Wrapup: ‘iitasLBi’ and six more things you need to know this week

Forget going back to the full-service agency, says Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorrell said: "The toothpaste is out of the tube—media agencies have got a taste for independence now."

DigitasLBi has decided to drop the letters ‘D’ and ‘G’ from its name for a week to protest Dolce & Gabanna’s anti-IVF baby and anti-gay-adoption stance. So for the time being, the brand will be ‘iitasLBA’ and its chief creative officer, Ronald Ng, is signing his name, ‘Ronal N’.

It’s on our site today, but just in case you missed it, Publicis Groupe has rebranded its 2014 acquisition Walker Media to Blue449 and plans to launch it in 17 markets this year. No word on its plans for Asia at press time.

In people news: Peter Dingle has left Intel for Nest; McCann Tokyo has hired strategist John Woodward from Publicis Worldwidel; also in Japan, W+K Tokyo named John Rowe MD of its office; and Carat Asia-Pacific has appointed Adam Bow as its head of content strategy.

So what do you do when an agency decides to play for the dark side in the name of your brand? We discuss this issue using the latest scandal involving Singtel and Gushcloud in Singapore on our sister site, PRWeek Asia.

We’ve got our Content Marketing Singapore conference happening right now, but did you know we had a similar event in Sydney earlier in the week? Keynote speaker Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute discussed the importance of building loyalty with consumers, not just relationships.

In a rather odd move, considering that two of its airlines have had three terrible crashes in under a year, Malaysia has launched yet another airline. It’s called flymojo. We are speechless.