Enfatico CEO Boone: Dell Ain't Everything -- We're Pitching New Clients

Enfatico CEO Torrence Boone said his agency is already pitching new business. Although Boone always said he wanted to take on other clients with Dell’s permission the announcement — in an interview with DMNews (see video below) — is still an eyebrow-raiser because Enfatico was founded with the sole purpose of serving a single client, Dell.

Now, it seems, Enfatico wants to change into more of a traditional agency that serves multiple clients — the exact type of agency that Dell fired in order to retain Enfatico in December 2007.

Boone:

We’ve been pitching a lot of new business, that’s a key goal of this year, is to bring on additional clients. That was always part of the vision of Enfatico.

If Enfatico is any good at presenting to new clients, we should see results soon. Boone described this recent pitch:

There was a pitch we just had where we had PR, digital and media experts co-presenting around this notion of the intersection of earned, owned and bought media, and the overlaps and how you can use that framework. This particular client is constrained [budget-wise] as everyone is in this environment.

He adds that the client wants a “new brand campaign” and then says:

We had our PR expert, our digital expert and our cross-channel media expert just riffing on the strategy there. It was really phenomenal.

That’s pretty interesting, because usually agencies want their presenters to stick pretty closely to a focused message in a new business presentation, not start “just riffing”.

DMNews’s coverage of their interview with Boone is fairly extensive. And fairly softball. So here’s a digest interspersed with a translation aid and some commentary:

Torrence Boone, Enfatico’s CEO: “Enfatico was built to anticipate and respond to a lot of the seismic shifts that we are experiencing in marketing today, be it fragmentation, media shift, consumption model shift, Web 3.0 globalization, and so on.”

Translation: Blah, blah, blah.

…while he recognizes that some are still waiting for a big, splashy consumer campaign for Dell from Enfatico, it will come only if it is relevant to Dell’s customers, he explains. “Our customers want highly localized and personalized experiences from our products, so we are doing more localized campaigns,” he says. “If you are selling a bar of soap, it is a lot easier to do a global campaign, but when you are making so many different types of technology, it helps to be more local.”

Translation: Yeah, we haven’t managed to persuade our client to sign off on a branding campaign yet … even though we’re, like, their branding agency.

The results from India have been fantasic, we’re blowing through all the numbers.

Translation: I’m not mentioning the U.S.

There are a number of consumer product launches coming out in the coming months which we’re excited about. Again a lot of that work originating in Beijing.

Translation: It’s cheaper to pay creatives in China to develop ideas than it is to pay them in the U.S.

Now that we’re out of the transition mode we can even partner more closely from a strategic level with Dell.

Comment: What? You’re only now out of the “transition” stage? You’ve been on this business more than a year! Obama transitioned an entire country between November and January! What are you guys doing?

And ultimately with other clients we’re actually in the throes of a lot of new business development as well.

Translation: I’m not stupid. Dell or its shareholders could demand my ouster any day. I want to diversify my revenue base ASAP.

Dell is widely considered one of the leading players in the social media space. … We’re doing really cool things on Twitter.

Comment: Dear god.

In traditional terms the brief typically gets thrown over the wall and comes from the client and doesn’t necessarily avail itself of the full array of thought processes that can make the brief better and get better work… we’ve actually talked at Dell about being briefless and that ultimately the aspiration is that you are so tied into the business, so seamlessly connected with what’s going on … so that the brief is unnecessary. The team knows organically what they should be doing.

Translation: Client ideas suck! Note: This is an old WPP strategy — get your agency so embedded in the client’s business that it becomes impossible to fire you now matter how incompetent you are.

Here’s the full video: