Publicis could deliver a 'knockout punch' to rivals with Dentsu purchase

With Dentsu said to be exploring a sale of its international creative and media business, Jay Pattisall, vice-president, principal analyst at Forrester, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday (2 September) that a transaction will “dramatically impact” how the agency industry looks in the future.

Any reshuffling of Dentsu’s operations, he wrote in a post entitled “What a possible Dentsu sale means for CMOs”, will “reconfigure the concentration of buying power, access to technology, and the number of CMO partners choices”, determining whether future marketers select from “among the big three or four”.

He said that Dentsu’s $5bn market capitalisation, while significantly less than that of both Omnicom and Publicis, is close to WPP’s ($6bn), and exceeds other major global players such as Havas and Stagwell.

The company is also blessed with an intriguing collection of assets – including data-driven, technology-enabled performance marketing agency Merkle, and a robust global media operation with an enviable client list – that makes it an attractive takeover target, he said. However, he cautioned that most of the leading suitors are likely to face hurdles to incorporating Dentsu into their existing businesses.

Merkle, for which Dentsu paid $1.5bn for a majority stake in 2016 (and acquired outright in 2020), would immediately benefit any marketing services company wanting to compete with Publicis (which is powered by Epsilon) and Omnicom (which uses Acxiom and Omni), Pattisall said.

Acquiring Dentsu would also give the purchaser its extensive media operations in the Americas, APAC and the European Union, where it operates networks including 360i, Carat, iProspect, Vizeum and Dentsu X that boast a combined $27bn in billings for a roster of blue-chip clients including Kraft Heinz, Netflix, Procter & Gamble, and General Motors.

“Any marketing services company with ambitions to compete with Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP would benefit from the global media scale of Dentsu,” according to Pattisall, who identified Accenture Song, Havas, Publicis Groupe or even private equity as potential suitors.

Pattisall said that acquiring Dentsu’s operations would allow Publicis Groupe to deliver a “knockout punch” to its rivals, with Arthur Sadoun’s company eclipsing both Omnicom and WPP, while adding both media scale and “creative firepower”.

There would, however, be redundancies between several operating divisions, including Merkle and Sapient, Connect and CoreAI, and Tag and Prodigious, which he said would result in “significant” regulatory and antitrust concerns. 

Accenture Song, he argued, would instantly gain an advantage by adding to its media capabilities, which a previous Forrester evaluation characterized as “relatively modest”. Accenture Song’s desire to lean more heavily into media was made apparent earlier this year, when it hired Initiative’s former global chief executive, Dimitri Maex.

However, Pattisall added that while Dentsu’s scale would enhance Accenture Song’s media capabilities, many of its technology assets would be duplicated. Plus, he said, Accenture gaining possession of a proprietary consumer dataset of digital IDs could potentially conflict with its auditing business.

Meanwhile, Havas has shown what Pattisall described as a “robust M&A appetite”, with CEO Yannick Bolloré calling it “one of the most acquisitive groups in the industry”, with the company averaging between five and 10 acquisitions per year for the past decade.

Havas would benefit from all aspects of Dentsu’s assets, he said, with Merkle providing proprietary data and activation, and its media assets tripling its billings to a combined $37bn. Dentsu’s proprietary data and identity solution Dentsu.Connect and Merkury would also bolster the company’s nascent strategic plan Converged, he added.

Private equity could also be a potential suitor, providing they were facilitating a holding company sale, Pattisall contended. Otherwise, he added, it’s more likely that private equity firms would purchase specific portions or marketplace capabilities.

However, he also argued that separating Dentsu's tech capabilities from its services “devalues” both. “In other words, decoupling the Dentsu marketing OS ecosystem from other agencies decreases the scale of the platform and capabilities of the agencies,” he said. “This seems less likely.”

A version of this article first appeared on Campaign Canada