A Mad Man Gets His Head Together

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Right and Left Brain From left to right: Maurice Lévy, Davig Droga, and David Kenny at Droga5 offices in Manhattan.

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This is no small challenge for ad agencies, particularly megasize ones like Publicis, which were cobbled together during a wave of consolidation premised on the idea that scale, not precision, was the key to success. Now Lévy and his ilk are watching smaller, nimbler shops -- especially those built around interactive work -- routinely chip away at accounts they long thought secure. CMOs, straining to show a return on their marketing dollar, are demanding quantitative proof of how their budgets are performing in the marketplace. Then there's the specter of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo buying up network and ad-server companies such as aQuantive, BlueLithium, DoubleClick, and Right Media, effectively controlling access to what might be the most lucrative source of future revenue: keyword search.

The undercurrent of panic at big agencies is palpable, as is the hunger for fresh approaches. How Publicis is attacking this reality is a case study for the industry -- and a saga of unexpected self-discovery. The rising stars across Madison Avenue are the folks who can best target consumers, deliver tailored messages, and analyze performance. The joyless granularity that once made direct marketing, digital's forebear, the lowest caste in advertising, has come out on top. And suddenly left-brainers like Digitas CEO David Kenny can crow, "We're all gearheads here!" without worrying that he'll be barred from the cool-kids' table in Cannes.

Yet where does this leave the hard-core right-brainers like Droga, the creative superstar who earned his chops producing slick commercials for the likes of Heineken, Hewlett-Packard, and Monster? "I've had to put aside a lot of the things I've learned over the past 20 years," he confesses a month before Honeyshed's launch (which, as we went to press, was slated for the Friday after Thanksgiving). "So much of getting here has been about the technology, and that's been foreign to me."

For Lévy, the holy grail is to make Droga a little more like Kenny -- and vice versa. Lévy's grand vision is an interlocking system in which data are at the service of creativity, and creativity is responsive to the data. Despite all the focus on click rates, numbers alone, he knows, won't fuel performance without the sizzle that gets target customers excited. "We can't have a line that is pure digital," he says. "We have to be digital with humanism." In short, he needs a fully functioning cortex with synapses firing efficiently and cheerfully across the divide. The complementary brains of his two Davids, Kenny and Droga, lie at the heart of this strategy. Now he just has to prove that it all works.

The Hunter

To be honest, Maurice Lévy confesses over cappuccino at a New York hotel, the only reason he got into the ad business was to chase skirt. And the 6-foot-2-inch, silver-haired, 65-year-old Publicis chairman is every bit the French charmer still.

Back in 1967, when he got his first job in advertising, he says, he knew nothing about the business. He was actually an IT guy, sitting on a good offer from a giant technology company. Then he had a vision of his future: "I was really thinking my life would be boring." When a friend mentioned that a small Parisian ad agency was looking for someone to run its computer department, Lévy was skeptical but went over to take a look. What the 24-year-old saw enthralled him. "The men were wearing sneakers and had long hair, like me, and the girls had long legs and miniskirts," he says. "I thought, 'This is a nice place to work.'" To his surprise, he was hired.

By age 29, he had mastered the business so well that he was offered the company's top job. Still, Lévy knew what he didn't know and figured any agency willing to be led by such a neophyte was best avoided. So he quit to join Publicis in 1971. Lévy was leaving a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées a little over a year later when he noticed a glow in the autumn sky. The Publicis headquarters, farther up the avenue, was on fire. He bluffed his way into the building and recovered what was left of the computer disks, tapes, and papers; within three days, working with IBM to reconstruct the data, Lévy had the company functioning again. "We were able to pay salaries and run all the campaigns," he says. "We didn't miss one ad." Lévy's heroics so impressed the agency's founder, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, that when it came time to pass the torch, there was no question that the self-confessed geek would get the job.