Wal-Mart just can't seem to keep their advertising executives around. Less than two weeks after firing its top advertising executive, Julie Roehm, for "swirling stories of sex, bribery and lychee martinis" , Sam's Club's top advertising executive is gone as well.

Mark Goodman leaves just weeks into a huge advertising campaign by Sam's Club. As the article notes, Sam's Club has been trailing Costco in sales by nearly $20 billion, despite having more stores.

Trailing Costco
Sam's Club has fallen behind fast-growing Seattle-based Costco, the No. 1 warehouse retailer in the U.S. Costco has 504 stores and nearly $59 billion in sales, compared with Sam's 550 stores and $39.8 billion in sales in 2006, accounting for 12.7% of Wal-Mart's sales in 2006.

Wal-Mart's PR woes feature prominently in a number of Advertising Age's year-end stories. Indeed, it is the number one story of the year.

1 - The Wal-Mart saga
A $580 million review for the world's largest retailer would have made the list on its own merits. Dumping Bernstein-Rein and GSD&M for DraftFCB made it a touch more dramatic and made Draft the top contender for Ad Age's agency of the year. But when Julie Roehm and Sean Womack were fired and Draft along with them? We were ready to write a script and make this one movie of the year. But we're still waiting to see how this one ends.

Roehm is number six on the list of "10 who made their mark":

6 Julie Roehm
She started the year by leaving Chrysler and heading to Bentonville to serve as senior VP-marketing communications for Wal-Mart. We wondered at the time if she would fit in. The answer came, but not until after she validated Interpublic and put Chicago back on the map by tapping DraftFCB for Wal-Mart's $580 million account. Turns out she didn't fit in. Neither does Draft.