Martin Williams press is on full steam. Choo-choo! WE HEAR THAT... today, the shop is laying off least 9 people with some staffers saying the total will go up to 15. Question is - who is doing the firing? We know that high level staff is out of office. Please... did they leave this to the HR lady to do? Crap. Craptastic.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice..." We actually chatted with some high level folks at MW and we wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, that we were getting full disclosure. Silly us. Silly cow.

We're going to do a No Wukkas post before EOD for those who got the shit end of the stick today.

More on the news that Martin Williams has lost the Cellular South account from a good reliable source.

It's true. Cellular South has kicked MW to the curb and hired its third agency in about18 months. As we mentioned, the client is totes difficult and comes with a skittish CMO who is under enormous pressure to compete with the big boys and y'know how that goes. Forget strategy! Saynora agency!

Meanwhile, Martin Williams will be working on the account for Cargill, which has asked the shop to extend their US corporate brand campaign into Europe. To be fair, we failed to mention some of the agency's other clients including agribusiness, Syngenta, three divisions of Pfizer Animal Health, Marvin Windows and Doors (MW has had the one for 28 years).

Aiight? Alright.

Word on the street is that Martin Williams lost the Cellular South account this past Friday. They've held the business since March 2007. Cellular South is known to be a notoriously difficult client, so maybe that's all this is - a difficult client moving on. We'll have more details for you later today.

What is clear is that the agency recently suffered a round of layoffs and that shop is holding onto somewhere around nine accounts including the pro-bono MediaWise, Payless, the low billing Timberwolves versus the $40M Hoover account.

What we also know is that the rumors circulating that Martin Williams will be merged with BBDO Minneapolis per an Omnicom mandate are totally false. Repeat, totally false. The agency has not totally lost the plot.

There are big lay-offs and then, there are small ones, too. Minneapolis ad agency, Martin Williams, just laid off 14 staffers from across media, creative, operations, print production and television production units. The lay-offs came from across the agency, since let the "primary reason was to bring staffing resources in line with workload expectations on existing clients early in 2008." We hope the 14 find themselves a new home soon, but that reasoning by the agency is the nature of the business, no? Martin Williams has Payless (see video above), Cellular South and Cargill, as clients.

Minneapolis ain't an easy town for ad folk. The Star Tribune once said that:

"Agency chiefs acknowledge that advertising is, if nothing else, highly cyclical, and clients tend to change their chief marketing officers more frequently than the Minnesota Timberwolves change coaches."

True. Things may improve for the City of Lakes, though that loss by Fallon surely hasn't helped the city's morale. Sigh.