Bridging the Gap

The Gap has been through agency changes, retreats to the in-house agency, management changes and yet their advertising almost always looks and feels the same. Which would be a good thing if this unwavering consistency was resulting in big numbers, but we all know that the Gap has lost its mojo for some time.

Into the breach steps CP&B, as yet another marketer turns to these guys to shake things up. At this point, it's almost become a default decision, with clients saying, "We suck. Let's call those Miami guys to take the heat off." Pretty soon we'll have to start calling CP&B venerable.

The Gap must have one strong machine to have forced so many decent agencies to make the exact same commercial over all these years. But if any agency can craft advertising that won't seem like an attempt to recapture the Gap's heady days of the early nineties, CP&B probably has a shot at this exact moment. By next year, it may be too late. Maybe chickenfight.com was horribly misguided, but that might have been just a case of too many people drinking the Kool-Aid these last few months. We'll see.

Of course, the bigger problem is that nobody wants to buy the clothes that are in Gap stores. Hmm. Don't think Crispin can solve that one.