WPP announces WPP Deliver
Commentary on WPP's creation of WPP Deliver and Publicis's Prodigious - two different in-house models to provide digital production services for group agencies and clients.
WPP’s recent announcement (5th September 2008) that it has created WPP Deliver, a digital production network to service group clients and agencies globally, has raised barely a ripple in the UK or international trade press. I know ‘production’ has rarely sought or won the limelight in our industry but a global operation claiming a resource of ‘about 700′ should surely warrant more than a few lines spread thinly across our media. This ’soft’ launch by WPP may have something to do with WPP Deliver being in its nascent stage of life and still not sure what form its mature state should be.
So what are the options available to the global communications groups as they look to improve digital production efficiency? With the expansion of high-speed broadband, developing markets are showing great potential but where and how best to harness this without sacrificing on quality and service? As a provider of outsourced digital production services to UK agencies, Flip Media has a vested interest in how the big boys play-out this game.
Publicis have set about creating a standalone network - buying, growing and adapting agencies to create a network of digital ‘factories’ under the Prodigious label. It was launched just prior to the credit crunch. I don’t know but I can guess that Prodigious is likely to be more profit focused than the ‘virtual’ model that WPP is creating (see below). Its core business will be heavily reliant on the work it is fed from Publicis Groupe companies rather than having its own local markets as its primary business. A stronger management structure and more focused business model could work in its favour as it tries to build the processes and relationships needed to sustain steady offshore business.
WPP, on early evidence, appears to have opted for a virtual network strategy with a small management team trying to pull together the disparate digital resources now on offer from its buying spree of the past few years. The strength of this approach is that the resource is largely in place and ready to work from day one and there are minimal start-up costs. But what other option could they have followed? In times of great economic uncertainty I can’t image that the powers at Farm Street would have given much thought to creating a new standalone network. Buying a ready made digital operation of the scale needed to service WPP’s global empire might have appealed if such an agency existed - it doesn’t. Flip Media, with our 160 staff of digital programmers split equally between Dubai and India, makes us one of the largest digital companies outside the western world but we’re not even close to the scale needed to meet the demands of WPP’s collective digital output.
Whichever strategy one adopts, if you fail to install and enforce the use of reliable work-flow systems then service levels will be unacceptable. However capable one’s Flash designers or XHTML programmers may be, if the processes to run complex multi-lingual banner and website builds across geographies, time-zones and cultures are not fully operational then disaster awaits. Pricing is also a critical component for success. Networks must ensure that both the commissioning agency and the production agency get a fair deal whilst ensuring that some of the benefit is accrued to the client. Client procurement teams, like traffic wardens, have a nasty habit of finding you out.
For agencies not able to build their own offshore production network but looking for low cost, reliable resource options Flip Media UK would be happy to help.
