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‘An important capability for us’: PepsiCo CEO on Publicis switch
At least one CEO wants to talk about advertising. PepsiCo’s Ramon Laguarta used a recent appearance in front of investors to champion the company’s decision to hand its global media account to Publicis Groupe.
The move came without a formal review and pulled the business away from Omnicom, which had managed it for three decades. That is a lot of money changing hands. PepsiCo spends an estimated $1.9 billion on media a year, $780 million of it in North America, according to COMvergence. The fallout spread fast. Coca-Cola, a Publicis client in North America since the holdco won that account from WPP only last year, is now preparing a review of the business, reportedly in talks with Omnicom and Dentsu.
Laguarta had his own account of the move when he spoke to investors. He described the partnership as “an important capability for us” and said PepsiCo would be able to invest “with much more data, much more granularity,” as a result. Holdcos tend to sell themselves as partners. He spoke about Publicis the way a company talks about something it has bought.
That framing will suit Publicis. The holdcos have spent years trying to get investors to see them as technology businesses, and whether or not PepsiCo’s CEO meant to play along, he gave the pitch a lift. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies rarely talk up an agent partner to Wall Street. That job usually falls to the CMO.
Laguarta’s comments arrive at the start of earnings season and they set up something worth watching over the next few weeks. Marketers have argued for years that advertising should be treated as an investment in future, closer to capital expenditure in spirit, with returns that build over time. Accounting rules and most CFOs book it the other way as operating expenditure — a cost that hits the current quarter and can be cut when margins get tight. That classification shapes how boards think about the budget and how quickly it disappears under pressure.
“I think both quantity and quality, you will see more investment in A&M [advertising and marketing], and you see better investment in telling every consumer about our products and telling them in a way that they will be much more enlightened with it,” said Laguarta on the earnings call last week. “I think that is how we are thinking about it. Obviously, we continue the journey of increasing the competitiveness in the U.S. and accelerating the categories, which is the role that we need to play for the long term.”
These points sit inside a bigger argument about what PepsiCo needs to fix. North America has been a problem for a while. Several years of price increases propped up revenue access packaged goods while volumes slipped and shoppers started trading down.
Marketing is one of the few levers a CEO can pull on that could reach the shelf quickly so it’s getting talked about on earnings calls with a frequency the CMO would normally have to themselves.
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