Last summer, two enormous advertising companies, Omnicom and Publicis, announced that they'd be merging to form the world's most enormous advertising company. Yesterday, they announced the deal is off. Why? Because these companies are essentially kindergarteners.
Publicis and Omnicom, two staggeringly huge conglomerates of advertising and PR agencies, are combining into one even more staggeringly huge conglomerate, as we march towards a bright future in which one ad company sells all ads to one media company, which controls all entertainment.
The French CEO of huge ad conglomerate Publicis thinks Barack Obama's election shows America is smart again! Also, that all this economic trouble is the fault of shady corporate lies. But not advertising lies:
Yahoo's marketing department didn't like "Apex," and their choice, AMP, was already taken, so when Yahoo finally announced its new display advertising dashboard for sales representatives yesterday, the company decided to call it APT. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News have already signed up, …
Ah, schadenfreude: Vibrant Media, the company responsible for those "IntelliTXT" ads that appear disguised as hyperlinks in the middle of articles and pop up if you accidentally mouse over them, is enduring executive turmoil. Sean Finnegan, an advertising executive who joined the company as "chief media officer" in…
As promised, Google has found a buyer for Performics, the search-marketing business it acquired when it bought DoubleClick. French ad conglomerate Publicis will take the Chicago-based company off Google's hands for an amount that so far remains undisclosed — probably because the fire-sale price will be low enough to…
Ad agency conglomerate Publicis Groupe announced it will create a new "open source" ad network running on inventory from AOL's Platform-A, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Everyone knows the world does not need yet another ad network, so why is Publicis doing it? We asked AdWeek's Brian Morrissey. The five-word version:…
AvVenta Worldwide does the production work behind digital ads for General Motors, Microsoft and Bank of America and it expects to earn us much as $22 million in revenues this year — all while charging 20 percent to 50 percent less than the competition. How? Outsourcing! AvVenta, founded in 2005, has 415 employees in…
2007 was supposed to be the start of an advertising-industry downturn. But growth in agency revenues slowed from 8.8 percent in 2006 to 8.6 percent growth in 2007, according to AdAge's annual survey, and it's large part due to ever-increasing digital spends. The world's four largest agencies — Omnicom Group, WPP…
Google is more than just a "frenemy," Publicis CEO Maurice Levy told gathered reporters yesterday, after surprising them with a visit from Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Today's New York magazine serves up a massive "OMG, did you know? Offices!" package, starring an insane, useless, and quite still exhaustive look into who gets smoothies with whom at ad agency Publicis New York. (Remember, they were so excited about being photographed!) What did we learn about Publicis? NOTHING.…
