• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, January 3, 2022

Happy New Year. Apparently, you enjoy an April Fool’s prank as much as I do. The most widely read Mediapsssst column of 2021 (by several fold) posted on April 1, reporting that P&G had acquired Publicis Groupe.

Not an iota of truth in it, of course, but it’s easy to see why some might read a headline reporting such a combination and be taken in for a second or two, given P&G’s recent efforts to pare back its agency roster and do more in-house work.

And who knows, maybe some day a deal like that might make sense to any number of big multinational firms with dozens or even hundreds of consumer brands.

Other widely read columns had to do with big account reviews, Walmart and Unilever among them. We all like to read about those, don’t we?

And COVID-19, annoyingly still rattling the world two years after it first struck, was another topic of high interest, particularly how agencies and holding companies were adjusting business models to serve clients.

Here’s hoping COVID-19 is in the rear-view mirror long before the end of 2022.