In an industry in which consolidation has gone on since the “Mad Men” age, a mammoth one has just taken place. Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC) will combined, and according to most experts, and new entity will replace WPP PLC (NASDAQ: WPPGY) as the world’s largest agency. Shareholders in the French and U.S. firms will each own 50%. Unless there are some economies of sale, the marriage seems nothing more than an exercise in McKinsey type intellectual exploration.
One of the risk of the arrangement is that the leaders of the two companies will serve as co-CEOs, an arrangement that never works, because the chief executive job is about power. Nevertheless Publicis CEO Maurice Levy and John Wren of Omnicom, will be share the top spot. If the companies can hold their market values, which may not happen of Wall Street does not like the deal, the new firm will have a market cap of $35 billion, when its starts to operate early next year.
Each of the companies is already a mash up of smaller agencies. Omnicom, for example, is comprised of BBDO, DDB World Wide and TBWA. Along with those is a menagerie of PR firms, brand management operations and media buying and research firms, all of which seem to compete with companies outside the group, but perhaps also with one another.
The heart of the deal may be ego. WPP has been at the top of the ad food chain for a long time, perhaps in the viewpoint of Wren that time has been too long. He now has the chance to be top dog.
The people concerned about this kind of merger fall into two groups. One is shareholders who have to worry whether the new company will be run worse than the old ones. The other is all the clients who might believe they will be lost in the shuffle of consolidations, buyouts and layoffs.
The reasons for not doing the merger outweigh those that support it.
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