Today (in France), giant marketing network Publicis announced it is writing down the value of its digital brands (Razorfish, Digitas and Sapient) by 1.5B USD. [1] This was part of a discussion of the company’s 2016 financial results, which indicated a loss of 567M USD, mainly attributed to Publicis’ digital business in North America. This wouldn’t normally have caught my attention, except that just yesterday, I’d written a quasi-sarcastic post that involved digital.
Could it be that the big consultants and accountants really are eating the big agencies’ lunch? The billions of dollars in digital business the former group is doing now must come from somewhere, and it’s not from small and medium-sized clients without big consultant/accountant relationships. Just maybe.
It could also be that the Publicis model (and every other big network) is wrong. I’m being ham-fisted here, but that model appears to be:
- Find the hottest independent digital shops.
- Make the entrepreneurial owners an offer they can’t refuse.
- Lose the digital shop founders/entrepreneurs as soon as non-compete terms are up, or sooner.
- Pitch current clients digital services without understanding them as well as the founders/entrepreneurs.
- Repeat steps 1 through 4 as many times as possible.
Consultancies aren’t better marketers than marketing agencies, but they have their clients trust based on their core business relationship, which is very focused on ROI and business results. The reason for Marketing Wilderness.
- Alexandra Bruell, CMO Today/The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2017.
