The spin rift.

• Author: Tschida, Anne
• Position: Rockett Burkhead Lewis and Winslow - Company Profile

In a business where image is everything, Rockett Burkhead gets thrust into a situation where it can't shape its own.

The colorful Piedmont landscape peeks in the fifth-floor windows of Rockett Burkhead Lewis & Winslow's north Raleigh offices on this cool autumn day. But in Chairman and CEO Howard Rockett's office, closed blinds shut out the leafy view, and the atmosphere is downright chilly.

Hasn't this been a trying year, he is asked. "Absolutely not," shoots back the co-founder of the state's third-largest advertising agency. "Where did you get that idea?"

As new president Bill Youngclaus launches into a diatribe about an uninformed press that has blown events out of proportion, Rockett, 60, turns irritation into action. Three minutes into the interview, he picks up his coffee mug and marches out of the room, without a word. He leaves behind a tense and nervous silence.

Later, new public-relations director Don Ingle suggests that Rockett might respond to some written questions.

Would he answer any about Richard French?

"No, no. Don't. Don't ask about that." That French's name is a touchy subject at Rockett Burkhead is understand able. He was once head of public relations there. Last March, he left to start his own firm. He took three account managers with him - and three of the agency's best PR clients: Wrangler, Lee and Girbaud jeans - all brands of VF Corp., which is moving its headquarters to Greensboro. French trumpeted his defection, and the press picked up on it.

His departure was like a pulled thread that begins to unravel a nicely tailored suit. About the same time, Rockett Burkhead got a C+ rating from Adweek's Southeast edition, which said the agency "needs to jazz up creative product." Then over a five-month stretch starting in May, it lost at least four advertising accounts, including one of its biggest, Greensboro-based Volvo Trucks North America Inc. By the time Rockett Burkhead brought in industry-veteran Youngclaus in August, Triangle Business Journal was calling the move an effort to "resuscitate" the agency.

Change is part of the business. Clients come and go. So do executives. Howard Rockett himself left a well-known Triangle agency he helped build - McKinney Silver & Rockett, now known as McKinney & Silver - to start Rockett Burkhead in 1985.

But to listen to Rockett, you'd think his agency had a tranquil year. "What changes?" he retorts before storming out. "This is entirely typical of what happens in an agency on a yearly basis. When a former employee has an ax to grind, gets the ear of the press, it's blown all out of proportion."

His agency has, in fact, made up for some of its lost accounts by signing a handful of new ones last year, including...