Publicis announced in March the consolidation of six global agency brands into four.
Since that time Starcom, Mediavest, Spark, Zenith, Optimedia and the Blue 449 have been reorganized into four hubs: Publicis Communications (responsible for all creative brands); Publicis Media; the digital division Publicis.Sapient and Publicis Health.
Eight months after the change up, Marketing found Maurice Levy, the chairman and CEO of the Paris-based holding company, at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. He agreed to a quick interview to discuss the results of the restructuring effort and possible futures for the company.
What was the strategy behind the restructuring effort?
What we have done is to reorganize around [tentpoles]. One of which is a creative pole, another that is a digital and technology one, and the media one. So we have three media poles, and we are using the strength of all these operations to best serve our clients and to leverage the scale in order to best serve the client to bring all assets.
That is something that is working extremely well, and has been very well received. We call it “the power of one.” The clients have been tremendously excited by what we have presented. We had a huge success already with the new solutions, and, for example, if you go and look at what’s happening here in this market, all the agencies are all together in the same building with one single boss. This is creating a new energy. It is helping everyone to work in the same direction and it is delivering tremendous services to our clients. It is working very very well.
How has this reorganization helped position your place in the market?
What is making the big difference is the fact that we have acquired Sapient, and we are bringing services to our clients that others cannot. For example, we start with consulting, we develop technology, the platform, the communication campaign, and we end up with the transaction. We have the full range of services, we call this “the power of one,” and we have a system that is in fact the alchemy of creativity and technology.
This is a huge difference when you compare to what other players are doing. Our positioning is today between the classic holding companies — we no longer have a holding company — and the consulting firms, and when you look at the kinds of services we can render. We can do the whole thing ourselves when our competition needs to combine Accenture plus WPP, or Deloitte plus Omnicom in order to do what we do. It’s really addressing the needs of our clients when it comes to transformation of our business.
When you look at the current world where digital and technology are really dictating the need of transformation, we are the sole partner, we can cover the whole range of services.
MDC Partners just announced the launch of Born, an AI-focused agency. Do you imagine Publicis going in the same direction, perhaps with an AI incubator or development agency?
We have been investing in AI for a long time. We not only have developed AI at Digitas and Razorfish and obviously at Sapient, but we have also invested in an operation called Lucid.AI, where we have a big share in the operation in order to have access to artificial intelligence, which is essential nowadays. AI is something which is well imbedded in our operation, and which is extremely important for Sapient and the kind of services we are rendering to our clients, particularly when it comes to Sapient Consulting.
