Dell Pioneers A New Type of PR/Ad Agency

Throughout its history, Dell Corp. has been an innovator. This week, the company turned its attention to the world of advertising and PR and announced an innovation that is already sending shock waves through the marketing sector.

Dell announced that it would consolidate its $1.5 billion per year worldwide advertising and PR budget with a new agency the company itself is forming in partnership with WPP Group, one of the largest PR/ad companies in the world. Previously, Dell had spread its advertising and PR spending among 860 — 860! — agencies around the world. In process, Dell had almost zero ability to track the efficiency and success of that spend. And as managers love to say, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

So in addition to working with one global company that will presumably provide Dell with excellent service, the two companies are developing an integrated analytics tool that will be open to both sides of the relationship and will provide Dell and WPP with the exact same information about the return on Dell’s marketing investment. “We’ve been calling this ‘Project DaVinci’ because we’ve been looking for the combination of artist and scientist – an agency that has both the creative horsepower and ability to measure the business impact of their work,” Dell said in a press release.

In any interview with PRWeek, Dell PR chief Andy Lark sounded a familiar and weary note about the tactics PR agencies use to pitch business: “You get a whole lot of talent that pitches you on the day, and you really warm up to these folks and they come up with a lot of interesting creative ideas, which they later tell you you can’t afford and the people vanish as well… It’s kind of like you go to the Audi showroom and look at the RS8, and you end up with a Kia driven by your neighbor.” Lark said this partnership eliminates that concern for Dell, because Dell will be working with a stable team that doesn’t have to worry about pitching or winning the business.

Dell expects two things to happen as a result of this partnership: 1) The outright poaching of talent from other agencies both within WPP and outside and 2) Pitching the services of the new agency to other businesses that don’t compete directly with Dell.

Obviously, not many businesses have the clout to do what Dell is doing. But every business has the clout — because it has budget to spend — to ask the right questions of agencies it hires. So while Dell is pioneering a model for Big Business, smaller businesses can feed off the Dell approach by asking the same key questions:

• What am I getting for my PR or advertising spending?


• How can we measure the success of the program and how will we adjust it based on the metrics?


• How can we be sure that the people who pitch us the business will stick around and actually work on it and do what they said they would do?