Dell Ad Agency Enfatico Blog Shut Down
January 20, 2010
The all famous Enfatico Blog, Next Story Board has been shut down. Now everyone that visits the site will be redirected to their main page… the blog has vanished. A call into Enfatico to find out what happened was met with a number being disconnected… ouch.
To make matters worse.. they didn’t even properly redirect it.. it’s just a domain alias rather than a 301 redirect.
I don’t understand this, not at all. Out of all their marketing efforts to promote themselves, the cheapest, lowest cost, highest ROI way was via their blog. Sir Martin should have kept that site up. A hosting account costs 5 dollars a month… many webhosting companies give away domain names for free with a year’s purchase.
The total advertising campaign for you to save face … perhaps even fish for business would be a total of 60 dollars a year.
Have an intern to post on the blog… not just redirect the thing in complete failure. You know you could have kept the appearance of an active company running (we know you are all about appearances) by having some intern post on it daily. Hell you might of been able to sucker some company into allowing you to pitch.
Or most likely, you could have better explained to everyone what is going on, rather than making us think the worst happened… or did the worst happen?
Wow that was poorly executed. No wonder the Dell contract with WPP Group plc expires in 314 days, 13 hours, 21 minutes, 55 seconds .. yet the agency has no blog (and no CEO, and no creatives, just a bunch of empty offices) who the hell is paying for all those office spaces thoughout the planet? What nearly 2 dozen locations, the Manhattan Office with 100,000 S/f (I told you idiots that was a bad idea)?
Is Dell or WPP group plc paying for it? What a waste of resources… In rent alone you could have saved hundreds of jobs… as you got multiple WPP group plc offices, all 25% filled or 0% filled within blocks of each other…
Just freaking stop calling them differing names… that whole model is freaking broken… make WPP just an ad agency.. consolidate all the expenses… put everyone that works at a WPP group plc agency in one building in New York… and duplicate that in Philly, London, and everything else…
I swear by just looking at a spread sheet you can see the amount of people you fired that didn’t need to be if you just used your fixed assets more effectively.
Then you get shit like this where Enfatico going down like the Titanic makes your whole holding company look like a second rate crappy holding company that can’t even keep a client. Honestly I would think twice about doing anything with WPP … after seeing what happened with WPP and Dell.
What do I know? I’m just an idiot with a blog… but clearly that is more than what WPP Group owned Enfatico has right now.
RIP Next Story Board, your entire life of 451 days was well honoured… well not really..
Parker on WPP Group : The final sad, pathetic end of Enfatico
January 11, 2010
George Parker is reporting the following:
This just in from Austin… The “Agency of the Future” has fired all the creative directors, they have taken ninety nine percent of the content out of the website (it’s just a list of offices now.) Torrence Boone is toast after they promoted him to CHAIRMAN, in charge of “special projects.” That lasted all of one month, and then they just bounced him out altogether. Gone. Fucking gone! And no one has a clue where he went.
Talk about game over, this is a complete disaster for WPP group plc. Not that the world didn’t see this coming for years. We even built a countdown clock (that we felt no need to update since Enfatico has been for the most part shut down for some time now)… but part of the new news is that Torrence Boone has been escorted out… and no one knows where he has gone… pretty shocking stuff. What is he up to these days?
See the problem is we can’t blame Torrence, he was given an impossible mission. You can’t build an ad agency like this, not the way Enfatico was built.
A robust advertising agency needs more than just one client, you need to have some sort of cross between industries, some things that work well in one industry might make sense if adapted to another. You need fresh ideas.
Enfatico had no ideas, it was a one trick pony that never actually even got off the ground. For the record, this last paragraph of the report most likely has more weight to it than anything else.
If I was a WPP shareholder I’d have some pretty hard questions for Sorrell before he picks up his $96 million performance bonus!
I felt that over here.
Ad Agency Note : Bing+Yahoo = less than 13% market share
December 7, 2009
Ad Agency WPP group plc along with most of the other advertising agency holding companies recently announced that they are “supportive” of the Yahoo! / Microsoft “search merger” Even though PCworld just noted that Bing was down for 30 minutes, yet no one noticed.
In case you missed it–and most of you probably did–Microsoft’s Bing search engine was offline for about 30 minutes on Thursday evening. (PCworld)
This baffles us, because they are supportive not because of the stellar results that the search engine is providing for their clients, they are supportive because it’s not Google, the largest advertising agency on earth. Let’s face it, hitwise is stating the market share is double digits, but most people are not seeing that in their log files.. not even close.
I know from sites that I have direct access to that Bing’s market share is roughly 8% and falling.
It’s not a small sample, it’s based on nearly 6 million unique visitors per month to a host of websites that we directly measure for our SEO services. In other words the sample is large enough to be accurate.
So consumers don’t like Bing, nor do they like Yahoo .. especially together… but boy.. WPP group loves them. Traditional BDA’s don’t like Google’s view of advertising, they don’t like this new imposed model of what advertising is moving towards.
In other words, they don’t see a need for themselves in that picture.
frenemy has taken a new turn, to the point where Madison Avenue is against anything Google is for, even if it hurts the consumers and clients.
Pretty shady stuff.
Ad Agency Ogilvy cans 90 from both coasts
December 2, 2009
We just got a tip that wpp group plc ad agency Ogilvy just laid off 90 people from East and West coast. … we cannot verify this yet as from what we understand, pink slips are flying at multiple locations simultaneously. Our understanding is that many of these people were working on the same project hence the “coordinated attack” to stop them from taking to each other.. or one office giving a heads up to another.
Story is developing, but on face value it appears that Ogilvy is getting really good at firing people.
Google : Yahoo is a competitor to WPP
November 18, 2009
In a very interesting statement, it appears that Google is saying that Yahoo is a competitor to WPP group plc, but not themselves. A recent check on the stock price of WPP group plc (NASDAQ: WPPGY) showed the following as a list of “Related companies”
So the question is, why is everyone else calling Google an advertising agency. From the linked article “To understand these moves is to realise that Google is an advertising agency;”
But Google themselves and the Advertising agency holding companies?
We believe that if a company looks like a duck, quacks like a duck.. it is a duck. In this case Google provides copywriting services for adwords (IE: creative) they serve those ads via their own content network. They allow for media purchases though adwords though their properties and other peoples properties via adsense, and they provide a way to measure clients ROI via Google Analytics.
That’s not an advertising agency? You have to think about it, just because it’s not a 30 second spot (which they can provide via Youtube in 1080p ) doesn’t mean it’s not an Advertising agency because it’s different than what you are accustomed to.
Then the other question is why does Google say that Yahoo is a competitor to WPP group plc, but not themselves?
Doesn’t this raise any other questions? For example, We’ve been saying for years that JWT should stop using “largest Advertising in the USA” because they are not the largest, that is Google.
So what is your thoughts, most importantly we find it fitting that they called second rate Yahoo! as the competitor. Tells you what Google is thinking.
Ad Agency Denizen sues WPP group plc – Patent Infringement
October 29, 2009
Ad Agency Denizen is claiming to have patented product placement (patent 6,859,936) is suing WPP group plc, for violating the patent. It’s actually interesting on multiple fronts.
First let me go on record as stating that product placement existed for over a century for TV / Video / Movies.. literally I have just pointed out evidence below of it taking place in 1896.
This above video was filmed in 1896… notice the Wheelbarrow mid way though the video where the name of the company is shown in a pretty obvious fashion?
Understand that was filmed in 1896, you’re watching a video that is 113 years old. To be clear, everyone in that video is dead now. Their kids have likely died from old age as well.
Here we are generations after this was filmed.. and yet these people feel that they can patent the wheel and sue for it.
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.
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.
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…
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