14258: Victors & Spoils & Losers.

Adweek published a way-too-long report on the closing of Victors & Spoils, an inevitable event that, ironically, failed to draw a crowd. Honestly, the only entity that bought into the enterprise (literally and figuratively) was Havas—and the lame holding company ultimately shut it all down.

Adweek had the stupidity write a headline that read, “End of an Era as Havas ‘Crowdsourcing Agency’ Victors & Spoils Closes Shop.” End of an era? End of a really bad idea would have been more accurate.

The official Havas statement announced, “We are reducing the V&S footprint and reallocating any continuing clients to our Havas Chicago office.” Giving remaining work to Havas Chicago is like crowdsourcing to Lloyd Christmas, Harry Dunne, Moe, Larry, Curly, Shemp and Eric Trump.

“All in all, the experience of working with Havas as the global chief innovation officer was a good one,” said V&S Co-Founder John Winsor. “I had the honor to work with David Jones, who is one of the true visionaries of the industry, and had a chance to learn the complexities of working on a global basis.” Yeah, now Winsor is officially a world-class sycophant and huckster.

“I’m surprised V&S ended up closing their doors,” said former Havas CEO David Jones, who green-lighted the V&S acquisition in 2012. “I imagine losing their brilliant founder, John Winsor, was a fairly terminal blow, but I do think the huge success of other people-powered marketing businesses like Mofilm, Tongal, Vidmob and Vidsy that are built on the same people-powered principles as Uber and Airbnb would suggest their demise wasn’t due to the model.” Gee, guess the “true visionary” didn’t realize the ad game isn’t the same as chauffeuring with your own wheels or renting out a spare room. Then again, holding companies and crowdsourcing have helped ignite the commoditization of creativity—leading to generic mediocrity across the industry.

Idiots like Winsor and Jones don’t even realize their current situations prove how the advertising industry has degraded. That is, a “brilliant founder” and “true visionary” can get booted, and life churns on without them. Everyone is disposable and replaceable—especially Winsor and Jones.

14069: John Winsor’s Still Irrelevant.

Adweek published a too-painfully-long-to-repost perspective titled, “5 Ways to Save Agency Holding Companies From Becoming Irrelevant.” The author is John Winsor, a bona fide expert on becoming irrelevant. ‘Nuff said.

12827: Chief Irrelevance Officer.

Crowdsourcing con artist and Victors & Spoils Chairman John Winsor is abandoning his Chief Innovation Officer role at Havas. It’s just as well, since innovation and Havas are two words that should never appear together in the same sentence. Ditto innovation and Winsor. MultiCultClassics has consistently recognized the pseudo thought leader as a talentless, culturally clueless asshole. The man has become so irrelevant, even Digiday didn’t bother reporting on Winsor’s latest move—only AgencySpy shat out a post. And he failed to inspire a crowd of cutting comments too.

11508: John Winsor Lacks Talent.

John Winsor continues his uncanny streak of commenting on matters where he has no credibility or intelligence—which is actually an unlimited space for the man. Of course, he’s found the perfect soapbox at Digiday, whose editorial staff remains ignorant regarding all things related to the business of advertising.

Winsor’s latest column—The Agency Talent Problem is Really a Culture Issue—is pathetic on multiple levels. And offensive on a few levels too.

Winsor opened by referencing Kofi Annan. Sorry, but a White huckster quoting Annan is the equivalent of a Grand Wizard saluting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That Winsor immediately transitioned to a sports analogy and the New York Yankees demonstrates cultural cluelessness of the highest order.

Winsor claimed that in baseball and advertising, “it is the team of underdogs, unsung heroes and washed-up has-beens that comes together to beat the team with impeccable talent.” The theory, however, has not proven effective in Major League Baseball or any professional sport—and it certainly has not worked in the ad game. Winsor’s thinly veiled attempt to validate crowdsourcing appears to have been inspired by a single viewing of Moneyball. Um, Winsor being placed in the same league with Billy Beane is about as unlikely as Winsor being mistaken for Brad Pitt.

It’s appalling for Winsor to speak about culture and talent in agencies when his current failing business model is rooted in drawing from an anonymous crowd of unpaid freelancers. Plus, he’s directly tied to Havas, which is arguably the global holding company featuring the worst talent in the field.

Winsor stressed the importance of creating culture around a vision. He didn’t mention that two of the three founders of Victors & Spoils have already bailed out. Guess they realized the vision was really a fantasy.

Winsor closed by declaring, “Leaders have only one job: create the culture. They must develop the culture, then support it and get out of the way, leading from the bottom up, serving the people instead of creating a kingdom, commanding from the top down.” Winsor ought to take his own clumsy advice and focus on his one job—versus writing inane opinion pieces that show he’s thoroughly unqualified for the one job.

11500: Two Cents On JCPenney.

Advertising Age reported more details on the JCPenney account reassignment to Doner, EVB and Victors & Spoils. MultiCultClassics originally commented that the trio of terrible shops looked like participants on AMC series The Pitch. Turns out the competition actually resembled the reality TV show, as the exclusive review lasted only three weeks. Three-month-old JCPenney SVP-Marketing Debra Berman booted six-month-old AOR Y&R after deciding the agency’s 2013 holiday marketing plan was not “sufficient to build the relationship we want to with our customers.” Merry Christmas, Y&R. Meanwhile, Omnicom’s EVB and Havas’ Victors & Spoils teamed up to win social and grassroots marketing assignments. In other words, pseudo thought leader John Winsor needed to bolster his mystical crowd of freelancers with a mediocre digital shop—and he ultimately got beat by Doner, a traditional advertising agency dinosaur. Of course, there was no mention of minority shops in the mix. Heaven forbid non-Whites might comprise a sizable portion of JCPenney’s audience. Berman and her new agencies recognize the challenge ahead demands staging a major turnaround. Seems as if everyone involved could use a total professional makeover.

11353: John Winsor Is An Asshole.

John Winsor is at it again. His latest Digiday column is titled, “Agencies Are to Blame for Deferred Payments”—a critique based on the recent moves by Procter & Gamble and Mondelez to lengthen the time they take to pay their agencies. Admittedly didn’t bother reading Winsor’s perspective. After all, here’s a fucking idiot running a shitty crowdsourcing shop who doesn’t even feel obligated to pay everyone submitting concepts. Winsor is revolutionizing hucksterism.

11331: John Winsor—Wannabe Innovator.

John Winsor should seriously consider crowdsourcing to write his editorials, as he seems incapable of handling the task on his own. The man’s latest perspective at Digiday—which is barely a rung above AgencySpy as a forum for pseudo thought leaders—presents commentary on the Publicis Groupe-Omnicom merger that essentially blends common knowledge with self-promotional pap. If there were a Darwinian chart for idiotic hucksters, Winsor would definitely be depicted in the evolutionary lineup.

For starters, Winsor actually had the audacity to quote Havas CEO David Jones’ (Winsor’s boss) critique of the mega-merger: “Clients today want us to be faster, more agile, more nimble and more entrepreneurial, not bigger and more bureaucratic and more complex.” Um, Jones’ network is no stranger to bigness, bureaucracy and complexity. The company website boasts, “Havas is one of the world’s largest global advertising, digital and communications groups.” And let’s not forget the enterprise is fueled by nepotism. Havas implying Publicis Omnicom Groupe is outdated sounds like Joan Rivers calling Betty White an old shrew.

So what solution does Winsor propose to address the problems inherent in holding companies such as Publicis Omnicom Groupe and Havas? Why, crowdsourcing, of course! Winsor wants to counter the “commoditized service offerings” of traditional advertising agencies with a failed industry fad that commoditizes creative people and the creative process in the worst possible ways. As history has shown, agency mergers never improve the lives of the worker bees executing the campaigns. But crowdsourcing as performed by Winsor turns writers and art directors into anonymous, interchangeable drones—and grossly undervalues their contributions during an economic recession.

Winsor said Publicis Omnicom Groupe is “an attempt to stop the clock.” Okay, but Winsor better check the clock too—his fifteen minutes of fame expired a long time ago.

11302: C’MON WHITE MAN! Episode 29.

(MultiCultClassics credits ESPN’s C’MON MAN! for sparking this semi-regular blog series.)

John Winsor’s professional titles include CEO of Victors & Spoils and Chief Innovation Officer at Havas. Um, Chief Innovation Officer at Havas is an oxymoron. And based on his recent editorials, Winsor is an ordinary moron.

Winsor managed to turn the Harvard Business Review into AgencySpy, inspiring caustic comments for The Dinosaurs of Cannes. He later added idiocy at Digiday with Time to Lose ‘Creative’ as an Agency Job Title—which has so far garnered a single robot response.

What makes pseudo thought leaders like Winsor so annoying is their delusional belief that they are revolutionaries. Realizing the advertising industry needs a better business model is a no-brainer. Thinking the solution involves crowdsourcing is brainless.

Victors & Spoils has yet to produce anything beyond mediocre—they really should remove the word “creative” from the company’s vocabulary. Over the past few years, the place has seemingly degraded into nothing more than an understaffed agency relying on freelance support (a pretty standard operating procedure for small to mid-sized firms today).

Despite Winsor’s cries for change, the officers listed on the agency website are regular veterans with regular titles. And the mystical crowd is probably comprised of cronies. In other words, V&S is virtually perpetuating the exclusivity that has fueled the industry for generations. Plus, asking people to work on spec during recessionary times—while privileged Caucasian leaders enjoy salaried positions—is 21st century corporate evil.

To top things off, V&S is now part of Havas, the least interesting network of all. Condemning the status quo and then joining it displays hypocrisy of the highest order—a common trait of old school Mad Men. In short, Winsor has succeeded in building just another typical White agency with a few obscene twists. The fool rightly deserves a title that’s been around from the start: Huckster.

C’MON WHITE MAN!