Times Advertising Account Goes to McCann-Erickson : Marketing: A new campaign featuring the paper’s “faster format” is expected to be unveiled in the fall.

Following one of the longest ad agency searches on the West Coast in years, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday named McCann-Erickson as its agency.

“A difficult choice had to be made, but McCann-Erickson had the edge,” said Donald H. Clark, executive vice president of marketing at The Times. “The agency had a wonderful feeling for the market and for The Times.” The win is a big psychological boost for McCann-Erickson, which recently lost the estimated $20-million Century 21 business.

But it is not necessarily a big boost to McCann’s billings. Although The Times spends an estimated $5 million annually for advertising and promotion, McCann-Erickson has been hired only to create the advertisements. Western International Media will continue to purchase broadcast time and space in publications for the ads.

The review, which took more than a year to complete, began in June, 1989, when The Times dropped J. Walter Thompson as its agency. With plans to introduce the streamlined “faster format,” The Times then picked the Los Angeles office of Hill, Holliday, Connors & Cosmopulos for that project only.

But during this period, several major changes put the review on hold. Central among them, on Aug. 31, 1989, The Times named a new publisher, David Laventhol, who played a key hand in selecting McCann-Erickson. Then, on Nov. 2, 1989, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner folded. Since then, The Times gained about 90,000 in circulation, with about half of that attributed to the demise of the Herald Examiner.

The new agency said it is up to the challenge. “It’s always nice to have a client like a Tiffany’s or Steuben Glass on your client roster,” said Jim Surmanek, senior vice president and director of new business at McCann-Erickson. “There is superb marquee value in working for a first-class newspaper like the Los Angeles Times.”

Surmanek said the next campaign--expected to be introduced in the fall--will likely continue to use the “faster format” theme. But he declined to state any changes his agency might make. Most of the advertising McCann will create for The Times will be overall image campaigns, he said.

This will be no easy task, said James K. Agnew, whose agency, J. Walter Thompson, created the ad slogan, “We’re there for you every day.” The challenge that the new agency faces, said Agnew, is: “How can The Times make itself seem like a paper for the whole region as opposed to a paper just for the metropolitan area?”