vml axed by dr pepper snapple group

The news is not unexpected if you have been reading the daily (ad) biz, but it’s still sort of sad to type because it definitely means layoffs for the good people of Kansas City-based VML. Dr Pepper / Snapple Group, formerly Cadbury Schweppes, has removed the last vestiges of a WPP roster of agencies that only a few months ago also included Y&R and Mediaedge:cia by shitcanning interactive shop VML.

Considering that the DPSG soda portfolio, with flavored sodas leading the way, has outperformed category competition from Coke and Pepsi, I can definitely see why sleazy VP of Marketing Sean Gleason would want to remove them. After all, they were responsible for the tragic development, launch and massively over-estimated sales of Accelerade. What? Eh? Oh.

The good news is that, with VML out of the way, Mr Gleason can fill out his roster of agencies with an interactive shop headed by a buddy, just like a tipster says that he did with media, advertising and below-the-line.

I don’t know if that accusation is true, but a tipster who has been right before says it is, and anyway it wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened in the history of marketing.

It happened on BMW with GSD&M and on Porsche with Cramer-Krasselt and on the Burger King interactive account with Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. It happens. It’s the industry.

But it still sucks.

It especially sucks for those who will lose their jobs…there is no official word that this will happen, but after losing the Burger King account to the aforementioned CPB and now DPSG, which had seen them as agency of record with responsibility for online advertising, major web redesigns on most brands, maintenance, etc and so on, it is going to be tough to retain their staffing model as is.

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.

project da vinci finally hires a ceo

WPP’s agency for Dell may still be unnamed, but at least they have a CEO. Torrence Boone, formerly president of Digitas, Boston has taken the reins according to Ad Age…I know what you’re saying and, yes, I understand that you may not trust Ad Age’s reporting after they jumped the gun on the Synarchy name, but Adweek reported it as well so you know that it’s true.

Boone said he was attracted by the chance to play a leading role in developing a new agency that’s “built-to-spec, with an ambition to redefine the client-agency relationship.” I say that he was attracted by the chance to make a hefty chunk of the $4.5 billion that Dell is expected to be spending on the agency relationship because, let’s be serious, there is no way that this agency is even close to redefining the client-agency relationship.

On a positive note, Mr Boone has a great advertising name and HighJive will likely be happy with this hire, and for good reason.

On a negative note, Mr Boone joins an agency that has managed to hire only half of its project complement of staffers, was weeks late in naming the CEO and still doesn’t have a name.

You win some and you lose some, I guess.

synarchy isn’t final name for davinci?

A commenter on my earlier post about the reports that WPP’s dude-we-won-the-Dell-account Project DaVinci has been renamed Synarchy is convinced that Synarchy is not the final name.

Apparently, it is but one of a few names under consideration, and noting how well-received Synarchy was I can’t wait to hear some of the other options.

In the best journalist tradition, I have contacted DaVinci’s PR flacks and hope that they can do half of my work for me.

Stay tuned.

wpp’s new name for project davinci

WPP’s new agency created just for Dell, the former Project DaVinci, has been officially named Synarchy…noting the vague similarity to anarchy and having the tickle of a memory from a history class long ago in my head I looked up the word to see what it meant, exactly.

The short definition is “rule by a secret elite.”

If that doesn’t just define most ad agencies, especially huge, faceless and leaderless conglomerations like Project DaVinci/Synarchy, then nothing does. In the case of Synarchy, which does not have a CEO yet, the elite that is running the place is even more secretive than usual…which is making recruiting an issue.

Anecdotally, a number of people that I know were willing to keep an open mind about the place pending who ran it (advertising is all about your connections, and if your guy is on top then it makes sense to fall in with him). But there is nobody running it. So they are staying on the fence. As are, based on the challenges Synarchy is having in staffing out, a lot of other people.

So who are the cabal in charge of the synarchic Synarchy?

Living up to the awful name, it’s a secret.

(There are additional meanings to the word, including a connection to European fascism through Vichy France. Which is nice.)

cadbury schweppes is getting trigger happy

According AdAge… marketers apparently can’t get enough of reorganization, but they aren’t getting much satisfaction from it either.

No surprise there as the people controlling the re-org are usually the ones responsible for much of the initial mess.

Reorganization – of the internal teams and the external agencies – has reached a crescendo at Cadbury Schweppes. The internal teams have already been wracked by one big round of layoffs, ostensibly to make the beverages side of the company more attractive to potential buyers, and has another one lined up if the rumors are to be believed. Then there are all of the people who have left the company of their own accord – almost the entire Brand and Activation team on Snapple and Mott’s – and others, including Director of Interactive Erika Knight.

That move doesn’t bode well for interactive agency VML.

Nor does the fact that VML’s WPP cousins Mediaedge:cia and Y&R have been fired and are in a review that Cadbury Schweppes is pretending isn’t a review respectively. The word is that they might just fire all of their agencies and start fresh with a completely new roster across all brands and functions. That would be fun.

Maybe Cadbury Schweppes could just pull a Dell and just start their own agency completely staffed with cronies and old friends of the VP of Marketing and the CMO (or whoever is calling the shots over there).

While this sort of behavior is par for the course with many marketers (I know that everyone reading this has at least one horror story and maybe more) it is still fucked up. Especially so is the word that Y&R, which isn’t exactly a Daily Biz favorite, was not told that other agencies were pitching against it and officially heard the news through Adweek.

What a classy organization.

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?

d-day for mediaedge with cadbury schweppes

A few weeks ago Cadbury Schweppes Beverages, makers of Dr Pepper, Snapple and others, announced that it was putting its media business into review. Incumbent Mediaedge was to defend, but sources said that retaining would be unlikely.

Then, the de-merger between Cadbury confection and Cadbury beverages heated up and there was a marketing department reshuffle. One that included almost 500 layoffs.

Yet, the show must go on. In the case of Mediaedge (and the other agencies pitching Cadbury Schweppes), the show goes on with all pitches taking place next week, and a final decision by early December.

It is still, ahem, unlikely that Mediaedge will retain.

Why do agencies that know they are going to lose still pitch the business? Is it some sort of a macho thing? Do they not actually believe that they have no chance? I have to admit to being baffled by it. Sometimes, it seems, it’s better (in terms of agency expenditure and the bad publicity of having an account in review) to just resign. Fall on your sword and all that.

In better news, and contrary to previous rumors, I hear that Mediaedge is the limit of the near-term agency flux at Cadbury Schweppes. The senior marketing team has not changed and it really wouldn’t make sense to fire a bunch of internal people and then get rid of all of the agencies, too (VML and Y&R, it looks like you’re safe).

Just because it makes sense doesn’t mean it will happen, but one does hope.