• by The Editor , February 14, 2008

In a video interview with EuroBusinessMedia released this morning as part of Publicis' earnings report, Chairman-CEO Maurice Levy outlined details of the French agency holding company's alliance with Google. The full video can be seen here. An excerpt follows:

"This partnership/collaboration that we have announced is something that's been cooking for more than a year. So it's not something which happened like suddenly "Oh! I met Eric and we will make a press release" as somebody has said... No, no, no. It's something which has been very thorough.

"Teams working together, at Digitas, at group level, we had had some presentations, some common presentations and exchanges, and tried to find the right solution for the future. This is based mainly on three key aspects. The first one is that we share the same vision of the future, which means that we don't believe in disintermediation. We believe that we, the advertising agency group, the marketing services group, we will play a crucial role. Google believes the same. Otherwise we would not have been able to make an agreement.

"We believe also that technology will come from people like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. And we believe that we don't need to invest heavily in that segment. First, because it requires a lot of money that we don't have. And second, talent and approaches which are not ours. We do creative, we work on branding positioning, we work on brands, we work on people, we create images, words which connect brands and people, which help building brand and which help building loyalty beyond reason of their consumer.

"Google works on programming, developing technology platforms and scaleable aspects of the digital world. That's our vision and it is shared. The second thing is that if Google wants to have the best tools and if Google wants to have better revenues, not only Google, but as I say, the other platforms, if they want to have better revenues from advertising, what they need to do is to make sure they are developing the right tools for the consumer, for targeting the right consumer, for being friendly and not intrusive in the lives of the consumer, and also for servicing the needs of the advertisers.

"Who knows the consumer and who knows best the advertisers' needs ? We do. So we are brining our knowledge to Google. They are bringing their technology and we are trying to see what is best for the future of both of us.

"The last aspect, which I think is very important, is that we believe that this collaboration is not a one-off, it's not something that will last only a few months, it's not for one single project. It's something that is built to create a real partnership between partners. We will never be a platform - they will never be an ad agency. So as we have agreements and collaborations which are well established with media, so we will have this. And we have decided, the two of us, that it will not be exclusive, in order that they can do something equivalent, if they have the time and the energy and the tools and the people, with some of our competitors, and we will do the same with Yahoo and Microsoft, on some other subjects.

"So I believe that by making this kind of agreement, not only we have a vision of the market which is very different from some of our competitors, but we are really focusing on what matters most, which is 'what are the needs of our clients ?' And we believe, maybe a little bit naively, that if something is good for our clients it will be good for us."