Cliff Freeman & Partners. Where's The Grief?

Last week marked the sad end of the great New York agency Cliff Freeman & Partners.

Cliff Freeman and his agency showed the world of advertising that it is possible to make really, really entertaining work that was all about the product.

That's something that ad folks here in Britain have always been unwilling or unable to do - maybe it's because of the way people in the British ad business generally see the idea of selling as a bit grubby and beneath them? Over here, most people seem to think that any funny sketch or interesting thing with a product shoved on the end is an ad.

Cliff himself previously wrote the famous Where's the beef? ad for Wendy's. It never ran over here, but to me has always been a great example of a proper piece of advertising - in effect it's a simple product comparison - but the way it was done made it funny, and "Where's the beef?" became a catch phrase that really stuck.

Cliff's own company went on create some of the best advertising that I can remember, the stuff that helped me realise what it's really all about when I was first starting out. The stuff that helped me feel ok about wanting to do advertising that was unashamed to be advertising, but that was very entertaining or interesting at the same time.

Read an great post from someone closer to them, by the excellent Escape Pod here.

And another from Ben here.