“Publicis is in the midst of a transformation,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, chief global strategist at Publicis Groupe. “It is a clichéd word, but in our case it is true.”
It has certainly been a tumultuous time for the Paris-based network. Hurt by its ill-fated attempt to merge with rival Omnicom in 2014, the company sprang into acquisition mode, most notably spending $3.7bn on digital consultancy group Sapient earlier this year.
Publicis chief executive Maurice Levy brought together a new management team to lead the changes, including former DigitasLBi boss Tobaccowala, ZenithOptimedia’s Steve King and Starcom MediaVest Group’s Laura Desmond.
At the heart of the new strategy, says Tobaccowala, is an acknowledgement that technology has enabled the creation of the “empowered individual” – a regular consumer who feels he or she can cross time and space, and be a modern day David using smartphones as a slingshot to take down Goliath corporations and institutions.
“We must better understand that we are marketing to the gods, and stop believing that we are the gods,” he says. “It is creating challenge for our clients, because they are finding themselves falling behind their consumers’ behaviours and expectations.”
Being ‘Ubered’
When announcing the acquisition of Sapient in February, Levy claimed the addition of 15,000 digitally-savvy employees would prevent Publicis from being “Ubered” – in other words, displaced by technologically-savvy upstarts, rather than established competitors. It is a challenge facing all of the network’s clients, and to the group itself.
“Our clients are finding themselves falling behind their consumers’ behaviours and expectations. The opportunity and threats to any business now come from outside that category. An iPhone was not just a competitor to the old Nokia, it was also a competitor to Nintendo and Nikon,” says Tobaccowala.
“We take opposing holding companies seriously, but we believe the real opportunity and threat is where marketing, consulting and technology intersect”
“[At Publicis Groupe] we take opposing holding companies seriously, but we believe the real opportunity and threat is where marketing, consulting and technology intersect. For example, Deloitte has supposedly built a $1.5bn agency practice.
“Where Sapient really fits into this model is by allowing us to really scale our technology practice. There is no other company which combines ‘IQ’ [consulting], ‘TQ’ [technology] and ‘EQ’ [creativity] at such scale. That is our mission.”
Watching the CIA
Tobaccowala argues that, for Publicis to remain at the cutting edge of marketing and media trends, it must pay close attention to developments in three very different markets: China, India and the US, or the ‘CIA’, as he refers to them.
China is vital both because of the scale of its digital revolution – possessing both the largest number of internet users and mobile users in the world – and also due to the distinctive dominance of domestic technology players such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Xiaomi.
“Those who say the Chinese do no innovate, that is absolutely not true – they seem to find a way of innovating in a uniquely Chinese way,” he adds.
India, meanwhile, offers something “completely different”. Indian-born Tobaccowala speaks with awe about the enormous potential of a market in which half the population is aged under 25 (“You are talking about almost the combined population of the US and Europe”) and the impending explosion of smartphone ownership.
“Because [India] is so mobile-orientated, and the infrastructure is so poor, it is shaping the future of commerce. Amazon is investing a lot there, as is Uber,” he says. Pointing to the accession of leaders like Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Sundar Pichai at Google, Tobaccowala also claims India will be vital to future talent acquisition plans.
And the US? “It is still the world’s largest market, where all the major innovation happens first at scale.” The decline of traditional media channels is also most pronounced in North America, he says, giving an insight into the likely future behaviour of emerging markets.
“Looking at these three countries, you are pretty much set to cover everything else,” he adds.
Marketing’s digital revolution
From his early days at Leo Burnett in Chicago, Tobaccowala has enjoyed a ring-side view of marketing’s digital revolution.
In the mid-1990s he became president at early US interactive agency Giant Step, before taking the helm at Starcom’s online media planning and strategy division, Starcom IP. He spent four years as chief strategy and innovation officer at VivaKi, and a 14-month stint as chairman of Publicis’ digital shops DigitasLBi and Razorfish, before assuming his group chief strategist role a year ago.
“The world is getting much more silicon-based, but we are still carbon-based life forms, we are analogue”
Reflecting on the upheaval in the industry since his first advertising role in 1982, Tobaccowala insists the single most important change is that technology has granted individuals a “feeling that we have power”.
“It is the single greatest societal and media change of our time,” he says. “The positive is that, if people are empowered it allows us to make markets – we become both consumers and producers. And a lot of these technologies are bringing people out of poverty across the world, and allowing access to medicine. It is pretty amazing.
Dark side
He acknowledges, however, that there is a “dark side” to the relentless march of progress. As the likes of Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates warn against the dangers of artificial intelligence, Tobaccowala believes the tensions between man and machine will increase over the coming years.
“The world is getting much more silicon-based, but we are still carbon-based life forms, we are analogue,” he says.
“The intersection between technology, with its speed and efficiency, and our need for space, silence and to move slower, will become a very interesting conflict. There will be societal implications for a world where you are completely connected and non-private.”
We are approaching a time, he says, when Apple’s virtual personal assistant programme Siri will testify against individuals in court (“your phone will know more about you than you do yourself”).
Consumers’ sense of “god-like power” is creating the kind of inhuman working conditions alluded to in the recent New York Times ‘exposé’ about Amazon. The data-driven world will make as well as break personal relationships – take the data leak suffered last month by extramarital dating website Ashley Madison.
“The future does not fit in the containers of the past,” muses Tobaccowala. “We cannot go on with our existing structures and mind-sets.” It is a lesson anyone in the marketing and media industry would do well to learn.
