Publicis and WPP: does taking over as world’s number one ad holding company actually matter?

Adland may be full of professional charmers but it’s as competitive as a 16th century Italian court, with assassins lurking behind every arras when it comes to pinching other people’s business.

Saatchi & Saatchi wrote the book on this in the 1970s and 1980s as they embarked on their rise to (brief) world domination. One of their maxims about business, courtesy of Harvard professor Ted Levitt, was: “Being the world’s number-one company is wonderful, two can be terrific, three is threatened and four is fatal.”

At the time the brothers’ finance director was one Martin Sorrell, not an accountant but a tyro business consultant. Sorrell executed their mantra to perfection via earn-out deals and, when that foundered as some big bills came in, pursued the same path to huge success at his own creation WPP, founded in 1985. It worked until he was defenestrated some 33 years later. Some would way that WPP’s only strategy was to be the biggest.

In 2013 Publicis Groupe boss Maurice Levy tired of Sorrell larging it and proposed a merger with America’s Omnicom, at the time the second-biggest ad holding group, Publicis was the third. Omnicom’s John Wren rather surprisingly accepted. Sorrell, who must have been secretly worried, pelted them with cabbages from the sidelines and was proved right when the deal, which would have created a much bigger company than WPP, founded for tax and “cultural” reasons. The amigos, if indeed they were, are here below, with then IPG boss Michael Roth and Havas’ Yannick Bollore.

So being the biggest mattered, to some of these titans anyway, in 2013 and it clearly does today, as instanced in Publicis’ enlisting of Snoop Dogg to hymn its (delayed) rise to first place in 2024.

Publicis billings are forecast to rise to €13.9 for the full year 2024 while WPP’s final number is expected to be €13.7bn. Not that big a difference and someone is going to look silly if WPP plucks a rabbit out of the hat. Sorrell, in the same position, would have moved might and main to do so. Publicis is already comfortably the biggest by market cap.

As Madison Avenue Manslaughter author Michael Farmer noted in these pages, there are many more reasons for Publicis’ success and WPP’s travails than just being the biggest. Interestingly he also noted that the French are good at top-down management, especially perhaps when it comes to getting one over the Anglo Saxons. Maybe it’s because the Brits nicked large parts of their empire in the 18th century and helped to send Napoleon packing.

So the Publicis cockerel can be forgiven for some noisy crowing (doing so in a Snoop Dogg video was a neat move.) But once you’re top then you aren’t a challenger any more and you’re there to be shot at. Its fortunes in the US are key to its future, so far it’s performed better than well there, arousing less animosity than Sorrell’s WPP did.

But beware who might be lurking behind that arras.