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…
Supreme Court : corporations now allowed to buy elections
September 11, 2009
In a big WTF, the supreme court is now ruling that Corporations are now allowed to buy elections. The story that broke in the Chicago Times. This is a complete game changer, and it will cause some serious issues in the future. For example, the health insurance industry would have a much greater ability to target for defeat members of Congress who supported a so-called “public option” for medical insurance. Banks and investment firms could oppose representatives who favor stricter regulation of the financial industry. Chances are you’ll have Advertising Agency WPP group plc setting standards on what’s allows or not over the FCC controlled airwaves.
The overall problem with this is that it pushes money over volume of people in a fashion where 1 company with a billion dollars can overrule a million people with $10 dollars each.
This needs to stop, you can’t have companies completely buy elections but evidently the supreme court feels that firms like Blue Cross and now-defunct Lehman Brothers can dictate policy to even a greater extent.
It’s like having Enron dictate accounting policy.
This can’t be passed, nothing but bad things will happen.
WPP Group plc takes serious earning dump
August 26, 2009
Advertising Agency WPP Group plc published their earning results, and it’s ugly.. really ugly. Revenue is down 8.3% earnings are down a mind boggling 47% and to make matters worse “Digital” Takes Bigger Slice Of super shrinking WPP Pie, Accounting For a full 25% of total revenue. We say worse because WPP group plc doesn’t actually do Digital, The companies they hold GroupM, Outrider, 24/7 Real Media, and media shops such as Mindshare, Mediaedge:cia and MediaCom are not “digital” firms as per say. Most of the revenue is just online media buys. For example WPP group plc has very limited access to SEO talent and very limited access to Social Media Talent.
Leaving their “digital” assets mostly addicted to flash based websites and Google Pay Per Click.
That’s not digital, not by a long shot. On January 1st 2009, we published an article defining digital here we are nearly 1/2 a year later and WPP group plc epic fails on that definition.
Having a bunch of guys and girls sitting there running clients credit cards though Google’s Adwords isn’t actually digital.. but that is pretty much what they define digital as hence why their total revenues are down and Google Adwords related work now accounts for such a huge percentage of their ever declining revenue.
Sir Martin, Digital isn’t Pay Per Click, Digital is when you are reading this blog post. If you don’t understand the difference think about the trail on how you found this article.
WPP Group plc hires Julie Roehm
July 28, 2009
Julie Roehm’s Experience * Marketing Consultant * MJM Creative Services * (Public Company; WPPGY; Marketing and Advertising industry) May 2009 — Present (3 months) — HOT STUFF going on via her Linkedin Profile
This is the definition of classic.
For a quick History Lesson…. well George Parker has one hell of a history lesson regarding her
The fact is that Julie Roehm was fired from Walmart for taking joy rides in an exotic car from an advertising agency (which she then awarded the Walmart Business to), having wild sex with an employee (not her husband) and other crazy issues.. her stunt of course left her with no job, the ad agency being fired… and lawsuits..
But clearly, WPP group and Sir Martin are willing to look this over….
Microsoft offers WPP group plc a “google killer”
July 13, 2009
A few minutes ago The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft is in discussions with five giant advertising agencies — not only to buy Razorfish, but also to utilize the Microsoft’s ad technologies and purchase “hundreds of millions of dollars” of ad space across its Web properties.
What is glaringly missing from the report is the fact that Microsoft’s system doesn’t work properly after years of development, hence why advertisers hated using the system, the other problem is that Microsoft doesn’t own any relatively high traffic websites. Every single Microsoft website is in the single digits in terms of market share for their respective industries.
“They need to have a real website or search engine in order to use this, and they don’t. Where the hell will they place the ads?” said an anonymous source.
The most popular of their online products is MSNBC (jointly owned by NBC and Microsoft, meaning that Microsoft doesn’t even fully own this one) and even this is a distant third behind CNN, Foxnews and even the Drudgereport.
So there are your tens of millions of dollars to get displayed on MSN / Live / Bing ….. good luck with that… great service to your clients….
WPP group plc calls Twitter a “letter writing service”
July 9, 2009
Sir Shorty from WPP group plc has bit the biggest loaf the world has seen in recent times, saying Twitter is a “letter writing service”.
Sir Martin Sorrell equated Facebook and Twitter to writing letters to one’s friends; do you want to see ads on your correspondence? Maybe not, but from my perspective, people are so receptive to ads on their search results it doesn’t seem out of the question.
Because of course posting a tweet is just like writing a letter… it’s so personal that everyone that follows you can see it….. hot stuff… Completely out of touch… twitter may be a no revenue company, but it’s not a letter writing service… Twitter isn’t FedEx…
CNBC has the rest of the story
Dwarf sucks out $100 million from WPP group plc
June 3, 2009
WPP group plc is bleeding money in debt to its eyeballs and yet is paying Sir Martin $100 million to keep him happy according to George Parker
“Which means… A la the Chainsaw Dunlap school of management, if all else fails, lay thousands off every quarter. If you are a WPP employee, when it comes to job security… You’re X(O#KX!!”
Enjoy the new reality on the ground, no matter how much debt you throw your company in or now much the lack of innovation within the firm exists, as long as you can keep borrowing to buy revenue “your doing good!”
This is the kicker from the report:
“WPP also told shareholders that for the remainder of the year the short-term focus would continue to be balancing staffing costs against the fall in company revenue.”
So the company is losing revenue, yet he is still getting $100 million. Never ceases to amaze us to see this happen.
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