The senior management team at SASS have revealed plans to wind down the full-service agency and replace it with a new company "more focused on digital and design".
Cheshire-based SASS claimed to offer advertising, digital, PR, media, design and direct marketing. The new agency, Mosquito, will strip out many of these services and instead concentrate on "brand-led digital capability".
Graham Sass, chairman of SASS and one of the partners in Mosquito, said: "We took a long hard look at the agency after stepping back for nine months last year to develop our own online brands. When we returned we saw an opportunity to create a much more relevant offer going forward.
"The traditional agency model still has its place but we felt it was no longer for us – the full service practices in place were delivering creatively but definitely beginning to feel outmoded and clunky in the context of market demands at the time.
"Real change was increasingly hard to effect within the existing structure so we came to the decision that the way forward was to completely reinvent and take the best of what we had in brand building and creativity and fuse it with the excellent digital capability that has been growing steadily over the past three years."
Other partners in the new business are Jo Sass, previously media and PR director at SASS, and Anthony Diver, SASS's head of digital.
SASS's co-founder and creative services director Crete Panayi and senior technical architect Andy Todd are also understood to be moving to Mosquito.
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Comments
Seems obvious this is a thinly-disguised company debt removal exercise – agencies can change direction or re-focus or whatever they want to do without closing down... Complete BS.
There are a lot of agencies out there hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and undoubtably the fallout from the banking crisis has made it even more difficult for business's (especially one's like agencies, which by their nature, have very few 'tangible' assets) to get finance.
However, I wish that company senior management would stop presuming that just because they've managed to convince themselves with their own spin, that the rest of us don't know what's really going on.
Oh purlease...............it's not even thinly veiled is it?
However would we rather be mourning the loss of another longstanding agency or being positive that there's a future for those that are saved?
Just wish they hadn't tried to be clever about it.
Times are hard, cash is tight, commercial decisions have to be taken - don't dress them up in this way.
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