WPP Digital Leverages Global Production System

Neal PrescottWPP's digital investment and operating arm WPP Digital has established a global digital production hub to distribute work among its stable of digital agencies.

The objective of the new outfit, Deliver, is to better leverage WPP's existing production capabilities in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa in a "distributed model," according to Neal Prescott, CEO of Deliver.

"Every holding company is doing this to varying degrees," Prescott said. "We have the benefit to use the scale of WPP's digital production to provide cost-effective digital production and channel assignments to the best-qualified resources within the company."

Prescott most recently served as EVP and global head of "technology enablement" at Digitas, where he created arguably the first-of-its-kind offshore digital production capability in the industry.

"Neal is charged with improving our digital services offering and making it more coherent and cost-effective across the group," said Mark Read, WPP Digital's CEO.

At present, WPP has some 700 professionals working in digital production in various markets around the world. So, while much of their business is currently offshore work, Deliver is designed to give them access to a broader range of clients and agencies inside WPP.

The agencies involved with Deliver include Actis Systems in Russia, Agenda in China, Aqua in South Africa, Studiocom in Colombia) and Zaaz in Seattle, as well as The Ogilvy Group and WPP Digital agencies BLUE in China and Singapore, Quasar in India, and Schematic in Los Angeles and Costa Rica.

According to Prescott, the agencies that will be contributing their expertise to Deliver are already outsourcing work for their own clients to more economical production facilities in Costa Rica or Eastern Europe. Schematic, for example, maintains a large staff in Costa Rica, while Studiocom does the same in Colombia via its Offshore Guys subsidiary.

What sort of budget will Prescott have at his disposal? While the budget has already been set for this year, he said, "I've been great discretion to come up with a budget for next year."

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