Ok so WPP did not say that, but rather their actions proved it. WPP had a great week by winning a $4.5 billion dollar deal with Dell. A deal of that magnitude is not easy to come by, and certainly not easy to win so I want to congratulate them.

One would assume that the very best minds and top talent at WPP spent countless hours in a conference room somewhere lined with whiteboards, Starbucks paraphernalia, pizza boxes, etc. working their asses off to win this. The product of which was a plan for how to best service the Dell account. No doubt the answer is to put together a multidisciplinary team made up of creative (both traditional and digital), media experts, strategist, analyst. Planners, industry experts, and this is only a partial list – effectively a new agency.

This “think tank” and the horsepower and tools to make their ideas and plans a reality for the Dell client would have to share focus, incentives, and account responsibilities. This makes all kinds of sense to me, and obviously so did Dell.

Why create a “new agency”? The irony here (if you have not picked up on it yet), is that this whole thing flies in the face of the promise of what the holding company model was supposed to deliver. These guys have been pushing the “benefits of the network”  - how many times did they tell a client the tale that their collection of agencies would work together in concert to support your brand, yet all they got was bickering about who got the revenue, the credit, or the earn out. Funny that now after the dust has settled, and all the double dipping has been exposed the client’s have learned their lesson. The smart winner in all of this was Michael Dell.