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Pravda

Why did Pravda go into voluntary liquidation?

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By The Drum Team | Editorial

August 19, 2010 | 6 min read

At its peak Pravda was at the forefront of Manchester’s creative scene, winning national awards and an enviable client list. Now Pravda is no more, as its owners called in the liquidators. But plans are afoot that will see the team re-emerge, refreshed and ready to tackle an evolving industry. But why did they decide to close? And what of those that lie in the wake of the failed business?

As reported exclusively by thedrum.co.uk, Pravda, one of Manchester’s better known advertising agencies, has ceased trading.The news that the eight-year-old business had been put into voluntary liquidation by its owners Tim Trapp and Simon Sinclair seemed to catch many people in the industry by surprise. Commentators on our online story lamented the closure of a respected agency. A few speculated that Trapp and Sinclair would soon ‘bounce back’ with something new.Today, after sitting down with the pair to discuss Pravda’s closure and what the future holds for them now, The Drum can reveal exactly what they plan to do next.We meet Trapp and Sinclair at Pravda’s old office on a quiet corner of the Northern Quarter. Downstairs, at the imposing entrance to this grand old Dale House building, there had been quite literally no sign that Pravda, or any of its old team, were still around. The agency’s name - the Russian word for ‘truth’ - had been etched from its buzzer.But here on the third floor it is almost tempting to describe the appearance we are presented with as business as usual. A handful of staff quietly graft away in corners of the bright, open office. Trapp and Sinclair wait in the glass sealed boardroom.This office will remain the home for their new agency, they tell us, the agency that will succeed Pravda. If by closing Pravda Trapp and Sinclair are trying to do a runner from something, The Drum wonders, then it is quite apparent that they are doing a pretty pitiful job of it. They won’t be hard to find.Asked to explain Pravda’s closure, Trapp tells us it is the outcome of a “really difficult couple of years”. “We make no bones about the fact we’ve had a horrible couple of years,” he says. “We’ve lost business, or the business has stopped spending, and we’ve had to lay people off.“We were convinced, as were the staff, that it was time for a fresh start. There wasn’t any one overriding factor.”It is understood that during those ‘horrible’ last two years Pravda was forced to make between 10 and 15 redundancies and scale back on freelancers as spending dried up from clients including the Manchester Evening News. A sign that Pravda was not itself, not the confident agency that burst onto the north west scene in 2002, was the departure of co-founder Phil Howells. The agency’s “head of fluffiness”, as Howells was known, left just before the Christmas of 2007.Morale-sappingGiven all that morale-sapping baggage, the yearning for a fresh start from Pravda’s final two directors seems understandable. The impression they give is that Pravda had stopped being fun, as Sinclair says: “We want to have an agency that clients and staff - and we - enjoy working in.” He later adds that Pravda had begun to feel “a bit staid”.Trapp stresses that the new agency, as yet unnamed, is not just a fly by night ‘phoenix’. That’s “what it isn’t, what it definitely isn’t” he says. Instead it is something that has been much more carefully planned, he assures us. “There were discussions with the staff about whether we wanted to do this, did we want a fresh start? They’ve had as hard a time as we have. We’ve fought tooth and nail to keep a skeleton team of core people that we felt we owed their jobs to. We could have thrown the towel in years ago.“We do want that new agency feel. We want to have a new culture, a new agency.”The launch of a new agency will be scrutinised, quite understandably, by Pravda’s old suppliers who were called to a creditors’ meeting when the agency announced its liquidation.Looking at the latest accounts, for the year to November 2008, the reason for the failure is not obvious. They listed that the company had shareholder funds of £93,000. One of its largest liabilities was a bank loan of £42,000 and the company had a debtors sheet valued at £326,000, stock of £120,000 and creditors of £454,000.Trapp says he has talked the plans through with the IPA, which accredited Pravda, to allay any concerns that its closure could cause “collateral damage” within the industry. “They wouldn’t let us do it if there was going to be collateral damage,” he says.The new agency will retain Pravda staff if not clients. Account director Sam Rowlands, creative Sam Richardson and a recently-recruited graduate with a first in advertising are among those who will remain on board. If things go well Trapp expects to be soon recruiting for designers and account handlers.Sinclair, who had been a creative partner at McCann Erickson and a senior writer at Ogilvy and Mather before that, hints that the new agency will be closer to his advertising roots than the direct response work Pravda became best known for. It will go after more FMCG clients, more “proper advertising” work.Sense of funTo attract these new clients he has worked on a new briefing form and new creds to try to “distil it down to why we do what we do, not how we do it”. Pravda termed and talked about having something called a “co-creative approach”. Don’t expect the new business to say such things. “We’ve looked at what is it that we’ve actually enjoyed doing,” Trapp says. “It is getting a sense of fun out of it again.”Now the priority is securing clients. Trapp says discussions are going well and he tells us they are on course to make a TV ad soon, and that announcements about client wins are not far off either.It all feels like a “new lease” to Sinclair. He describes it as being like a “start-up”, only one a lot more world-wise than the Pravda that started life in borrowed space from Tucker Clarke Williams. “We’re not doing things the way we used to,” he says. “It’s exciting.”The full details about what comes next, what this new agency is really all about, remain something of a mystery until it has been officially christened. Its new identity is expected to be revealed in days. But while that all remains to be confirmed one thing is crystal clear: Pravda, as we know it, is no more.
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