How Publicis-Omnicom Could Make Enormous Scale Equal Data Expertise
When Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group announced their $35 billion megamerger Sunday, the first slide in the part of the investor presentation explaining the strategic rationale touted they were living in a new world with an “explosion of big data, analytics and insights.”
So, will this merger truly help the company to better get a handle on big data? Or is it just a scale play intended to improve efficiency and negotiating leverage? That’s been much debated over the past few days. Scale doesn’t magically translate into data expertise and infrastructure and the soon-to-be-co-CEOs, Omnicom’s John Wren and Publicis’ Maurice Levy, have shed no light on how they plan to get there.
What is clear after talking to several people in the industry, including some at these two giant ad players, is that there are a few ways a merger could help a combined Publicis-Omnicom build the kind of infrastructure a giant holding company needs to compete in a data-driven world. But the merging certainly isn’t the only way to do that — and everything will depend on whether it can execute a path potentially made more complicated by the doubling of its size.
