• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, December 8, 2015

When you lose an account like Procter & Gamble’s $2.6 billion North American media assignment, it’s hard not be philosophical, which is the tack that Publicis Groupe CFO Jean-Michel Etienne took when commenting on the company’s loss of the big account.

Etienne spoke at the UBS Media Conference in New York on Tuesday, the day after P&G confirmed it was shifting the bulk of the account from Publicis media agency Starcom MediaVest Group to Omnicom Media Group with a smaller portion going to Dentsu-owned Carat.

The loss, acknowledged Etienne, is “painful,” and “a disappointment for us.” But he also said it’s “not the end of the world,” noting that the assignment represented 0.7% of the Groupe’s annual revenue. “We can compensate obviously,” he added.

A few years back, Etienne noted, the company lost a bigger piece of business — media for General Motors — and the company managed to survive. “It’s part of the business,” Etienne, said, noting Omnicom’s recent loss of a Johnson & Johnson assignment. “Sometimes you lose and sometimes you win.”

Etienne said Publicis Groupe expects organic revenue growth of about 1% for 2015. When asked about the company’s performance in October and November, Etienne replied “not flat but not good. We’re not satisfied at all.” (By comparison, a day earlier at the same conference, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell indicated that the same two months were the best so far for the UK-based holding company.)

“It’s not a good year,” Etienne said. "We understand we have a problem," he said, adding that the company is totally focused on solving it. Part of the intended solution is a major reorganization that the company disclosed last week, and which Etienne said would take about six months to fully implement. The cost of implementation should not be high, he said. “Many of the ingredients are there,” he noted, indicating that he and CEO Maurice Levy still have to “decide a few names” for certain positions within the new setup.

Etienne said that consolidating the firm’s media agencies under one leader, ZenithOptimedia’s Steve King, will “give us new opportunities” that should enhance the overall position of the Groupe’s media operations. “We’ll have a new picture soon,” he said.