The World: Has Enfatico got its justifiable comeuppance?

As WPP's shop set up to handle Dell is submerged into Y&R Brands, Ann Cooper asks if the model was flawed from the off.

Enfatico, WPP's standalone global behemoth initially built to service one single client, Dell, has been silent of late. Once known for its self-promotion and its grandiose pronouncements ('We will jointly develop what we hope is the greatest agency in the world'), not only does the company's PR machine offer up a 'we have no comment' to a reporter's request for an interview with someone, anyone, from the company, but its blog site 'Nextstoryboard', which regularly posts breezy discourses on everything from research analytics to the company's own campaigns, has similarly been conspicuous by its silence for most of April.

No matter. If Enfatico, recently submerged into Y&R Brands following Dell concerns about the company's operational efficiency and creative work, has finally zipped the lip, its critics on the global blogosphere court of public opinion have not. With the 16-month-old company's progress gleefully dissected and criticised by a jury of its often-anonymous peers, the Y&R move constitutes what to many was Enfatico's justifiable and inevitable comeuppance.

Enfatico sources say the agency has been given 90 days by Dell to get things right. Peter Stringham, the Y&R chief executive, who visited Enfatico's headquarters in Austin, Texas this week, is understood to have told staff that they should focus on nothing but Dell for the immediate future. However, in a company-wide e-mail, he was positive about the Enfatico model, which he indicated would be around for a long time.

It all began in December 2007, with an exclusive three-year, dollars 4.5 billion partnership between the Texas-based Dell and WPP, to which the client had just awarded its global account, previously at some 850 different agencies worldwide. In an effort to integrate marketing efforts, Casey Jones, Dell's vice-president of global marketing, who had joined Dell earlier in 2007, wanted to rethink the structure of the client-service agency model.

Aided and abetted by Mark Jarvis, Dell's chief marketing officer, the aim was to create a better agency structure by having media, creative, account management etc under a single P&L and to align the agency's profit motive with client/agency success. (This was reportedly one of WPP's key selling points when it landed the Dell business.) Initially dubbed Project Da Vinci, by March 2008, Ken Segall, a former TBWA\ executive with extensive experience working on Apple ('think different'), IBM and Intel, had signed on as the chief creative officer Meanwhile, a self-imposed deadline to have a chief executive in place came and went.

Two months later, the former Digitas executive Torrence Boone was named chief executive, reporting directly to Sir Martin Sorrell, the WPP boss Boone had been a top executive at the management consultant Bain & Company, where he'd encouraged new organisational structures and cultures among advertisers and agencies' clients. By June, Da Vinci had morphed into Enfatico, a musical term meaning 'to play with emphasis'.