetano.
And no retainers? “You get sucked into that quagmire of client stuff, just processing without any clear initiatives,” he says. The policy doesn’t stop East/West from accepting permanent status; in addition to Kraft, it’s an agency of record for Reckitt & Coleman and one of Nabisco’s “approved shops.”
Come on, filling out a award entry form isn’t so hard, is it? “We’d rather put the time into our clients,” says DeGaetano. “They’re much more impressed with [service enhancements like] remote-access viewing than if we bring home a Reggie.”
The staff appears to be just as content as the clients. In the last four years, EastWest has lost just two employees. “People come either for six months or 16 years,” says DeGaetano, who attributes the phenomenon to a flat corporate hierarchy that gives everyone a chance to contribute ideas – and reap the rewards. “It’s the tone Len sets,” he says.
Len is Leandro Zabala, 43, a European-born, big-agency veteran who formed EastWest as a five-person creative shop in 1983. First work for Kraft came soon after.
Although the payroll is now up to 61, the attempt to keep the org chart as flat as possible “is something we keep striving for,” Zabala says. “There’s a level of humility throughout the company. It’s difficult to maintain, but I think it’s fruitful.”
Zabala says he’s still comfortable operating a small independent within the ever-consolidating promo industry. “You can get muscled out. But I think we have an intrinsic value. Even if the world became one company, I think we’d have some role there.”
No doubt.
EastWest leaves one group of staffers free to work on any project – the “SWAT team.”
