The key takeaway in Adweek’s story about Mazda picking WPP to handle its business:
After strategic presentations last month, client executives narrowed their focus to the WPP team and the Omnicom team led by DDB, said sources. WPP is expected to create a dedicated unit to service the account.
The pick is not surprising. WPP has consolidated its Ford work at an entity called “Team Detroit,” and Ford has a part ownership stake in Mazda. Still, it’ll be interesting to see a holding company put together a new group specifically for a piece of business, like Enfatico, which was created by WPP for Dell. I seem to recall that Omnicom tried it for Chrysler with an agency called Pentamark some years back. It’s not easy to create a large agency culture–of any kind–from scratch.