Televisionpoint.com Correspondent | London
WPP Digital, the digital investment and operating arm of WPP, is establishing Deliver, a global digital production capability that distributes work among the group's stable of digital agencies to ensure that clients get the best solutions at the best price, with Neal Prescott joining as the new unit's chief executive officer.

Deliver will leverage WPP's existing production capabilities in Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa in a distributed model that uses the scale of WPP's digital production to not only provide cost-effective digital production, but also channel assignments to the best qualified resources within WPP.

Presently, WPP has over 700 professionals working in the area of digital production in these markets. While much of their business is currently offshore work, Deliver will give them access to a broader range of clients and agencies inside WPP.

The agencies involved with Deliver include Actis Systems (Russia), Agenda (China), Aqua (South Africa), Studiocom (via its Offshore Guys subsidiary in Colombia) and Zaaz (Seattle) from the Wunderman network, as well as the Ogilvy Group and WPP Digital agencies Quasar (India), Blue (China/Singapore), and Schematic (Los Angeles/Costa Rica).

"With digital work accounting for more of our business and with large global clients openly embracing digital solutions, WPP has amassed arguably the most robust talent pool, resources and technologies in the digital marketing space. Neal is charged with improving our digital services offering and making it more coherent and cost effective across the group. By choosing to utilize Deliver, our agencies will be able to offer clients the best way to do the best work online at the best possible cost." said Mark Read, chief executive officer, WPP Digital.

Before joining WPP, Prescott most recently was executive vice-president and global head, technology enablement, Publicis-owned Digitas. He left there earlier this year. While at Digitas, Prescott created the first-of-its-kind offshore digital production capability in the industry. His extensive background includes senior positions at Answerthink and Price Waterhouse, where he has led both technology and outsourcing organizations.

"Deliver is a great opportunity because it is not emerging from a standing start. The agencies that will contribute their expertise are already outsourcing work for their own clients to more economical production facilities in Costa Rica or Eastern Europe. For example, Schematic maintains a large staff in Costa Rica. Studiocom does the same in Colombia via its Offshore Guys subsidiary. Blue produces online work for American and European clients in its facilities in Singapore. Aqua has similar capabilities in South Africa." said Prescott.

According to David Sable, vice-chairman and chief operating officer, Wunderman, "Deliver is unique because of the benefits of scale inherent to the agencies involved. Its distributed model will enable our agencies to aggregate their scale, which will drive the quality of the work as well as the efficiency and economy with which it is delivered. It's clear that only WPP has the resources to assemble such an offering. There's no doubt that clients will benefit."

Rob Norman, chief executive officer, Group M Interaction Worldwide, added, "Deliver meets a clear and present client need: consistent, high-quality creative assets produced affordably and in infinite variety to exploit digital communication opportunities around the world. We have always had the resources, but Deliver will aggregate and catalyze our production assets and make them simpler to deploy."