Alternative Future
By Brooks Jordan | September 4, 2008
“We don’t believe that digital media companies are aiming to disintermediate, we believe they are providing the industry with the technology to help us plan and execute campaigns more efficiently.” That’s from David Kenny, Publicis’s chief digital strategy officer.
He calls them “digital media companies” – for effect I guess – but he’s talking about Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL. Kenny hopes these tech companies aren’t going to disintermediate his and other ad agencies, but we all know they very well might, even though Google is playing nice at the moment with Campus@.
Sure, it’s a logical partnership. Ad agencies know how to engage with media. tech companies know how to distribute and track that media. And Google knows that at the moment ad agencies are the gate keepers for media buys by larger clients.
So Publicis is going all out to build an ad network using all four of the platforms offered by those tech companies, betting that they they won’t at some point get locked out. It’s called VivaKi, which is so far just a Web page (with some Flash).
But Google, particularly Google, knows it doesn’t have to ever lock them out (that’s not how Google even thinks). It’s happy to partner now and let Publicis earn the right to keep/earn its clients.
And that’s where Publicis is going to run into serious trouble over time. Not because it can’t eventually integrate the technology, but becasue it thinks its clients are the very large companies of the world, when really it’s the very unruly, connected customers of those large companies.
Publicis is going to build for one future without considering the alternative. That’s not a technology issue.
