Now Publicis job axe hits digital agencies Digitas and Razorfish

Publicis is baring its teeth this Halloween with a mounting pile of dismissals among its US agencies.

Last week it was its media agency employees taking the hit – ostensibly through non-compliance with its instruction to spend at least three days in the office. Now its big digital agencies, which include Digitas and Razorfish, are being clobbered with a reported 150-200 staffers on their bicyclettes.

Publicis said last week: “We have been clear and consistent about our policy that employees work from the office at least three days a week – an expectation that is being met and exceeded by the majority of our talent. We do not comment on individual employment changes.” Talent indeed, there’s a contemporary weasel.

Rules are rules of course and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect employees to turn up at work some of the time at least. The fear, though, is that this might be an excuse to cull parts of the empire that aren’t performing so well.

Publicis bought Digitas for $1.3bn in 2006 and Razorfish from Microsoft in 2009 for $530m, so big investments. But big digital agencies seem to be going out of fashion, maybe because there’s so much digital these days (over 70% of the global ad market) that everyone’s doing it so specialists may be becoming redundant. Interpublic is trying to offload R/GA and Huge while WPP has crammed AKQA into Grey.