Media Buying Briefing: How Publicis is winning and keeping clients, even as competitors cry foul

It’s all resulted in the amassing of a string of client wins that are the envy of their competitors — landing the likes of Coca Cola, Paramount, Mars, Hershey, Pfizer and, famously, parts of Disney’s business back in 2019, which set off the start of its climb back from a moribund second decade of this millennium. As recently as June, Adweek ran a lengthy piece celebrating the holdco’s successes, with only a glancing reference to “undercutting on fees.”

That’s the thing, though, it’s not that simple. After speaking with analysts, consultants, rival agencies (the latter of which all spoke on condition of anonymity), a picture becomes clear of Publicis using a variety of tools to beat its competitors to winning clients or luring them away.

Rivals point especially to client-friendly payment terms of 180 days, which three holding company rivals say they would never offer — nor could they afford to. And analysts confirmed that 180 days is highly unusual and rarely used.

Other tactics that rivals assert helped Publicis win in a manner they feel challenges the norms of pitching: One rival holdco noted that when Publicis won Hershey’s consolidated U.S. business in 2024 (which had been handled by multiple media agencies before then), one deal sweetener was a free Super Bowl ad. 

And new clients are also said to have received fee-free “resources” — FTE hours that ordinarily are charged to the client — for the first year of a three-year contract. 

Finally, lower pricing of ad inventory — now formally achieved through principal media — was cited by one former Dentsu exec as the reason that holdco thought they had won Disney in 2019 — but lost at the eleventh hour due to Publicis promising what this exec remembers as “impossible” rates. 

Publicis did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. 

Obviously, this could all be seen as sour grapes on the part of competitors that are not basking in the halo effect of win after win. After all, winning is a momentum game, and Publicis has the big ‘mo at this time. 

What’s unusual is how well it’s retaining clients — in the five years since this winning streak started, there have been no major losses (the lone exception is Havas winning part of LVMH’s business earlier this year). 

So even if Publicis has resorted to means that its competitors either wish they could do or feel is “unethical,” as one rival put it, in order to win, it’s not losing them either. Which says something about what CEO Arthur Sadoun and company have put together. 

“There have been allegations or feelings in the industry that there was such a thing going on as an agency buying pitches, which basically means they were getting in at impossible rates — like huge discounts on media rates, or service fees — and I genuinely don’t think that’s where we are right now with Publicis,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity, which is intimately familiar with what agencies offer clients to win their business. 

To Schreurs’ thinking, it’s the assemblage of bolt-ons that Publicis has made — along with the charismatic power of a CEO like Sadoun — that has helped clients stick around and even re-up after three or five years. 

Publicis “went through much of the transformation five or six years ago that WPP now is going through,” said Schreurs. “They have a way more consistent and uniform approach to going in with a holding company offering in a way that makes clients feel that it is indeed integrated and streamlined. It’s not just a bunch of labels slept together, and then after the pitch, they deal with all the the friction between the P&Ls … It’s just a very strong pitch. It’s a well articulated model they offer to clients. And it’s very deeply rooted in their data, consumer data capabilities, their retail media capabilities, their creative production capabilities.”

Another high-level consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity, largely agreed with Schreurs’ opinion on Publicis’ strategy. “When I hear that ‘they’re buying the business’ routine from people in our industry, I always say it’s bullshit. You can’t buy business for that long,” said the consultant. If you buy business, you generally lose it pretty quickly. If you buy business and you actually pay for it, then I guess you didn’t really buy the business — you made a commercial deal and you honored it.”

This consultant did point to Publicis’ expert use of principal media as a tool for generating revenue for itself while still saving clients money. “They were aggressive early in understanding the importance and the tool that principal trading could play in this equation,” said the consultant. “And using principal trading is allowing them to make guarantees on pricing because they have more flexibility, and it drives the profitability of the organization in a very meaningful way.”

How long this will last is anyone’s guess. I’ve covered this business to know that winning streaks end, especially in a cyclical industry. It wasn’t so long ago that WPP ruled the holdco universe with Sir Martin Sorrell at the helm, or Carat’s winning streak before that under David Verklin. And with all the consolidation happening around Publicis, the power balance could easily change.

But media analyst Brian Wieser noted that Publicis’ success might be more like a “one way flywheel,” as he put it. 

“Agencies have been cyclical — winning followed by losing and everyone, more or less, grows at the same rate over multi-year periods of time,” said Wieser. “But there’s an element of escape velocity at play here for Publicis, not least because they’re the only ones who have invested as consistently and aggressively in what they’re doing and operated and organized the way they’ve organized.” 

Color by numbers

Data is considered by many to be the most important factor in crafting marketing efforts that will find the right audience or seek out new audiences, or even uncover new behaviors. But the unsettling truth, according to research from mar-tech platform Adverity, is that marketers believe nearly half of data is either inaccurate. Adverity found this in a survey of 200 CMOs across the US, UK, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Some findings: 

• 43% of CMOs believe less than half of their marketing data can be trusted;
• When asked what would most improve marketing performance, CMOs cited improving data quality (30%), well ahead of automating data workflows (22%) and improving data democratization (21%);
• Areas where CMOs believe the most progress is needed to address data quality issues: data completeness (31%), data consistency (26%) and data uniqueness (16%).

Takeoff & landing

• New WPP CEO Cindy Rose wasted no time installing new leadership in her first week (see below for some of her comments at a Town Hall). She named Ogilvy Group global CEO Devika Bulchandani the holdco’s new COO, and replaced her at Ogilvy with Laurent Ezekiel, who also is executive sponsor (whatever that means) of Open X, the group dedicated to Coca-Cola. Replacing Ezekiel, who most recently was CEO of Open X, is Floriane Tripolino, who has been leading the Nestlé business. 
• Empower Media acquired Ocean Media to form Empower Ocean Media Group, which together count some $1.5 billion in media spend for clients including PetSmart, BetMGM and Rakuten, among others. 
• Dept won Digital AOR duties for Lufthansa Group’s loyalty program Miles & More, an extension of the agency’s relationship with Lufthansa Group.
• Keen Decision Systems launched the Keen Planning Module, a standalone media planning module for agencies to forecast outcomes, optimize investment strategies, and recommend media plans, without needing brand data.
• Personnel moves: Mediaplus hired media agency veteran Alan Schanzer as its first COO for North America, coming from Amazon … Innocean USA named Leslie Barrett its first-ever president, coming over from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, where she was president/partner … Dentsu named Katja Anette Brandt CEO of Dentsu Germany, and media practice lead for Central Europe, coming over from Mindshare where she was CEO of Germany Austria and Switzerland.

Direct quote

“I’ve been a client, I’ve been a tech partner, I’ve been a member of the board for six years … but it’s super clear to me that what made us successful in the past is not going to necessarily make us successful in the future. We will need to be smarter, faster, bolder, more agile. We’ll need to refocus on our top clients and be really obsessed about making them successful. We’ll need to embrace AI to disrupt ourselves and our competitors if we want to win.” 

—New WPP CEO Cindy Rose, in a company-wide Town Hall address to employees. 

Speed reading

• Sam Bradley tackled the complicated topic of the rise in ad spending on streaming, with the caveat that media buyers are pushing back on CPMs and fees. 
• Bradley also looked into the impact for media agencies on Walmart’s decision to open up its media business to more DSPs than just The Trade Desk.  
• Ronan Shields covered the surprising — and unsurprising — elements of the verdict on Google’s antitrust trials.