Aloha from Portland. Pollen index: Yikes.
If you’ve ever flown an ultra-low-cost airline, you kind of know the drill. You pay 12 cents for a ticket, then $900 for the extras. Want to choose a seat? $60. Food? That’s another $12. Eye contact with a flight attendant? $38.
Of course, if you’re a big brand and have hired an agency to help you with your digital presence—and paid a decent sum for it—chances are you don’t want to be surprised by a few add-ons that you weren’t expecting to pay for.
That’s what allegedly happened in 2018, according to a lawsuit Hertz filed against Accenture last week, claiming breach of contract over what they called “seriously deficient” web design work.
The client contends that $32 million was a bit much for work that fell short of “redefining the customer experience on Hertz’s digital platforms.” Note the plural there.
According to the suit, Accenture “never delivered a functional website or mobile app” after two launch delays.
Droga5’s parent company allegedly demanded “hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees” from Hertz to complete the work required in its contract—work that the client claims to have spent another $10 million to complete. Oh, and there were some issues around “security vulnerabilities and performance problems” and portability of code (which only worked in North America, and not globally) as well—again, according to the suit.
That’s quite a few additions to the original fee, it seems. And while all of this is still pending, one can’t help but think that if what we’re reading is true, Hertz got jammed into the back of the plane. In a middle seat.
Finally, we must mention that the new site has yet to go live.
In other news this week…
WPP’s North American revenue took a pretty big hit.
IPG isn’t sweating the competition.
More agency women need to experience Cannes—and Adweek and InVisible Creatives are joining forces to help them do just that.
The Martin Agency snapped up a big ($100 million) fish in the form of CarMax.
While you weren’t looking, Mark Penn became chairman of MDC Partners.
McCann got ahead of Droga5 and CPB to win strategic and creative AOR duties for ADT.
What did Publicis buy with its $4.4 billion Epsilon acquisition? Analysts tell us.
Oh, David. The Burger King stunts keep-a-coming. This time, they built ads from x-rays of customers who hurt their jaws eating Whoppers.
Monday, we’re announcing the winners of our inaugural Adweek Experiential Awards. See the finalists here.
More agency news, you ask? Then take a spin on our sister site, AgencySpy, where you’ll see more happenings in our little world.
As always, feel free to kick over your agency news and notes to me at doug dot zanger at adweek.com. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.
Warm Regards,
Doug Zanger
Senior Editor, Creativity + Agencies
Image credit: Getty Images
