The Reckoning
We weren’t the only ones to feel the sting of Big Fuel. During a final GM/Digitas trip to Detroit, the same IT employee who was upbeat about Converseon, social media and the introduction of Big Fuel as a social AOR was now the antithesis of how he introduced himself just a few months prior. He was angry, and visibly annoyed at any topic that pertained to their new social media AOR. “They cut us out.” He said to us, curling his upper lip as he drew a breath of disgust. “And now they expect us to play nice? Not happening. They can go about this on their own.”
“Oh no,” I thought. “Big Fuel was in trouble and the ink on their contract was still wet!” Over the next few months Avi would get what he wanted – an exit courtesy of Publicis Group, who I assumed used the acquisition to allegedly stay relevant within GM’s network. As Avi moved into a creative role, former Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners founder Jon Bond moved in as CEO. With a legitimate CEO at the helm, it seemed they were well on their way to building the Detroit office as a true regional outpost to service their midwest client base. In fact, upon joining my employer, one of the first messages I received was through a friend of John’s asking if I’d be interested in meeting him. I declined the opportunity for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with:
- I love my job and felt it was unprofessional.
- I still had ill harbored feelings towards how I perceived my former employer was treated.
A few weeks after I declined the meeting, I discovered Big Fuel hired a former colleague of mine from my Omnicom days to run their office in Detroit. He was a talented Creative Director working in Rapp’s retail group out of Dallas. I never had issues with him, and thoroughly enjoyed his insights and ideas. Although, I did feel it was a puzzling hire. I simply couldn’t see how his persona would mesh with General Motors culture. All of my thoughts were confirmed through a friend tied to the business who was recruited to be a part of the Detroit team. His sharp criticisms were filled with phrases such as “building the plane while in the air” and “aspiring beyond their current capacity.”
Conclusion
It’s easy to kick a company when they’re down and regardless of who they worked for or what they worked on, I sympathize with every employee who walked in those doors hoping to become agents of change in a city that saw such a diaspora of talent over the last half decade. I could empathize with their plight to an extent, which leads to my final anecdote. Six years ago I had a small agency/consultancy that helped brands ramp up their understanding of emerging media. At one point during a series of assignments with a large automotive company, it was plain as day that we were hitting the glass ceiling. There was simply no way we would ever be able to scale to service the clients who hired us. Their needs, as hard as it was to admit, were well beyond our capacity to deliver. I feel Big Fuel suffered the same fate in Detroit. To take on one of the largest corporations in the world in a global social media AOR capacity sounds exciting, until you realize that boiling the ocean is a prerequisite to the task at hand. You need to be disciplined, you need to have bulletproof infrastructure, and you need to learn to work within the culture you were being asked to change. Whether the resistance internally was fabricated or isolated is of no consequence. What is
disappointing is how I looked out my window every day expecting them to bring their best and we were ready to not only answer but exceed the call.
That’s no longer the case and sadly, may never have been at all.
