Publicis Groupe finalizes Razorfish from Microsoft
October 19, 2009
This one goes in the history books, the deal is final as of today (we’ve known about the purchase for months) but finally today Advertising Agency holding company Publicis Groupe acquires “digital” Razorfish from Microsoft
The deal has finally given Publicis some sort of digital outlet, abit a fairly weak one in terms of Social Media and SEO. It’s also been criticized that the transaction valued at approximately $530 million was way overpriced for what Publicis is actually getting, as the barriers to entry are low… really low.
Enjoy the mess…. this has a good chance of looking like Enfatico.
Enfatico loses Advertising Agency of Record Status with Dell
October 5, 2009
The WPP group plc advertising agency, Enfatico has lost it’s agency of record status with Dell Inc. Evidently this has been a fact for nearly 2 months, but WPP group plc swept this fact from the public in an attempt to save face from what we understand, or perhaps better said, never publicized the bombshell.
George Parker wrote the following “Officially (although there have been no releases to the press that I have seen,) Y&R New York is the agency of record for the consumer work. Wunderman, New York, is handling the B2B work”
Well of course there has been no press release, what are they going to release?
Title : “Enfatico complete failure”
Subtitle : “Enfatico, epic fails , never finished countdown clock”
Body: “Only in the minds of Sir Martin and Michael Dell did this make sense…. etc etc”
The entire concept was lamblasted by the media, bloggers and everyone else in between because of the poor business model and of course other reasons.
Our hearts do go out to the employees there, honestly this isn’t their fault… the entire project was designed to fail.
Parker: Ken Segall now available for bar mitzvahs
October 3, 2009
It’s official… Ken Segall is no longer Global Creative Director of Enfatico, and to make this even more of a circus, George Parker stated that he is now “available for bar mitzvahs” basically saying he is completely unemployed from the WPP group plc owned advertising agency.
Now we don’t like the idea of anyone being sent packing, in fact this is downright awful what is happening, just under 1000 people have received their walking papers due to the Enfatico disaster. Everyone knew this was going to happen, we even setup an Enfatico countdown clock the night the contract was signed… it’s not “news” as per say, but it is news to see the heads of Enfatico get pink slips. Generally they are the last people to get pink slips, and in this case it appears the chances are they ARE the last people… literally.
Now some will try to paint this in the history books as a “bold idea before it’s time” .. or some other flattering term. But that isn’t what Enfatico was, it was a disaster of epic proportions. It was a complete waste of resources but to only 2 people, Michael Dell and Sir Martin Sorrell where in their heads they felt it was a successful model, despite the evidence contrary.
What Sir Martin and Michael didn’t understand, and most likely won’t ever understand there was a flaw in the business model that was clearly apparent before the ink dried. Creative individuals will never be happy being creative with just a single company product line.
If your creative, you want to try new things, you want to explore new venues, you want to take on new types of clients.. you want to expand, but with Enfatico there was no place to expand. You can either promote only a handful of Dell’s Notebooks, desktops and servers. Doesn’t sound too creative to anyone.
This severely limited their talent pool in terms of the creative side.
Then there was the overriding factor, this one didn’t just apply to the creative individuals, this applied to EVERYONE. The single client ad agency had a contract had a time limit of about 1000 days. Meaning that by the time you actually started working there, the best you could hope for is a renewal of the contract.. the worst you could hope for is what happened. All the employees at Enfatico were held by the throat by Michael Dell.
You can’t raise a family on that.
At least with a normal advertising agency if one client goes the chances are the agency doesn’t go with it. Perhaps layoffs, but generally speaking if you were a star, you would be re-tasked to another project. With Enfatico you had no such option.
In other words if Michael Dell woke up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, you were screwed out of your mortgage, car payments and career.
The first problem people might be able to swallow, but the second… no future with the agency of the future… that is just too much for anyone that can see further than their nose.
Enfatico firing everyone
October 1, 2009
Agency Spy is reporting that there is a steady stream of pink slips flowing from Enfatico right now as this is being typed.
Just last week we were told that Enfatico was going to fire everyone in a parody video.. Interesting how much parody videos mirror real life. Regardless, the word on the street is that Enfatico is virtually shut down, with just a few support staff working under the Y&R label.
Honestly, if WPP group plc followed that route, and just hired within their existing agencies such as Y&R a support staff to help out with the workload from Dell, they would not be in the mess they are in now.
Dell planned to spend more on Enfatico than Perot Systems
September 21, 2009
News today that Dell has purchased Perot Systems has many shaking their heads, as the purchase price of $3.9 billion is considerably less than what they planned to spend with WPP group plc / Enfatico . From their initial release, of 4.5 billion planned to be forked over to WPP group to the now petty purchase of Perot Systems… my how things have changed.
Enfatico turned out to be a complete failure, ending with a parody video of the event when Sir Martin blamed bloggers and media outlets for their failure.
Think about it, Dell inc was willing to spend more money on an advertising gamble with a startup then they were willing to on actually developing products. Pretty amazing stuff to watch how corporate suits work.
New Enfatico Video – Upset because bloggers reported
September 19, 2009
We figured we would put this out there… so everyone knows what exactly happened when Sir Martin blamed bloggers for Enfatico’s failure
WPP group plc CEO : Enfatico failure is because of bloggers
September 17, 2009
In perhaps the biggest cop out ever stated, Sir shorty is blaming bloggers for the failure of the $4.5 billion dollar DELL / Enfatico / WPP group plc account that shut down earlier this year.. He isn’t blaming himself. He’s blaming everyone else for the poorly planned , poorly delivered, highly expensive launch that never got off the ground. Many of those accused bloggers such as George Parker are now ripping Sir Shorty apart for such an outrageous statement.
It’s a simple message Mr. Martin, don’t blame the people that reported on the mess.. as the ones that are the cause of the mess. The media only reported on the disaster as it happened, not forced the disaster to happen.
That distinction is huge, because your implying that the cause of the problem is attributed to the people that reported on the problem after it happened.
Last I checked, we can’t exceed the speed of light, hence time travel is impossible…
Casey Jones : Communication breakdown lead to Enfatico Failure
August 17, 2009
The Media Bistro / Agency Spy article points to “a communication breakdown” is what caused the Official Enfatico Countdown clock to go faster than budgeted for.
Not the fact that Enfatico was a horrific Idea to start with.. or that it had serious problems from day one is what caused the failure, not lack of communication… Lack of communication implies that there was something worth communicating about. This was a failure from the day Sir Shorty went up to Michael Dell and signed the contract.
It was publicized at a 4.5 billion dollar project when it was announced, no one (not even Dell or WPP) can really put a dollar figure on what was wasted on the project. Of course there are hard figures, like the 10 year leases that still have 8 years left on them or the fact that Enfatico went on a 1000 employee hiring spree that never reached any of it’s goals.
It’s ugly people, really ugly.. but to blame it on a communications breakdown is nothing less than a cop-out… it was a failed agency to begin with.. you can’t build an advertising agency with a horrible idea. This was the pure definition of horrible idea.
June 9th, 2009 – the last day Enfatico updated their blog
July 14, 2009
Enfatico’s last update was June 9th, 2009 on their blog.
We all read the press that the game is over…. even the Official Enfatico countdown clock went static.. then low and behold… Casey Jones comes out of the woodwork (the chief architect of the 4.5 billion dollar Enfatico disaster) to pitch is advertising agency skills.
This is an advertising agency nightmare… on par with the former Wal-Mart Julie Roehm that took advertising agency given Automobile joy rides to land accounts. It’s crap…. and it’s how business is run today.
ROI… solid creative… good social media skills… SEO… forget that… it doesn’t matter… it’s how bad you screw up is what gets you into the door.
Amazing … completely mind boggling amazing..
Advertising Age is SO wrong
April 20, 2009
Advertising Age is arguing that Enfatico was just poorly executed and overall not a bad idea.
If you wanted a fully functional advertising agency dedicated to a sole client, then go to Detroit or Chicago, and pick up any one of the dozen agencies sitting there with hardly any business coming in.
“Although WPP’s custom-built agency for Dell never got off the ground before it was folded into sibling shop Y&R this month, that doesn’t mean a marketing structure built for a single client can’t work. ” screams Adage
It then goes on to rail about Enfatico’s talent problem. “Then there’s the talent issue. As any recruiter will tell you, it’s not easy attracting top-notch talent to a shop that’s focus is just one client, and keeping good talent in such an insular culture is even harder — so there have to be measures that allow for some variety. ”
Well that’s the problem with any single client agency. Who is going to work for an agency where if the client leaves the advertising agency is forced to shut down and you lose your job.
But back to the main issue, if this model will even work? The answer is flatly a no, it’s not worth even entertaining.
See here’s the problem, you don’t build an advertising agency from scratch… complete with 10 year leases .. going on a monster scale like that… because they will never get the proper talent and the model simply cannot work.
If Dell wanted an advertising agency dedicated to them, simply floating out an RFP to the advertising agencies that just don’t have that many clients would fix the problem.
If an ad agency has 3 clients, all averaging about $100 million a year… then Dell walks in with $4.5 billion… the advertising agency is dedicated to Dell… end of story..
But this is where it matters and where Enfatico went wrong, see that hypothetical ad agency mentioned in the paragraph above already has a billing department, already has a creative department, already has a media department, already has an office, phone system, computer systems, everything is already there and just needs to be expanded on… whereas where Dell and WPP group plc went wrong has all the aspects needed didn’t exist.
It was doomed to fail from day one. The day Sir Martin and Michael signed that contract… it was $4.5 billion floating in promised money with nothing else.
You can’t build an advertising agency like that… and clearly Enfatico proves that it cannot happen.
Dell blew a ton of money on this project, and WPP blew a ton of time on this project…. and the funny thing is that virtually everyone knew that this was a bad idea from day one… We even created an official countdown clock from the day the project was announced till it collapsed… we setup the site from the day it was announced… meaning we just were counting the days until it crashed… it wasn’t rocket science, George Parker, Media Bistro even the New York Post, a dying industry itself, all said this is a bad idea.
What an epic failure… and adage, you might want to rethink that article…. this model can never work….
There is a reason the common term “one trick pony” is derogatory.
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