Hasta La Creative!

The new WPP-created agency to service Dell gets a new name. From Ad Age:

he new WPP Group agency designed to handle Dell’s marketing-services business is expected to be named Synarchy Worldwide, a reference to a utopian political system coined in the 18th century.

WPP could change direction if the name doesn’t pass legal muster or translate well into the various international locales in which it operates. But according to executives familiar with the matter, it looks like the holding company will lean on a relatively obscure political theory to describe one of the ad world’s most closely watched experiments.

In the context of political theory, synarchy means a lot of things. The Wikipedia entry for synarchy runs through a history of its use including applications in Mexico, China and France. The entry quotes from a book on Vichy France that had an account of French industrialists who saw Nazi Germany as alternative to Communism: “Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.”

I kind of like DaVinci. Synarchy sounds like one of those made-up words that branding firms come up with.