Considering the current frenzied state of the agency and holding company business and the Omnicom/Interpublic merger that promises around 4,000 job cuts – and a focus on such esoteric bullshit as AI and data integration under new “leadership!” – I thought that before the dust starts to settle, it might be worth dredging the bottom of my AdScam memory barrel to come up with a few promised agencies of the future that inevitably ended up as agencies of the past.
In the years since Lintas was founded (for Unilever), many have jumped on the bandwagon of creating a totally dedicated agency that would concentrate solely on the service of a single client on a global scale. Virtually all have failed; most of them disastrously, yet this doesn’t seem to have tempered the appetite for BDHC’s to continue trying.
However, many believed that in 2008, WPP had finally realized the ultimate one client/one agency solution that would make both parties happy and rich. It was not to be.
It was obvious from the beginning that the Poisoned Dwarf (Sir Martin Sorrell) had made Michael Dell an offer he couldn’t refuse. As usual, it had little to do with the quality of the work or the level of service that would be brought to the account… It was all about the money. No one knows the exact figures, but rumors were flying that the agency would operate on razor thin margins and would make its money from the volume of work passing through the operation. Or, as summed up by the title of a long defunct British TV comedy about a couple of East End tailors..“Never mind the quality, feel the width!”
In typical bean counter fashion, many spreadsheets and Power Point presentations were created to show that the Dell dedicated agency could serve as a single point of reference for a client that was claimed to have been using 800 agencies globally. Personally, I believe that was a crock of shit. At the time IBM consolidated all its work in Ogilvy and Mather, it was using less than 80 agencies, and IBM was much bigger than Dell and operating in many more markets.
So, “Enfatico” was created. Initially called “Da Vinci,” though the name was soon dropped as being a little too pretentious. Having said that, no one seemed to have a clue what Enfatico meant. A visit to their web site didn’t provide any hint, although the introductory page did establish one thing… “Building a new global agency required a delicate touch. There were loud noises. Broken rules. Crushed silos. Blown-up preconceptions.” No wonder, Enfatico’s logo was a giant sledgehammer!
Enfatico immediately hired nearly a thousand employees, working out of fifteen offices scattered around the globe, including an entire building on Madison Avenue, for which Sir Martin signed a ten year lease.
Within months, Enfatico rolled up its sleeves and got down to work producing its first campaign… For itself! Featuring sledgehammers and wrecking balls, as expected, it focused on the agency’s ability by break, crush and blow shit up. It couldn’t show any of its on-going work for Dell, ‘cos there was no work on-going. In fact, in its two year existence, Enfatico never produced a single global campaign for its solitary client. A couple of ads ran in India, and that was it!
All the offices were closed, there were massive lay-offs, and a small skeleton crew was absorbed by WPP’s Y&R, to service the business. Within a year Enfatico had completely disappeared. It was the biggest, fastest disaster in advertising agency history.
As expected, “Agencies of the future” pop up with endless frequency. Most are based on some new highly hyped technology or methodology. Some are merely the merger of two long existing sclerotic dinosaurs, which end up creating an even bigger more sclerotic, dinosauristic, fucked up organization that is completely out of touch with basic advertising principles.
Or, as Yogi would say…”It’s deja vu all over again.”
Soon to come…agencies of the past.
…
