Dive Brief:
- Publicis Groupe is consolidating its Publicis Media network of agencies into four global brands, according to Ad Week.
- Starcom and Zenith will remain separate agencies, while Mediavest and Spark will be rolled into a single agency, as will Optimedia and Blue 449. VivaKi will remain part of Publicis Media, but will also serve as a resource for all the agencies within the network.
- Publicis previously restructured its entire roster of agencies into four subgroups. Along with Publicis Media, the groups include Publicis Communications, Publicis Sapient and Publicis Healthcare.
Dive Insight:
Since the beginning of the year, the French advertising and PR agency giant Publicis has been undergoing a transformation.
Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Maurice Lévy said the new subgroups announced earlier this year would each have a new focus: creative, media, digital/technology and healthcare. He said the consolidation will "simplify our process and reduce our costs, thus increasing our competitiveness and profitability without compromising the crux of our business."
Now, the company is consolidating its media agency network in the hopes of achieving greater ad buying leverage in the marketplace through scale.
“Across all practices including trading, data, analytics, and content, I want to try and ensure that we are leveraging that scale as much as possible,” Steve King, chief executive officer of Publicis Media, told the Wall Street Journal. Publicis named King in charge of the restructuring last December.
Last month, Publicis created the Vivaki IQ academy to train its media buyers in programmatic buying, a step taken to decentralize programmatic buying across its agency network, and a step that helps add some definition to the VivaKi agency’s role in the new Publicis Media structure.
Publicis purchased around $79 billion in ads for its clients in 2015, according to research firm RECMA, second globally only to fellow giant WPP.