If you are in the advertising/marketing agency business (like me), you’d have to be living under a rock in Greenland not to have heard about the Enfatico/Dell brouhaha. You’ve likely heard about how Enfatico, WPP Group’s 1,000 person agency start up, launched almost nine months ago as the single global agency of record (for now at least) for Dell, still has not produced a single ad for its sole client. Of course, Enfatico did actually produce one ad, but that was an online effort for Enfatico itself. Probably not a good way to start for a new single-client agency. But, I digress…

With a mixture of jealously, envy and a lot of schadenfreude, the ad business has been abuzz about the new Dell in-house agency and its seeming inability to come up with any advertising for Dell, a client greatly in need of re-branding and re-launching. In all the rumors and gossip (delightfully and snarkily covered by George Parker’s AdScam site), there was even the news that a current Dell agency, Mother of NY, had been asked to create the Dell holiday campaign. That was presumably because Enfatico had not yet come up with the goods.

Some schadenfreude-driven observers even launched a “tribute” site, called “Enfartico.” Hey, it’s hard to be the new kid on the global ad agency block…with several hundred million dollars in your pocket to hire a thousand employees, set up offices around the world and buy brand new Macs. (This is another one of the stories uncovered by the breathless blogging on Enfatico. Michael Dell himself was planning to visit the Austin offices of Enfatico and the agency brass panicked when they realized that a wee too many Macs were adorning the desks where only Dells should live. Oops!)

I guess enough has already been said and written about l’affaire Enfatico. I won’t add to the gossip, tempting as that may be. I will make this observation, however. George Parker is right to call the new Dell agency an “in-house agency.” And, as Parker correctly notes, for all the bloviating by Enfatico’s PR machine that it is doing something completely new and “revolutionary,” the fact is that in-house agencies have been around for a long time. Remember, the old Lintas agency (now part of Lowe Group) started life as the Unilever in-house shop. Similarly, Revlon had an in-house agency for years, and so did Quaker Oats (which was also spun off as an independent agency in Chicago…can anyone remember its name?). And, Gap has long operated an in-house ad team (really an agency), with wildly mixed results; some memorable advertising came out of the Gap in-house group, but a lot of dreck, too.

In-house ad agencies sometimes make sense for certain kinds of clients (typically for fashion and lifestyle companies, which are as much about fashion, beauty and style as they are marketing). In my opinion, however, they don’t really work for big-ticket, highly competitive brand categories, like computers and electronics.

So, I join with George Parker and the many other skeptics who believe that Enfatico is starting life fighting a strong headwind, given the checked history of in-house ad shops. I also agree with what has been said frequently about Enfatico, which is that it’s going to be very hard to hire and retain the best people just working on one client. Historically, and definitely recently, Dell has not exactly been known for supporting or producing breakthrough work. Dell prefers numbers-driven, plug-and-chug direct marketing that moves boxes. They are the biggest printer and mailer of catalogs and FSIs in the world. That should tell you something about their branding and advertising prowess.

That said, my biggest reason for being cynical about the Enfatico experiment is the fact that in-house agencies — almost by their very nature — don’t do very good work. Why, you ask? Because in-house too often equates to in-bred.

Great thinking and creativity naturally arises from a certain amount of independence. It’s why clients go to outside agencies in the first place — they know that having an outside, independent and fresh perspective is very important to produce great strategy and creative.

The in-house agency model works against that. And, if any client in the world needed a fresh point of view these days, it’s Dell. They are the last people who should be stuck with one group worldwide creating their advertising. In a recent interview Michael Dell made it very clear what his motivation was for going with the Enfatico global single agency solution — efficiency and saving money. He said nothing about the quality and originality of the work.

Apple, that paragon of innovative marketing and design, does not use only one agency worldwide. They know that even a great creative firm like TBWA Chiat/Day (led by the estimable Lee Clow) won’t have all the answers, all the time. Ideas are where you find them, and very frequently they come from everywhere.

I wish Enfatico and Dell great luck in their new marriage; here’s hoping it lasts long and produces many happy offspring. However, in my experience, narrowing your choice to one agency worldwide has the dangerous potential of narrowing your options in terms of thinking and ideas.

An in-bred, in-house solution is probably not what the doctor ordered for Dell. But, with Enfatico, that is exactly what they ultimately will get.

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