VCCP's cheeky coup inspires admiration but appears disloyal. (Perspective).

These days few clients hand over their accounts without a long period of foreplay. The competitive pitch is still the best way of finding exactly what an agency can do for them, as opposed to what they can do for the other clients whose work attracted their attention in the first place. We all know that such carrot-dangling on a grand scale takes agencies' best people away from existing business and costs a packet in experimental commercials, but that's just the way it is.

But when [O.sub.2] decided to ditch Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in favour of a start-up conceived barely a fortnight before, the rules changed.

Vallance Carruthers Coleman Priest came up with a brilliant idea and AMV didn't. It was an idea good enough, a mere 100 days or so from [O.sub.2]'s launch, to convince the client to tear up a contract with BBDO on which the ink was barely dry and write a new one in favour of four privately funded partners whose first job was to hastily assemble a network of agencies. What conclusions can we draw from all this?

There is the fact that contracts in advertising appear to be worth little more than the paper they are written on. In these situations it would be understandable if agencies whose income is threatened with a drastic reduction attempted to soften the blow by calling up m'learned friends. But we all know that ad agencies are a remarkably unlitigious ...