Maurice Lévy, CEO of Publicis Groupe, has bet more than $1 Billion that he can define the future of digital advertising. Getting there has been enough to make anyone a little schizophrenic.
In a cavernous studio in West Hollywood's media district, the cameras are ready to roll. At the director's cue, Samantha, a leggy blonde with cherry eyeglasses and endearingly crooked teeth, launches into a critical product demo. Dropping her striped shorts to her ankles, she steps into a pair of nude-tone fanny pads -- a perilous feat given that she's in 3-inch heels and balanced atop a small riser -- and hikes them up to her waist. Steadied by her perky brunette cohost, Rachelle, she models her new, foam-enhanced tush, to squeals of delight from the assembled cast mates.
"Oh. My. Gawd!" they cheer. "It's like a Betty Boop butt! So perfect and round!" It's cute, it's fun, it's shallow -- it's Honeyshed, the latest brainstorm of David Droga, former worldwide chief creative officer of the Publicis network and now proprietor of Droga5, an indie ad shop bankrolled by Publicis Groupe. Honeyshed, Droga says, is a place where brands can play with the people who love them -- a Web-based shopping center or interactive infomercial that caters to the mall-rat demographic, with all the bells and whistles that a generation of wired kids demands: social networking, interactivity, music, viral irresistibility, butt jokes, and, of course, shopping.
"Think of it as MTV meets QVC," he says.
Honeyshed's humor may tend to the sophomoric, but the venture is no joke for the mammoth Publicis Groupe -- the French holding company that ranks fourth in the advertising industry, with some 44,000 employees in 104 countries and with Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Kaplan Thaler Group, Fallon, Starcom MediaVest Group, and ZenithOptimedia in its portfolio. "Our most important creative bet today is Honeyshed," CEO Maurice Lévy told us in October. He sees the site -- and the company's other big bet in the digital arena, the January 2007 purchase of the interactive agency Digitas, for $1.3 billion -- as defining not just for his firm, but for the entire ad industry. Speaking to marketing executives at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit in Seattle in May, Lévy said his goal was to make his company the industry's premier digital-marketing outfit, to "invent the blueprint of the agency of the future. It's not about cosmetic changes, it's about profound and unsettling changes. At Publicis, we love this situation. There's nothing we French love more than a good revolution."
"This is about profound and unsettling changes. There's nothing we French love more than a good revolution."
The metaphor is not without its irony. Lévy and his fellow CEO ad moguls -- John D. Wren at Omnicom, Sir Martin Sorrell at WPP, and Michael I. Roth at Interpublic -- are, after all, the royalty of the industry. The advertising business is in the midst of an upheaval more profound even than the arrival of TV, and Lévy and his confreres are under pressure to get on the right side of history. The arrival of digital has shifted power to the consumer, and the flow of money is changing accordingly. In the first six months of 2007, Internet advertising in the United States was close to $10 billion, nearly 27% over 2006 -- a new record -- according to a study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. In October, a joint study from IAB, the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and Booz Allen Hamilton reported that more than 90% of marketers planned to increase their marketing spend in digital. "This is the year when we're seeing more and more marketers understand that digital is the fulcrum for advertising," says David Doty of IAB. "Rather than the tonnage approach of the past, where advertisers blasted a message across media and hoped to hit, interactive delivers the message in the context where people want to see it, and often at the point of decision."
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