Can former Publicis boss Richard Pinder’s new company be a new model for global advertisers?

After years of being a jet-setting senior suit in someone else’s service, Richard Pinder has decided to go global on his own account with the ambitious launch of his own international network, The House Worldwide.

Pinder (left), it will be recalled, was head of Publicis Worldwide for five years until group succession politics (the imposition of Jean-Yves Naouri as executive chairman) made further tenure of his position unrealistic.

That was two years ago. Since then, Pinder has been pondering how to cash in on his experience with global clients (he’s worked for over 25 years in Asia, Europe and the USA; for Leo Burnett, Ogilvy & Mather and Grey, as well as Publicis) by building a new-model worldwide agency network.

No mean cliché, the cynic will object. We’ve heard the rhetoric before. What’s the reality?

It’s true that the agency world has long been struggling with a “post-analogue” structural solution to the increasingly financially unviable traditional creative agency network, with its army of regional bureaucracies. Some have proffered a solution in the form of the fleeter-footed international micro-network (step forward BBH, Wieden & Kennedy and – in its heyday – StrawberryFrog.

Pinder, however, has gone a step further in presenting a top-down managerial solution – or perhaps that should be management consultancy solution – in place of the piecemeal creative one. His starting point is that the traditional global advertising business – unlike professional counterparts such as lawyers and accountants – loses most of its senior talent to the management of regional geographic fiefdoms, which are there primarily because of historical legacy. What this talent should be doing is servicing the client’s agenda rather than their own corporate one.

The exception, where the client really can insist on top-level personal service, is a vanishingly small number of mega-clients, such as Ford and Procter & Gamble, which have specially structured teams to pander to their requirements.

Pinder’s idea is to provide this level of service for global, or at least international, clients further down the budgetary league table. Each client should be serviced by no less than three senior people at any one time. To do this, he has joined forces with a core team of like-minded senior executives: initially, Peter Rawlings, former chief operating officer DDB Asia, Chris Chard, former chief strategy officer of Lowe Worldwide in New York and Ben Stobart, former senior vice-president (chief suit) of Burnett Chicago.

These will deal directly with top clients on a day-to-day basis; the specialist skills base, on the other hand, is to be provided by a network of over a dozen associated network companies, of which the best known is Naked Communications (see AdWeek for a full list).

Note the absence of an overall chief creative officer. This is deliberate: Pinder does not believe a single individual can adequately address the creative needs of all client types.

Why does Pinder believe it is possible to operate this model from one fixed geographical location (well, actually two in THW’s case – London and Singapore)? Because of consolidation on the brand management side. More and more marketing power is being concentrated into the hands of chief marketing officers and indeed chief executives; less and less being delegated to regional and country power bases.

But, the acid test: has Pinder got any clients? Yes he has. He has been collaborating with two over the past year in honing the organisational structure of THW, during what he calls “beta mode” (how digitally au courant).

And they are? Maserati and an upmarket specialist haircare brand, GHD (stands for “Good Hair Day”). Both, he tells me, are poised at an interesting fulcrum of development, from the brand and new product point of view.

Maserati, an ultra luxury sports car marque lodged in the Chrysler/Fiat stable, has been given a €1.6bn injection to broaden its model range and take on Porsche.

GHD – which produces premium-priced hair stylers – is also cash-rich after being bought for £300m by Lion Capital. Lion is investing in npd, with a view to bringing GHD out of the salon and onto the international stage. Inevitably, that is going to involve careful brand positioning as GHD moves into a broader market segment.

Pinder is more coy on the subject of who, apart from Maserati and GHD, is bankrolling all of this. It seems likely that both principal founders (Pinder and Rawlings) have skin in the game. But a project of this scope is financially beyond most individual investors, even if they are relatively wealthy admen. Private equity seems to the answer.

Among the list of network associates is, rather intriguingly, a UK-based hedge fund called Toscafund, whose chairman is former RBS bigwig Sir George Mathewson. Pinder claims Toscafund is very handy on the “analytics” side. No doubt. But my guess is it’s providing a lot more resource than that.

This post first appeared on Stuart Smith’s blog The Politics of Marketing