Is a scrap brewing between WPP’s Cindy Rose (below) and master-of-all-he surveys Arthur Sadoun at Publicis?
Sadoun has made much of Publicis winning major business without a pitch, saying clients shouldn’t waste their time on big pitches but take a good luck at one agency group (chiefly his of course) as, these days there are only three contenders, Publicis, Omnicom and WPP. Pepsico is the most recent example of such a switch, with Omnicom on the receiving end.
WPP has lost out to a degree and Rose said in her earnings call yesterday: “What’s really important to me is that my clients fully understand the implications of the decisions they’re making. These are really high-stakes decisions with material business consequences and they deserve careful consideration.
“I don’t think we do ourselves any favours, as an industry of professionals, by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence.”
She then rather undermined her position by saying, apropos Coca-Cola’s US media (which Publicis pinched from WPP without a pitch, it then effectively resigned it to take on Pepsico): “We won the rest of the world and we have a huge amount of work to do in a very short period of time. I had people, many, many people, pitching for many, many, many weeks over the summer.
“I was with them myself in London and Shanghai and Mexico City and we made a tough call between spending another six weeks pitching for North America versus delivering against what we had already won.
“It was a fine judgment call we made and it’s as simple as that really.” Which rather makes Sadoun’s point.
But it used to be fun when the holding company bosses routinely took a pop at each other, led by WPP’s then boss Sir Martin Sorrell (who could start a fight alone in a darkened room.) Publicis’ then boss Maurice Levy used to rise to the challenge. Sorrell’s successor Mark Read was low-key, allowing Sadoun at Publicis to make the running (Omnicom’s John Wren usually stays above the fray in his lordly American way.)
Is it time for gloves off?
