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Some brands have outstanding positions in the luxury industry. They accomplish amazing communication campaigns and very often they have ultra-talented agencies working for them. That’s the case of Chanel who have been working in the past years with WPP. This month WPP announced the creation of an internal dream team for Chanel. It is called Plus.

WPP Plus team

Chanel, a media giant

Chanel is an amazing brand and a great media investor. Only in the USA, its biggest market, Chanel invested more than 139 million $ in measurable media in 2012, which is pretty consistent vs 2011. Only in American magazines, the total amount of investment reaches 78.9 million $.

Chanel media investment

WPP, great powers lead to great responsibilities

Being the agency of several big brands, WPP developed a very interesting model of work. Once a customer crosses a certain amount of business, they put in place a dedicated team. One of the first successes is the Team Detroit, fully dedicated to Ford.
How does this work? WPP has a strong network of dedicated experts split in different agencies. From GroupM towards Mindshare. When the idea of creating a dedicated team comes, and after the customer agreement, they pick up the best of the best in all network (depending on the customer sector, goals and affinities). They also call them Plus-team. Here is the list of all Plus-teams within WPP.
WPP Plus teams list
Brands like Ford has been experiencing this dedicated way of collaboration since 2006. And Cadillac was the last addition last year. 2014 starts well as Chanel became a new Team Plus. They hope to achieve an optimized work scope with the best professionals they could have. These teams are driving a lot of turnover to WPP as they represent the core excellence at the giant of Communication.

total revenue for WPP team
Plus
These business model is a very
Powerful one. In 2012, they had around 30 Plus teams around the world. They would employ 35’000 people around the team
Plus teams for a overall revenue of 7$Billion (40% of the total holding revenue).
2014 sees Chanel as a great opportunity to tackle the luxury business and extend this organizational model towards more high-end brands. Chanel is definitely a reference to bookmark.

What to expect from Plus team Chanel at WPP

By building a dedicated task force, Chanel might gain at all levels. Quality: as dedicated people will probably invest themselves more. Speed: follow ups and flow of information might go faster as the Brand is the only possible priority. Specialization: the communication sector is populated by experts and specialists of all kinds. But at the end what a company really need is an expert or a specialist in one’s brand. By keeping people dedicated, the team gain experience with the brand and the understanding grows. This allow creative teams to go beyond the simple briefing.
Now we expect to see Chanel at the high level all the time. We cannot say that everything they did in the past was great. Like the Brad Pitt advertising for Chanel 5. At the same time we could say that only people who do not walk under the rain do not get wet. It means that only people who never try, never get failures. At least Chanel got it all right with the Marilyn Monroe campaign. Pure magic.
Let’s hope now that this new Plus team will give a permanent “Plus brand” level to Chanel. We wil definitely hear about the outcomes.
LA

Info sourced at WPP official communication, trademarkia.com, adage.com, Time. All Content is copyrighted with no reproduction rights available.