Publicis Groupe

Publicis Groupe will snap up Sapient, a digital-centric agency and communications company known for experience design and digital-retail integrations, for $3.7 billion. The all-cash transaction comes directly on the heels of Publicis’s acquisition of programmatic platform RUN, and may bring some closure to the holding company’s disastrous courtship of Omnicom Group. Sapient CEO Alan Herrick (AdExchanger Q&A) will become CEO of Publicis.Sapient, a new […]

Publicis Groupe reported a meager 1% organic growth rate for 2014’s Q3 on Thursday, with the displeased CEO Maurice Lévy blaming key account losses at Razorfish and lingering “distraction” on the failed Omnicom fusion. Publicis’ revenue in Q3 grew 4% YoY to reach $2.21 billion. “We have been too much focused on [the merger] and […]

Publicis Groupe will acquire 20% of Matomy Media Group, an Israeli performance marketing company that recently went public on the London Stock Exchange, the companies said Monday. The investment will not generate cash for the company’s coffers, going instead to a small group of individual investors, but CEO Ofer Druker said it will result in collaboration […]

The first half of 2014 was sobering, to put it mildly, for Publicis Groupe and its CEO, Maurice Levy. In the wake of the holding company’s failed megamerger with Omnicom Group and its weak second-quarter earnings report, Levy needs to show digital strength. Some structural changes announced Tuesday may help it do that. Among the […]

Publicis Groupe will make Adobe Marketing Cloud technology available to clients across its agency portfolio, the companies revealed Wednesday. Under the deal, the Paris-based holding company’s agencies will package Adobe MediaOptimizer and Adobe AudienceManager as part of a solution with the name Publicis Groupe Always-On Platform. It’s not the first time the companies have worked together on a large […]

French holding company Publicis Groupe acquired software and consulting firm Crown Partners on Tuesday and intends to align it with digital agency Razorfish. The purchase is a play to power up Razorfish’s ecommerce capabilities, especially as businesses that haven’t traditionally had strong online presences seek to remedy that situation. “Everyone wants to have an ecommerce capability today, even […]

On Tuesday at the Cannes Lions festival, leaders of the world’s four largest agency trading desks participated in a panel hosted by Rubicon Project. The discussion touched on a wide range of topics, including deal automation, technology investment and transparency. One macro takeaway is that the so-called trading desks resemble each other less than they used to. […]

Marketers need to fundamentally rethink the traditional purchase funnel if they want to effectively target media and messaging in the future, says Kate Sirkin, EVP and global research director of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG). Leading a discussion at Publicis Groupe’s New York headquarters Thursday alongside social analytics agency Mashwork, Sirkin discussed how social data is unlocking […]

Stephan Beringer is in for a ride. Earlier this week Beringer was named president of Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Audience On Demand (AOD) trading desk. He succeeds Kurt Unkel, a respected agency leader and progenitor of the trading desk idea, who will exit at the end of February for a hometown job as chief digital officer […]

The lawyers may be scurrying and the deal fees mounting, but Omnicom and Publicis are still on track to complete their $35 billion megamerger by early 2014. The companies are making slow but steady progress on achieving regulatory approval for the deal, Omnicom CEO John Wren told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call this morning. […]

Automation Is Coming. In panel after panel at New York’s Advertising Week, publishers and agencies heaped hate on ad selling inefficiencies and delivered eulogies for their mutual adversary, the insertion order. The big questions: Which players will be first to seize the automation grail? And how long will it take? The holding company trading desks […]

Media agencies have more influence than ever, thanks to the runaway train of audience fragmentation and the infrastructure/manpower needed to address it. This trend is nicely articulated by Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of digital agency Engauge Marketing – not because Engauge is a digital media agency (it’s not) but rather because it’s a creative and content-centric […]

Its $405 million acquisition of video ad marketplace Adap.tv closes two big loops for AOL. The first is around video, which has become a bigger part of both its and rival Yahoo’s strategies. Both portals have doubled down on original video content creation, but AOL has looked to video as an ad-tech solution, whereas Yahoo […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Paul Chu, vice president of advertiser solutions and RTB at PubMatic.   The recent news of the merger between Omnicom and Publicis shook the advertising world, and, like everyone […]

The differentiator is: Who holds the data? Immediately following the Publicis-Omnicom mega-merger that came on a sunny Sunday afternoon in France, a couple of questions remained. To what extent was the deal motivated by technology-driven changes in marketing? And what are the deal’s implications for consumer tech titans like Google, Twitter and Facebook? “If you […]

Publicis and Omnicom have confirmed their intent to create a merger of equals. The two global ad agency holding companies will form a new entity called Publicis Omnicom Groupe – with ownership structured approximately 50/50 and a market capitalization of $35 billion U.S. (press release) Speaking with press from Paris this morning, CEOs Maurice Levy […]

Bob Lord is leaving his twin posts as Global CEO of Razorfish and CEO of Publicis Groupe’s Digital Technologies Division to take on the role of CEO of AOL Networks, a post that has been vacant since April when former head Ned Brody exited in April for Yahoo, pending his non-compete. However, Lord, who joined […]

WPP Group’s trading desk Xaxis is known for its proprietary approach to technology. The GroupM unit has incubated numerous ad platforms, a legacy of WPP’s 2007 acquisition of 24/7 Media. It offers these products to clients as an alternative to licensing from vendors. By contrast, trading desk rivals VivaKi AOD (Publicis), Cadreon (IPG), and Accuen (Omnicom) are […]

When Publicis Groupe launched it five years ago, VivaKi Audience On Demand was among the first holding company trading desks. And Google was its key partner, supporting a great majority of AOD’s ad serving and auction-based display media buying. But those days are over. As of Q1, Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (formerly Invite Media) is […]

In the summer of 2008, Paris-based ad holding Publicis Groupe had started working on CEO Maurice Lévy’s pledge to derive at least 25 percent of the agency’s revenues from digital. The problem was that digital was still a sideline to the main business of creating and buying ads for TV, print and out-of-home. With those […]