BBDO revealed on Wednesday that it has merged its Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dallas, TX offices under the name West BBDO.

The group brings together 175 people under a single P&L and the leadership of Matt Miller, who will steer the entity as CEO and CCO while retaining his title as chief creative officer of Omnicom of team AT&T at Omnicom. He will remain based in LA. 

West BBDO was formed from a “realization that we have to do things differently,” Miller told ADWEEK, adding that “the strengths of each of those locations and those offices were quite complementary.”

BBDO LA and Texas opened in 2017 to service the flagship AT&T account, while BBDO San Francisco dates back to 2010. The agencies share clients including Meta’s WhatsApp, MegaMex Foods, WaterWipes, and Thinx.

Miller said that there were no layoffs as a result of the restructuring.

By combining the cultures and strengths of three offices—with LA’s roots in “fame and optimism,” San Francisco’s “innovation and technology,” and Texas’ “grit”—the agency will have a differentiated offering at scale, Miller said. 

The offering is already resonating with clients including AAA and Genentech, which hired West BBDO as creative agency of record earlier this year. 

“The goal is we can take all those [offices] and indoctrinate the totality of West [BBDO] to embody all the strengths of each place…so that we have a much broader perspective,” Miller said.

He added that positioning BBDO more strongly in Texas is a strategic move as more businesses set up shop there and it becomes “almost the new economic hub” of the U.S. 

“There’s so much opportunity in Texas,” Miller said. “The hope would be [to] start exploring that state as a pitch hub.”

West BBDO is still finalizing its leadership bench, but Miller said that Fabiano Tatu, head of art and design at BBDO, will lead a design team out of the office that services BBDO’s clients across the U.S. The next step for Miller will be determining who leads each office location. 

Do Big Things

The formation of West BBDO comes on the heels of the Omnicom-owned creative network’s new global positioning, Do Big Things, which rolled out in February. It was the agency’s first global rebrand in 30 years, which parted ways with its iconic tagline, “The Work. The Work. The Work.”

“The biggest ideas need the biggest perspective, the biggest aperture,” Miller said. “The combination of these three [offices] gives us the most inputs to arrive at the biggest, most universal ideas.”

The new consolidated structure of West BBDO is also an experiment that BBDO will consider rolling out in other markets as clients seek more integrated teams across geographies. 

“Let’s take whatever works here and apply it to be global,” Miller said. “It gives us a lot more flexibility in opportunity and in talent if we do something like this.”

He added that he “thought it would be trickier” to get new teams to work together across the three offices, but that “all it took was just start having people work on the same brands and assignments together.”

“I did not anticipate some of the logistical challenges,” Miller admitted. “When you were BBDO Dallas, you were just [working on] AT&T, and you have a very specific way of working. You then have to understand that there’s many ways of working, and there’s different brands and different approaches.”

The formation of West BBDO comes amid consolidation in the agency space, most notably as Omnicom works to gain regulatory approval for its acquisition of rival holding company IPG. Other recent creative agency mergers include the formation of Leo at Publicis Groupe and the consolidation of VML at WPP. 

Miller said that while employees had questions about the formation of West BBDO, they were reassured, “West is growing and doing very well.” He declined to share revenue figures. 

“This is very much BBDO looking at itself going, ‘Where are our strengths? What are opportunities?Where do we need to change?’” he said.  

This story has been updated to reflect that Miller is CEO and CCO of West BBDO and CCO of team AT&T at Omnicom.