PUBLICIS GROUPE REORGANIZATION, ITV / AEGIS CONTRACT FAIL, BAD AGENCY MARKETING: #MediaSnack Ep. 9

On this week’s #MediaSnack we can’t stop talking about the Publicis Groupe restructure (see Episode 4 [link] for a back story to all this). We spent some time last week with a delegation of institutional investors in the media sector at a special ID Comms Q&A lunch at Nomura Bank in London. Their questions were fascinating but lots of attention and focus was paid to Publicis Groupe, their restructure and their ability to reverse recent fortunes and find organic growth and grow margins. In today’s episode we delve further into these questions. We pick up on news that ITV, the UK’s largest terrestrial broadcaster has started an investigation into one of the UK’s largest media buying agencies (Dentsu-Aegis Network) for failing to meet their trading commitments (ITV suggest that the agency didn’t spend enough of its clients money with them). We discuss the merits and challenges with these kinds of big agency trading deals and wonder what the real benefit might be to brands when they seem to fail like these with increasingly regularity. Finally, Tom has a little moan about the poor standards of agency marketing collateral and what might be done to improve this.