Omnicom & Publicis: The View from an Indie

As an independent, global network, Wieden + Kennedy is about as far as you can get from adland's megalithic holding companies as possible. As such, we caught up with Wieden + Kennedy president Dave Luhr to pick his brains about the Publicis Omnicom merger and find out how it looks to an independent agency.

We wish Publicis and Omnicom all the best moving forward. We really do. Experimentation is close to our heart. But this is not a game we intend to play. Maybe it’s just us, but in our experience great advertising agencies are typically better at getting strong work out the door than they are at managing great numbers of people. We leave that task to our clients. The thought of managing 130,000 people around the world is truly mind-numbing. 

There has been a lot of talk in the past 24-hours about efficiencies, client conflict, agency cultures, stock prices and media/digital clout. And these topics all deserve some attention. But in reality, creative quality is the single qualifier that most clients are still willing to pay a premium for. If this merger can bring a creative resurgence inside the halls of the new Publicis Omnicom, we will be the first to raise a glass. The good news about our industry is that it has been and always will be resilient. If creativity doesn’t flow from this merger, it will invite other agencies we know and others not yet conceived to increase their creative output. And that’s never a bad thing.