Publicis is Restructuring

In this week’s upcoming issue I’ve written a story about Kevin Roberts, the CEO of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and how he’s struggling to prepare his agency for the future. While reporting the story, Roberts’ boss Maurice Levy (the CEO of Publicis Groupe) gave us some news: Publicis Groupe is planning a dramatic restructuring. Levy plans to centralize all accounting and administrative at Publicis, and consolidate his agencies’ work onto one profit-and-loss statement for each client.

Here’s the interesting part: each client will have just one senior account person across all the agencies, and everyone else who works on the brand — be they media buyers at Starcom, or creatives at Saatchi or Leo Burnett — will report to that person. He or she will be chosen centrally by Publicis, and can come from any type of agency. There’s just one rule: “It has to be the person who best understands the brand,” says Levy. “The media agency [or, he added later, the digital agency] has exactly the same merit as the creative agency to lead the client.”