Ad Agency Phenom : 5-Year-Old Outfit Cleans Up at the Annual Belding Awards

If advertising is geared toward the young, perhaps ad awards should be geared toward young agencies.

Such was the case Wednesday night when Stein Robaire Helm, a little-known Brentwood agency that didn’t even exist until five years ago--but has since helped turn Ikea into a household name in Southern California--walked off with seven of the West Coast’s top ad awards. No other agency won as many.

Another fledgling ad firm, 6-year-old El Segundo-based Team One Advertising, creator of ads for Lexus, took home five major awards at the 27th annual Belding Awards--which are sponsored by the Advertising Club of Los Angeles and limited to agencies with offices in Southern California.

But just when it looked as if youth had prevailed, the 55-year-old Los Angeles office of BBDO Worldwide was handed the competition’s most coveted prize--best ad campaign--for its TV spots for Apple Computer. One Apple ad features former Los Angeles Laker star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fiddling with a laptop computer while sitting in a cramped airplane seat.

The end result of the competition was sweet revenge for the Los Angeles ad community, which last year saw the top prize awarded to a San Diego agency--and the year before that to a promotional unit of ABC Television. Still, some contest judges said they were not very impressed with the estimated 1,200 entries.

“I don’t think that Los Angeles is setting the ad world on fire,” said Kirk Citron, a contest judge and president of the San Francisco agency Citron Haligman & Bedecarre.

But the chairman of the Belding Awards committee said that the judging, done by out-of-town ad executives, was especially harsh this year. Just 24 Belding “bowls” were awarded--”the fewest in my memory,” said John Armistead, creative director at D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles.

Local ad executives say the Southland’s lousy economy is to blame. They say their clients have become more conservative in their marketing in recent years--particularly firms whose key markets are in Southern California. Conservative ad strategies rarely win ad contests.

Most of the ads that won awards did so, Citron said, “because they didn’t take the products so seriously.”

Many of the largest agencies in town won no Beldings at all. And Chiat/Day, the Venice agency that won eight Belding bowls last year--more than any other agency--took home one this year despite entering 125 pieces of work.

Still, Chiat/Day was the training ground for the three founders of Stein Robaire Helm, the firm that waltzed away with the most prizes. In fact, when the agency was first formed, it approached prospective clients by boasting that it could provide Chiat/Day quality work for less money.

“Chiat/Day is the gold standard. No one has won more awards than them,” said Greg Helm, president of Stein Robaire and former general manager at Chiat/Day.

“We owe a ton to Jay Chiat,” he said, in reference to the chairman of Chiat/Day.

But when Helm and his two partners, John Stein and Jean Robaire, left Chiat/Day, they had no great visions of success. “We just wanted to make enough money to stay in business,” Helm said.

That wasn’t easy. The agency opened without a single client. And the firm spent its first 10 days operating out of Helm’s house. Things didn’t improve much when it finally moved into an office. With no money for furniture, Helm lugged in his backyard picnic table.

The agency opened with just the three partners, but it now has a staff of 34. And its annual billings exceed $40 million--although it recently lost the lucrative Southern California Acura Dealers account. One of the firm’s most familiar ads for Ikea, the Swedish furniture retailer, features an actor who appears to be looking into the viewer’s living room--and even sticks his nose into the camera lens. “You need some new furniture,” he says.

Meanwhile, BBDO’s winning spot for Apple was a big hit at the awards show. In it, the 7-foot-2 Abdul-Jabbar is shown wedged into an airplane seat, working on his computer.

“Having embarked on a new career at age 45, Kareem found himself traveling in coach,” says the voice-over by Abdul-Jabbar. The spot ends with a close-up of Abdul-Jabbar’s hands on the keyboard. “At least his hands were comfortable.”

The ad, filmed at Universal Studios, was not without its uncomfortable moments for Abdul-Jabbar, said Steve Hayden, chairman of BBDO’s Los Angeles office. The spot took hours to film, said Hayden, “but we never left him sitting in that chair for more than a half-hour at a time.”