By Stephen Foster on February 26, 2013
Top Publicis Groupe executive Mathias Emmerich (left) and the former CEO of Leo Burnett Greece Petros Venetis may be charged by Greek prosecutors over a €200m TV airtime broking deal that went disastrously wrong and led to the closure of Leo Burnett in Greece. Publicis Groupe offered creditors a percentage of the airtime value in [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Finance, Media, News | Tagged Alexander Holland, antenna group, Greece, greek prosecution, leo burnett, Mathias Emmerich, Petros Venetis, publicis groupe, tv airtime broking deal
By Stephen Foster on October 1, 2012
Ad spending forecasts are revised up or down (usually down, which tells you something) nearly as often as the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) discloses that its output figures are wrong. Now ZenithOptimedia is having another go at 2012, revising its growth forecast down from 6.1 per cent to 5.2 per cent with a [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Finance, Media, News, Research | Tagged adspend forecasts, bartle bogle hegarty, eurozone, Greece, Jonathan Barnard, nielsen, publicis groupe, Sir Martin Sorrell, spain, WPP, zenithoptimedia
By Stephen Foster on July 12, 2012
With all the stuff about Spain’s economy hogging the headlines it’s easy to forget about the plight of Greece. But big Greek telecoms company OTE and UK marketing agency OgilvyAction have been trying to drum up business for Greek SME companies (a big target for OTE in its home market) with a long-running TV campaign [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, Finance, News | Tagged business double play campaign, digital poster, Greece, greek businesses, London, ogilvyaction, ote, tower bridge
By Stephen Foster on July 3, 2012
Over 100 past and present employees of Publicis Groupe’s massive MSL PR business in the US have been given the go-ahead by a New York court to sue PG and MSL for discriminatory pay practices. If the suit goes ahead and PG loses it could be liable for around $100m in damages. Monique da Silva [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Finance, News, PR | Tagged Greece, legal action, leo burnett, Maurice Levy, Monique da Silva Moore, msl, pay discrimination, PR, publicis groupe
By Staff on June 19, 2012
Which is hardly surprising but also all the more reason to hope that US president Barack Obama and his allies (just about everyone outside Europe) can knock some sense into austerity junkies Germany’s Angela Merkel and even the UK’s David Cameron at the current G20 summit in Mexico. Media agency ZenithOptimedia has cut its closely-watched [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Finance, News, Politics, Research | Tagged ad spending forecast, Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, cuts, David Cameron, eurozone, g20, Greece, spain, zenithoptimedia
By Stephen Foster on May 18, 2012
For a couple of years at least the UK media markets have been defying gravity, showing reasonable growth (in the circumstances) despite a wider economy that’s stagnant at best. Over the weekend UK PM David Cameron (pictured) will be hobnobbing with the G8 group of industrial nations at Barack Obama’s Camp David weekend place. He [...]
Posted in Finance, Media, News, Politics | Tagged Barack Obama, bully pulpits, camp david, coalition government, daily mail, David Cameron, deficit reduction, france, Francois Hollande, ft, g8, George Osborne, Greece, leveson inquiry, liberal democrats, Martin Wolf, news corporation, Nick Clegg, Sir Martin Sorrell, slash and burn, Sly Bailey, spain, stagnation, Sun, trinity mirror, uk economy, Vince Cable, WPP
By Stephen Foster on May 15, 2012
Kraft Athenos and Droga5 have returned with their ghastly Greek grannie in two more 30-second epics. Here’s Yiayia’s view of a pool party (she says it’s pornography): And video chatting: “Have you married a machine?” And I think she tells Kristin “You’re a shit woman.” Sounds like it anyway. Brilliant stuff though. Apparently the ads [...]
Posted in Agencies, Clients, Creative, News | Tagged Alison Maclean, athenos, droga5, eurozone, ghastly greek grannie, Greece, greek crews, January Vernon, Kraft, pool party, Scott Ginsberg, video chatting, yiayia
By Staff on April 20, 2012
The nasties continue to emerge in the wake of Publicis Groupe-owned Leo Burnett in Athens which filed for bankruptcy last year after entering a disastrous media broking deal with Greek broadcaster Alter TV. Alter went bust last May, Burnett threw in the towel in December. Now rather larger Greek broadcaster Antenna has filed criminal complaints [...]
Posted in Agencies, Finance, Media, News | Tagged alter tv, antenna, bankruptcy, criminal complaints, Greece, leo burnett athens, leo burnett global boss, Mathias-Benjamin Emmerich, Maurice Levy, media broking deal, Petros Venetis, publicis groupe, €200m bad debt
By Stephen Foster on September 22, 2011
They do say that when you when you get a gaggle of economists together they won’t agree about anything: who they are, what they are, where they are and what they just ate with their coffee. The Western world has never been more afflicted by economists and, just a year ago, they were all recommending [...]
Posted in Finance, News, Politics | Tagged bloomsbury, Christine Lagarde, cuts, Danny Alexander, Ed Balls, eurozone, global economy, Gordon Brown, Greece, Harvard Business School, IMF, John Maynard Keynes, labour government, Nick Clegg, spending, uk economy
By Stephen Foster on September 20, 2011
He’s said it before of course but here he is, the colossus of WPP (looking very natty in shorts I must say) hammering home his message that media owners are mad not to charge for content. He was speaking at WPP’s annual Stream conference near Athens this year (I wonder if he gave the embattled [...]
Posted in Agencies, Finance, Media, News | Tagged athens, Greece, huffington post, shorts, Sir Martin Sorrell, soundbites, stream conference, world economy, WPP
Recent Comments