Publicis Groupe ANZ’s streamlining of cross-agency communications has helped, in a volatile ecosystem, win business and provide more effective client work.
Publicis put in place a new Groupe structure with the creation of three discipline leads, seeing Dave Bowman as the chief creative lead, Maurice Riley data and Imogen Hewitt media.
Reporting to CEO Michael Rebelo, who remains at the group’s helm, the trio has been formally working together for six months.
Publicis has been organised into a single country P&L since 2019, a move which removed the commercial pressures of competitive agencies.
The new leadership has built formal infrastructure to identify the best strengths across the 1,800 employees, 18 ANZ businesses, hundreds of products and dozens of disciplines.
The leaders can then form the best possible group of people, select products and disciplines to pitch on new business, service current clients and centeralise processes across the group.
Now with three specialised leaders who have deep knowledge of their agencies, Publicis’ media agencies, in particular, have been growing faster in Australia than any other global holding group network.
Yearly growth is at 21% following significant account wins last year, compared to 0.6% at OMG and -0.1 % for GroupM.
“The agencies themselves have amazing capabilities around keeping connected, what I'm doing is going the step above that and seeing what can be shared across all of them,” Imogen Hewitt told AdNews.
For example, Spark Foundry has strong data and analytics strength. Zenith has great research and contemporary methodologies. MBM and Razorfish have powerful digital auditing capabilities.
There are over 800 people across media, the Groupe can then pluck out the most necessary process, services and people for any situation.
“It's not client IP, it's the process, the product, or the way of working that we can share to accelerate everybody else's capabilities to deliver great work,” Hewitt said.
Certainly, for the size of the Australian market this structure is unique and more similar to the bigger markets of the US and Europe.
Beyond clients, the more formal interconnected structure is fueling employee learning and reducing duplicated tasks.
For example, the holding group now has formal forums for media leaders across agencies to connect and discuss everyday behaviour.
“Leaders across agency brands might be facing similar challenges from a client or a category perspective, we are working really hard to make sure that employees are sharing those experiences and solutions,” Hewitt said.
“It gives people time back that would otherwise have been duplicated by just getting smarter about how you share the brilliant things that are going on across different agencies, brands and disciplines.”
To do the role the three leaders were tasked with takes trust, Hewitt said.
“If we have a shared view on what great work looks like then we can move much more quickly into the practicalities of actually getting great work out together,” Hewitt said.
And having just come back from judging at Cannes, she believes the most impactful and the best ideas are those where you really can't tell if it was born of a data or contextual insight, an incredible creative leap of faith or a brilliant media craft.
“The best work comes from an artful combination of skills and disciplines,” Hewitt said.
“Between Dave, Moe and I we’re just really focused on how you get that magic to happen more often.”
The current convoluted state of media spend
From a macro view Hewitt is seeing many factors clashing causing volatile client spend.
For example, business confidence it's just eking its way back into positive space, but consumer confidence is still marginally declining.
“So you've got these two things, which continue to be at odds with one another, so there's no simple story to what's going on with clients, categories and spend,” Hewitt said.
“It's quite contradictory as we're seeing really strong performance in some sectors, and we're seeing real caution in others. In some situations innovation is the way to counter pressure on budgets but in some other clients conservatism is the right thing.”
Despite decreasing marketing budgets and economic volatility, Publicis isn’t worried as they have always believed there isn't one cookie cutter solution for a client with a relentless focus performance.
As across Publicis’ digital, creative and media agencies media mix modelling (MMM) has always been basic hygiene.
The Groupe has 50 analysts and 80 tailored business analytics products to solve specific client challenges.
Constant training ensures all planners and client teams can interpret those findings.
“So if science says x, we won’t necessarily do X. Instead the humanity and the business context means we would also try Y,” Hewitt said.
And if the Groupe doesn’t already have the solution, then Publicis has enough people and capability to build a new way of solving that problem for a client.
“MMM is an incredibly valuable input but it shouldn't dictate where the spend goes, it should be one of the considerations that we use to determine what's the best split of spend,” Hewitt said.
“That's where having all of those services in house is incredibly important, but it's not a silver bullet.”
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