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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Enter Eggheads

With his hipster glasses, cropped blond hair, and artfully frayed jeans, Kenny looks every inch the adman as he settles onto a white leather sofa in Digitas's Boston headquarters. Yet when he opens his mouth, the ideas that unspool -- slowly at first, then in a rush -- are not the usual Mad Men prattle about the Big Idea, or the Authenticity of the Brand, or the Work, the Work, the Work. Instead, they're densely packed concepts, the sort that fill whiteboards up the river at the Harvard Business School. This is a guy who can say, "We're passionate about operations" without a hint of irony.

Not that that should be surprising. Kenny holds an MBA from Harvard and was, in a previous incarnation, a senior partner at Bain & Co. Indeed, Digitas is rife with former suits from Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., and other high-end consulting firms.

That may sound like a hellish vision, but for Publicis it's an asset, and not only because the Digitas brand of egghead analysis is beloved by so many American CMOs. The Digitas team's experience in tackling management projects fits Lévy's mandate to integrate the disparate digital pieces of the Publicis network into one efficient, high-performance, client-oriented leviathan. "We are blessed," Roberts says. "David's ex-Bain, and he really gets this shit."

As analysts will tell you, many other holding companies' strategies have tended to be at once simple and shortsighted: Buy up anything remotely digital and figure out what to do with it later. These acquisitions are "bolted on," says Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and the strategy is "Let's buy and place bets because we think these shops are hot, but we're not necessarily going to integrate them and maximize their value."

Kenny has focused on transformative, systemwide initiatives since arriving at Publicis. In May, he rolled out a digital production company called Prodigious Worldwide, which uses workers in low-cost countries like Costa Rica and Ukraine to build the thousands of iterations of ads that clients of all the Publicis agencies use to reach consumers on cell phones, computers, and, eventually, TV. According to Prodigious president Corey Torrence, that effort is already saving participating agencies between 30% and 60% on production costs. Then, in June, Kenny convened a family gathering in Paris to discuss how Publicis could win in digital as a group. Tom Eslinger, Saatchi's worldwide creative director for interactive, sat in on the meeting and has since used Prodigious to build the back end of a variety of labor-intensive interactive campaigns. "I've got more heavy-duty stuff coming down the pipeline, on a scale bigger than we would do in-house," he says. "Now I don't have to have people crunching out 300 Web pages or 50 banner ads." Indeed, without the squads of Prodigious programmers, Eslinger might have a tough time getting the work done at all. The digital talent crunch in the United States has become so acute that it's become a drag on the industry overall, says Kerry Bodine, a research analyst at Forrester. "There's so much interactive work now that agencies are actively turning away 90% of the RFPs that come in the door" for lack of bodies, she says.

Kenny isn't necessarily thrilled to be seen as the wonk enabler of the Groupe's creative visionaries (he likes to point out that Digitas itself has produced award-winning creative for Pontiac and Cingular). But it's hard to avoid that conclusion. "You have to be able to concept how thousands of versions of ads are created, stored, and tagged, then delivered through billions of individual media buys, because you're buying each impression, one at a time," Kenny says. "Then you need to be able to read it analytically and learn from it." These are not the kinds of tasks at which your average copywriter excels. But it's the kind of data crunching that people in the equities markets perform every day, skills that will be invaluable in an ad world increasingly dominated by tech giants.

"Google and Microsoft are creating the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq for media," Kenny points out. "There's no reason we can't be the Goldman Sachs. But it requires us to add folks who really understand markets and math along with our creative and media excellence."

"Google and Microsoft are creating the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq for media. There's no reason we can't be the Goldman Sachs."