After five-and-a-half-years as director of broadcast production at FCB Chicago, Florence "Flo" Babbitt is moving over to Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, as senior VP/director of broadcast production.
Babbitt’s last official day at FCB Chicago is March 24; she will begin at the Publicis & Hal Riney office in April. Her signing fills the void left by the departure of former Publicis & Hal Riney director of broadcast production Sam Walsh, who joined bicoastal/international Propaganda Films as general manager of the commercial and music video division in November (SHOOT, 11/12/99, p.1).
"It’s the right thing for me to do, and the right timing for me to do it," said Babbitt. "What [Publicis & Hal Riney] has always stood for has been [to be] a creative-driven place. Scott Marshall, the agency’s president, certainly believes that, and the people I met there believe it as well; it is what Hal [Riney] always intended it to be. So I thought, I wouldn’t mind spending the next period of my life back in the creative environment that I know, and at a creative agency."
Prior to her stint at FCB Chicago, Babbitt was a fixture in San Francisco’s agency community. She spent 12 years at FCB San Francisco, which she joined as a senior producer and became second-in-command at the production department after executive producer Steve Neely (who is now that agency’s director of broadcast production/deputy executive creative director). There, she produced for such accounts as Pacific Bell, California Raisins, Clorox, Teledyne and Levi’s. Prior to that, she produced for three years at Ketchum Advertising, San Francisco, primarily on Clorox.
Babbitt came to FCB Chicago at the invitation of the agency’s then-executive creative director Geoff Thompson, with whom she had worked at FCB San Francisco. (Thompson has since returned to FCB San Francisco, where he now serves as chairman and CEO of the office, and worldwide creative director.) "Geoff had always been the second [in charge] after Mike Koelker [the late former executive creative director at FCB/ S.F.]. When he came to Chicago, the idea was that it was his opportunity to take that head position and see what he could do with it. That was one of Geoff’s selling points to me: the idea that ‘you’ve always been second; now it’s time to step up and be in charge yourself.’ "
Babbitt said she was proud to have helped raise the bar of FCB Chicago’s creative, and was particularly proud of the support she provided its producers. "We’ve given them the support to seek out the best talent to work with, to back them and push the work," said Babbitt. "In the broader perspective, I think I affected producer’s lives on a day-to-day basis in a positive way. I gave them a lot of the experience I’d had in terms of being very collaborative with suppliers. Because of that, the level of work in the last five years has definitely gotten better. I didn’t do it single-handedly; I was just there to help."
Among the accounts she oversaw at FCB Chicago include Gatorade (which Babbitt executive produced for the last three years), Coors Light, Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Illinois Tourism, Illinois Lottery, Sunkist orange soda, and a number of S.C. Johnson brands including Pledge, Drano, Edge, Glade and Raid.
Babbitt also cited the improvement in the quality of advertising for FCB’s packaged goods accounts as particularly rewarding. "The fact that these people could push the envelope and raise the bar, even a little, is not an easy task. It’s one thing when you have a very creative client like a Levi’s or Nike that’s going to let you run with the ball. But with clients who are conservative and test things, it’s so much harder to fight and really improve that work, and these people did that."
In her role at Publicis & Hal Riney, Babbitt expects to help the production department accommodate the agency’s recent new business, which include Webvan, ReplayTV and Sprint Broadband Wireless Group. "They’re growing like crazy with a lot of dot-com business," said Babbitt. "That’s going to be an interesting challenge: how to staff, how to handle [the accounts] because time frames are much quicker. It’s a different approach for the dot-com companies. I won’t be able to assess the department’s needs until I get there, but we will have to assess if we have enough staff to handle all the business."
