03-06-06
Category: Internet Marketing
Key Points:
- The international advertising heavyweight Publicis Groupe has opened a new media consulting firm called Denuo (Latin for "anew")
- Denuo's role will be to identify and leverage emerging ICTs for their clients.
- They seem to be taking more of a traditionalist approach to the advertising industry, and explicitly distinguishing themselves from more purist new media entities such as Google.
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Excerpt - For full article visit the New York Times.
AS Google ventures deeper into the mainstream areas of media and advertising, many of the reigning powers there are watching with a mixture of fascination and fear.
"Is Madison Avenue about to get Googled?" the trade publication Adweek asked recently, after Google decided to buy a company that sells radio advertising and made forays into areas like video distribution.
On the Champs-Élysées, however, moves are afoot to forestall any such Googling. Last week, the Publicis Groupe, the advertising heavyweight based in Paris, opened Denuo (Latin for "anew"), with about 15 marketing futurists to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients, investors and, not least, Publicis itself.
Leading the futurists is Rishad Tobaccowala, a top executive in the media-buying division of Publicis who has led several of its digital advertising ventures and who will be based in Chicago. Among Denuo's other futurists are specialists on advertising through mobile phones and video games, as well as through viral marketing spreading buzz by word of mouth and the Internet.
Mr. Tobaccowala took a brash and frontal approach to the Google threat. Rather than overwhelming the ad industry, he said, Google may find its business model ill suited to advertising for its new business areas, like distributing printed content and video over the Internet.
"I think Google has overextended, like Napoleon opening up a Russian front," he said last week in an interview in London. "I think they are a very amazing company that will take over nothing."
Traditional ad companies, with their human-touch marketing skills, will always have an important edge over Google, he said. "Human beings can never be captured in an algorithm, and Google only understands algorithms," he said.
Given that the vast majority of Google's revenue and earnings $6.14 billion and $1.47 billion, respectively, in 2005 comes from advertising, its approach seems to be working pretty well so far.
The company's rapid growth has been fed by sales of its pioneering keyword-based Web advertising. Its stock, however, has slumped on market concerns over a slowdown, which its chief finance officer, George Reyes, repeated yesterday. Google shares lost $27.76, or 7.1 percent, to close at $362.62.
How consumers will relate to media and advertising in the future is an issue that worries many marketers, and Google is only part of that question. As people spend more time online or engrossed in iPods or video games, and as digital technology shakes up traditional media, allowing on-demand reading or viewing, older forms of advertising are losing their impact.
"A lot of companies and clients are confused about tomorrow," Mr. Tobaccowala noted. "They didn't look like they were getting the answers they needed."
Denuo is far from alone in trying to provide those answers. The big companies that compete with Publicis agencies owned by the Omnicom Group, the Interpublic Group and the WPP Group, for instance also employ futurists.
Denuo's role at Publicis will be to try to spot the killer digital advertising applications of the future, an area in which Mr. Tobaccowala has a wealth of experience. A dozen years ago, he worked on one of the first online advertising projects. General Motors' Oldsmobile brand, which was living on borrowed time, sponsored a celebrity chat series on America Online, "Oldsmobile Celebrity Circle," with guests like Samuel L. Jackson.
Despite Mr. Tobaccowala's efforts to sell the brand to younger consumers, Oldsmobile was phased out, but "Celebrity Circle" gave an early look at how the Internet could change advertising.
"If you intend to advertise in a medium, you have to be consistent with how people use that medium," Mr. Tobaccowala said.
Full Article
