Ford, WPP Have Good News For The Motor City

The consolidation of Ford’s advertising — above and below the line — at Team Detroit appears to be working well. From the Detroit Free Press:

Team Detroit, the Dearborn-based collective of five WPP-owned agencies with Ford as the major client, has recently added more than 300 jobs while other local ad shops have closed or been badly wounded by the loss of automotive accounts including Chrysler, General Motors and Mazda.
In addition, the business model of putting multiple agencies with different specialties under one roof, adopted by Team Detroit in 2006, is being replicated by WPP in London and Shanghai, and at a new dedicated office in Irvine, Calif., for the Mazda account the company landed a month ago.

I think it’s worth noting that many of the pieces for Team Detroit were in place for a long time before they were brought together. It’ll be interesting to see whether a team like that can ramp up for Mazda, from scratch, in a short period of time.