Pioneer O.C. Ad Agency to Close by Year’s End : Advertising: Cochrane Chase, Livingston & Co. dominated the local industry until it was bought out in the mid-1980s.
Cochrane Chase, Livingston & Co., a granddaddy of the Orange County advertising industry, is set to close its doors by the end of the year and dismiss its 33-person staff.
The company has spawned at least seven local agencies--notably Salvati Montgomery Sakoda in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach-based Forsythe Marcelli Johnson Advertising--and has trained dozens of executives who went on to join prestigious firms here and in Los Angeles.
“It’s like losing Chevrolet,” said Dan Pittman, a former Cochrane Chase employee who left to become a vice president for Salvati Montgomery Sakoda.
Cochrane Chase over the years has handled advertising for Carl Karcher Enterprises, Beckman Instruments, Dollar Rent A Car, Lucky Stores and Pirelli Tires.
The office closing comes after a failed attempt by management to buy back the company from its parent, financially troubled Saatchi & Saatchi of London. Neither side would release details of the offer.
“You’ll have to draw your own conclusions about what, if anything, the offer constituted if we then decided to close the office,” said Martin Tucker, president of Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings U.S.A. in New York.
He said Cochrane Chase was losing clients, and closing the office is part of a restructuring of Saatchi’s three-office AC&R; division: The Los Angeles office was sold to management, the Irvine office will be shuttered and the New York office was placed under the control of another Saatchi division, Backer Spielvogel Bates Worldwide Inc. Cochrane Chase’s annual billings are reportedly below $10 million, down from about $59 million in 1987.
“They must be trying to move the accounts to one of their existing offices,” said Peter Stranger, president of Della Femina, McNamee WCRS in Los Angeles. He pointed out that Saatchi’s merger spree in the mid-1980s led to that company’s owning four agencies in the greater Los Angeles market: AC&R; in Los Angeles, Cochrane Chase, Saatchi & Saatchi DFS and Team One, which handles the Lexus automobile account.
The departure of the company’s affable founder Cochrane Chase in late 1988 had also left the company “rudderless,” Stranger said. “It was a very, very viable, vibrant Orange County agency. But a lot of the agency’s persona was wrapped up in Cochrane Chase.”
When Saatchi & Saatchi bought Cochrane Chase, Livingston in 1984, the larger firm dwarfed the smaller: It owned 62 agencies in more than 38 countries.
Founded in the early 1960s by Cochrane Chase and Lynn Livingston, the company grew up with Orange County. It was one of several ad agencies opened about the same time to serve the growing aeronautics and electronics industries here, said Leland Oliver, who had opened his agency, Leland Oliver Inc., in 1956.
Cochrane Chase, Livingston secured one of the first large consumer advertising accounts in Orange County in 1974, for the growing Carl’s Jr. fast-food chain, based in Anaheim. The account put the agency on the regional map.
Later the same year, Cochrane Chase won out over 300 competitors for the AMF/Voit account. It picked up a national account in Leach Racquetball and signed to promote Akai Radio for its Japanese owner.
“We were getting our socks beat off by them,” said Pittman, who was working for a national agency in Los Angeles before he joined Cochrane Chase in 1977.
Creatively, Cochrane Chase stood out among the business-as-usual advertising agencies of the day. In the mid-1970s, the company hired a graffiti artist to decorate its office walls.
In the mid-1980s, the company opened a biomedical/health-care office near Fashion Island and has since handled accounts for Beckman Instruments, PacifiCare and UCI Medical Center.
Cochrane Chase’s strategy is heavy on market research and focus groups, said Jill Murphy, who worked as an intern at Cochrane Chase in 1984, just before its sale to Saatchi & Saatchi. She is now a principal of Murphy & Watt in Irvine.
The sale to Saatchi & Saatchi was a chance for Cochrane Chase to increase its national image, and to some, it was a sign that the Orange County advertising industry had arrived.
“It was the big buyout for Orange County,” Oliver said. “But the company lost the personality it had developed. The flavor and the fun went out of it. The idea was to make sure the (weekly) report gets to New York on Friday.”
Cochrane Chase’s new emphasis on national accounts hurt the company here. Shortly after the buyout, it dropped out of contests for local ad awards because it was dominating them. In 1985, Cochrane Chase lost its longtime Carl’s Jr. account, which was worth $12 million, to Della Femina McNamee. Two years later, another local account, Lucky Stores, left with an additional $12-million in business. Cochrane Chase subsequently laid off 17 people.
In June, 1988, Saatchi & Saatchi merged Cochrane Chase into its AC&R; division, and the Irvine office changed its name to alphabet soup: AC&R;/CCL Advertising. At the end of the year, founder Cochrane Chase retired at age 56, announcing that he planned to sail for months--or maybe years--with his wife aboard their 38-foot boat.
“Their visibility decreased recognizably when they changed their name,” said Phil Salvati, president of Salvati Montgomery Sakoda.
In July, in an apparent bid to regain its local standing, the Orange County office resumed using the name Cochrane Chase.
The final blow came in September, when the company lost a bid for a $16-million account with Food 4 Less Supermarkets, which owns Alpha Beta and Viva grocery stores, among others.
“This failure is a commentary on the ‘80s, with all the takeovers,” said John Vrba, senior vice president of Western International Media Corp. in Newport Beach.
