project da vinci finally has a name

After going by Project Da Vinci for what seems like forever, having a short detour into Synarchy territory and going back to Da Vinci while the mess was cleaned up, WPP has found an official name for their built-for-Dell agency: Enfatico.

Apparently enfatico, while not moonlighting as the name of an ad agency, is a musical notation that means play each note “with emphasis” or “emphatically.” Presumably, that is how they are going to do their advertising. Emphatically.

Not content with choosing an obscure word to name their agency, the muckety-mucks at Enfatico want to actually add a definition to the word. If all goes well your Webster’s will soon have a secondary definition of enfatico reading something along the lines of “a new standard for integrated marketing, insightful creativity, and collaboration in the client-agency relationship.”

At least that is what Ken Segall, global chief creative officer, hopes. Or says he hopes. He may be kidding.

That said, Enfatico is a huge improvement on Synarchy…and I here that they’re still hiring if you’re interested.

wpp’s davinci wants you if you want them

The word on the street, yelled most loudly by George Parker from his AdScam corner stall, is that WPP is not going to use outside recruiters to staff up their new single-client agency DaVinci.

WPP feels like they and DaVinci have had enough coverage in the news, trades and blogs to do the work of attracting talent for them.

Reading the blog entries about the new agency, including mine, it’s hard to figure out why WPP thinks that industry folk would be interested in signing up…

At any rate, the DaVinci agency is a terrible idea. Why Dell thinks that building a new agency from scratch, with all that means for lack of culture, lack of structure, lack of team, lack of anything except a bunch of random people working together for the first time at a place that has no identity at all, is a good idea is beyond reasonable assessment.

Blogger Phil Gomes brings up a similar experiment years ago that, predictably, failed:

“After a successful five-year run with [PR agency] Applied Communications, Oracle decided to go with a megafirm built by Cunningham, Hill & Knowlton, and Ogilvy, Adams & Rinehart. In no time at all, Applied had the business again.”

Attracting talent by word of mouth (and by their awful website) for a project like this is also a bad idea.

Instead of senior leadership having an idea of who they want to attract and tasking actual professionals with getting those people on board, they are instead relying on staffing up with whoever pops by. It’s like those marketers who put a video on YouTube and wonder why it doesn’t take off…people need to know that it is there and know why they should view it. This whole fiasco leads me to believe that DaVinci just want/need warm bodies with advertising experience and have no clue what else matters or what even the agency stands for.

Of course, the agency stands for holding company greed and willingness to do anything for new business.

Hard to hire good people on that model.

Even harder if you don’t bother to hire professionals to help.

dell & a blog that starts conversation

One of the things that both motivates and frustrates me about the ad business is the fact that your work goes up on the wall for everyone to see. So everyone knows who is good, who is great and who should be getting their book together.

There is no better feeling than putting your work up on the wall and getting a great reception. Especially from people you really respect.

The fact that it doesn’t happen all that often makes it that much more worthwhile.

Blogging is a lot like advertising as well. Each post is up there “on the wall” and it is very quickly clear who has it, who might get there one day and who you are not going to have on your RSS feed even if they are the girlfriend of your best friend. Not that this actually happened to me.

One blogger who has it, and I have said this before, is Tangerine Toad (who blogs over at The Toad Stool). If any reader (including my Mom, who I know logs on from different computers to make me feel good about my traffic numbers) has not checked out his site, do it now.

His recent post on Dell and the Digital Revolution cuts right to the issue that faces Dell, $4.5 billion spend on a new agency or not, “no matter how good the new Dell ads are, consumers are going to go online first before they buy one. And if CNET tells them that the HP machine is the better one, then that’s the one they’re going to get.“

The best thing about his blog is that his posts start conversation.

Check out the comments section, where Bob Pearson, Dell’s Vice President, Corporate Group Communications, weighs is on the discussion. It’s not only what a blog is about, conversation, but it’s great information on how agencies ABSOLUTELY MUST go beyond advertising and telling the brand story and into new areas that affect the brand.

Every brand is going to face the fact that, with the internet putting immediate communication at everyone’s fingertips, consumers have the ability to research and learn about products and services and make decisions independent of marketing and advertising. And brands must be ready, with good product and design, with effective consumer-centric advertising and with a willingness to listen to what consumers are saying (like on blogs, message boards, etc), if they are going to live.

The days of a manufacturing-driven business are over.

Dell, at least, seems to recognize this.

wpp starts new agency just for dell

In what must rank as one of the strangest pitch outcomes ever, holding company WPP has won the worldwide Dell Computer business…provided it start a completely new 1,000 person agency to handle the account.

I too would be willing to do a lot for a $4.5 billion account that is reported to have $150 million in revenues for WPP.

Ad Age reports that Dell and WPP will “jointly develop what we hope is the greatest agency in the world.” According to Casey Jones, VP-Global Marketing at Dell, “this will be a nontraditional relationship and the purpose of it is to achieve marketing objectives of Dell’s that are simply not achievable either with our current roster of agencies or with a patchwork quilt of shops stitched together.”

If I understand this correctly, Dell is just too much account to be handled by any of the myriad of agencies in the world and requires a shop built just for them.

That might explain why their sales have tanked relative to Apple and Hewlett-Packard. They just needed a different ad agency. Or something like that.

Though this blog usually applauds new ways of looking at the traditional client-agency relationship, this deal looks to be simply a continuation of the classic agency model, only with a newly-formed, dedicated agency instead of a more established shop.

So nothing is really non-traditional…the only news is that a new shop has been created just for Dell.

Why Dell thinks that an agency that is whipped together out of thin air and disparate parts will be better than an agency that knows who they are, what they do and how they do it is beyond me. All people, process and even furniture will be new. They are supposed to start up out of nothing and immediately and seamlessly do great work, insightful and flawlessly executed work?

It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

And, though Dell will allow this new agency to take on additional non-competitive business, it is still an agency built specifically for around one client. And we all know how finicky clients can be (especially if things do not run smoothly right from the beginning). What happens if Dell leaves WPP?

And when did WPP become more than just a holding company? It used to be that agencies had their own brand and that marketers wanted to work with specific agencies because of their unique strengths and how they aligned with the needs of the marketer. Holding companies were mere financial vehicles. Not anymore. And this is not a good thing.

Creativity is not something that comes out of large corporate structures and what are the holding companies but large, corporate structures?