My final blog this week.
Day 5 was quite spectacular as our first meeting was a
surprise as we met John Wren – CEO of Omnicom. Ad Forum have not seen him
for a few years but he accepted the invitation to join us and give us an update
on the Publicis Omnicom merger. He confirmed that the many reasons
for the merger include finding efficiencies in financial and technological
areas, and that the focus is on the corporate side of the transaction not on
the individual agency brands.
None of the agency brands in both groups will be merged.
The newly merged group – and it will still take about eight
to 12 months to finalise in all areas – will continue to do acquisitions in
order to ensure that it has every discipline in place.
The group will continue to provide clarity to employees and
clients regarding Newco ( the new company that will ultimately be formed once
Publicis and Omnicom finally merge). It will have to yield good results
for shareholders.
And in the interim the Omnicom group still has its fiduciary
duties to its current shareholders – as does Publicis.
Andrew Robertson – worldwide CEO of BBDO – then spent time
with us and explained that the world does not need more content as there are
already six billion hours of content on YouTube and it will take us 1700 years
to watch it all. He showed us some wonderful case studies from all around
the BBDO network including the following brands:
La Redoute.fr
Doritos – Mexican band
Smart Fortwo – car
Snickers
Guinness – ad for the disabled
All of which have achieved major successes in their
respective countries already.
We then moved on to the final discussion re the Publicis
Omnicom merger. This time we heard from Miles Nadal of MDC ( Crispin
Porter, 72 and Sunny etc) and Maurice Levy – Publicis Groupe.
MDC commented that they will continue with their own
acquisition trail and do not see any real impact on their group from the POG
merger – although there might be opportunities.
Publicis Groupe – CEO Maurice Levy – provided a very
interesting new viewpoint on the merger and, as always, talked about the future
and Big Data rather than dwelling on the past. Levy proved to us that
this merger is very much about being ahead of the curve and being able to meet
the needs of a changing world. And the impact of external
consulting companies other than agencies.
Our final stops of the day were at the LinkedIn offices in
the Empire State Building and with a digital agency called Vertic.
Vertic showed us two case studies around renewable energy
and Office 365. In both cases, groups of Linked In members were targeted
according to demographics, profiles etc with astonishing results. They
showed us how they can calculate a business case on a global scale through
leveraging Linked In data – this is the future world. They would love to
be paid on ROI but procurement is not ready for this concept just yet.
Regarding Linked In itself – they acknowledged that most
marketers have not embraced what Linked IN can do but that awareness
campaigns are in play to change this.
And so after a final discussion and lunch, another Ad Forum
Summit was over.
Saying goodbye to real friends is not easy as we share many
experiences over a short space of time. We all felt that this was
probably our best Ad Forum Summit yet – with lots of content (!) and outputs to
think about.
Thank you for reading my blogs for the last week – I am
looking forward to being back in South Africa and to catching up with our
agencies and clients over the next few weeks.
Lots of food for thought.
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