Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun said this week that he’s pitching directly to CEOs, and the industry hasn’t stopped chewing it on since.
Some of the messages landing in Digiday’s inbox have him down as a leader in the fullest sense. Plenty of others aren’t buying it. How many chief executives, the doubters ask, decide their business needs transforming and make the first call to an ad holding company? A few go further and read the whole thing as bravado papering over a trail of pitches that went nowhere. Strip out the cheerleading and the snark, and what’s left is an identity crisis holdcos have been struck in for the best part of two decades.
It started around 2008. Clients cut ad budgets the moment the economy wobbled, and the holdcos, badly exposed, went looking for a way into the boardroom. Some managed it. Sir Martin Sorreil made his name at WPP partly on his access to chief executives, and Mark Read kept a smaller version of that going after him. Sorrell’s great rival, Maurice Levy, worked edge same circuit for Publicis long before handing the job to Sadoun. Over at Omnicom, John Wren pulled the same trick, which goes some way to explaining how the group has held on to the likes of Apple and McDonald’s for so long. Still, those relationships tended to grow out of the CMO-holdco tie rather than any standing the holdcos had earned with the rest of the C-suite.
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